Rights

I spent some of last week indoors to avoid air pollution and was reduced to watching a national joint conference of two large denominations live-streaming their sessions. Since I had been onsite at one event in the past it was interesting to see what was on the agenda.

One of the motions had to do with rights of all Canadians to clean water. No one would deny these in theory; we still have a long way to go in practice. Like many of the motions, this one had to do with social justice. It brings up a question for all of us as the last species to arrive. Is justice exclusively social justice? The eco-theologian Thomas Berry, who preferred to call himself an eco-geologian to avoid too much prying from the Roman Catholic church - especially since he was a remember of a religious order as well as a professor, asked the question. Does water itself have rights? We pretend that corporations are persons in terms of rights. Why not natural elements - soil, water, air? Berry looked at the importance of water for survival of all creatures, human and otherwise, in the Hudson Valley where he lived for many years. He also wondered about our ability to change the course of water by creating dams for our own convenience.

He would be pleased by one Canadian story.

“In February 2021, the world was introduced to Mutehekau Shipu — also known as the Magpie River — when the people of Ekuanitshit, Que. and the regional municipality made a joint declaration granting the river legal personhood and rights.”

Our first nations brothers and sisters have understood this instinctively until we took many away from the parents as children and placed them in residential schools. We act as though we have just awakened to something they have always known. It’s time for us to be their students and sit on the ground with humility.