Earth perspectives, 4/9: The Earth view above the Ganges River, India

4/9: The Earth view above the Ganges River, India



At the centre of the Earth view above is the Ganges River in India, a sacred waterway granted the same legal rights as a human being by an Indian court in 2017. Citing the similar case of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the judges of the Uttarakhand court declared the Ganges and its tributaries to be ‘legal and living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities’. Pollution that has been choking the river for decades, creating hypoxic dead zones in some sections, can now be more meaningfully mitigated by authorities. But the verdict is more than a bureaucratic achievement – it is a symbolic feat for the rights of the nonhuman silent majority, a reflection of our changing human conceptualisation of nature itself, and a milestone for the reappraisal of human-nonhuman power dynamics. Now a legal precedent, the case of the Ganges River paves the way for further judicial recognition and protection of environmental personhood around the world, as well as future imaginings of what other entities might qualify as a ‘person’.