The
river runs free. Courtesy of the photographer,
Kathleen Jo Ryan
For
centuries the United States grew and developed, always with
a sense of having inexhaustible resources. Our battles focused
on the rights of people and competing rights to resources. But
what about the rights of nature? Now some people are asking:
"Do
trees have standing?"
"Does a river have rights?"
"We
simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never
do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means
of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of
the geography of hope."
Wallace Stegner
The
Ahakhav Tribal Preserve is restoring the river as it flows through
the land of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. Hundreds of acres
of Cottonwoods, Willows, and Honey and Screwbean Mesquite trees
are being planted. Aquatic habitat monitoring, fish censusing, and
revegetation are all part of the process of reinhabiting the river.
Courtesy of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Ahakhav Tribal Preserve.
|
Does the
river have rights?
Roosevelt
Dam. The working Salt River.
Courtesy of Central Arizona Project.
In
1864, George Perkins Marsh became the first to comprehensively document
the destructive impact of civilization on nature. Later, John Muir
was one of the first to associate rights with what a later generation
would call ěthe environment. "Language like "ecosystem,"
"a round river," and "thinking like a watershed"
reflected this shift from thinking only about human rights to use
nature to thinking about the rights of nature. Aldo Leopold offered
guidelines to help the land survive the impact of mechanized man,
giving rise to the idea of a "land ethic." The growth of
environmental ethics over the last few decades has been codified in
the Wilderness Act of 1964, the National Environmental Policy Act
of 1969, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
Some
people argue that a river has "existence value" that
is, they try to gauge how much it is worth to preserve wilderness
or have a river run wild again, and they try to equate a dollar
amount to something that might be good for the spiritual health
of a people. Others argue that we must sever people from the equation,
and recognize that a river has rights of its own.
|
