Voices of Water: Constellations of Kinship and the Rights of Nature

‘Voices of Water‘ explored the politics and poetics of the Rights of Nature – a legal framework giving personhood to ecosystems, assigning a forest, a glacier or a river the same rights as a human. The event expanded the dialogue established at ‘Voices of the River‘ into wider waterways, tracing connections between efforts towards recognition of water bodies across contexts and scales, from local charters to transnational movements. As the curators framed from the start, this legal model represents more than ecological justice; it demands a radical shift in perspective that sees nature not as separate from humans but as an entangled whole, connected as kin. Each contributor’s intervention sought to open the possibilities for this shift.

Emma Critchley invited us into her work first. Examining water as a political, philosophical and ecological material, she posed questions that animate her practice: How can we connect with water bodies? What does it mean to care about places we may never fully know? Critchley’s project, Soundings 2025, explores these questions in the deep ocean, and to answer them with us she passed around specimens from the depths so that, as she said, we could ‘experience holding the ocean’. We witnessed a polymetallic nodule formed over millennia, now the object of deep-sea mining; we held in our hands the encasings of tube worms, invertebrate organisms found on the seafloor. We were then invited to collectively read from the Rights of the Deep (2024), a text co-written with Indigenous leaders from the Pacific, legal scholars and marine scientists. A critique of the Rights of Nature’s reliance on colonial notions of ownership and segregation, the text articulates values we should be reaching for instead, directly engaging with ancestral knowledges which have always known oceans as kin, practiced through relations of interdependence and reciprocity. After, Critchley showed a film excerpt of a woman singing in Gaelic – one of many singers from coastal communities featured in the video – sharing folk songs narrating long relations with their seas.

The stakes of this work are high. At the encounter of Indigenous perspectives with regimes of extraction and legal instruments born from legacies of domination, the Rights of Nature movement faces profound tensions in this political moment. Since 2008, Rights of Nature policies have grown exponentially. In 2024, thirty-five countries were reported to have this legislation in place.1 But as the climate crisis accelerates, the Rights of Nature model is accompanied by other solutions, some of which depend on green technologies powered by the extraction of critical metals found in nodules of the ocean floor. And, as the Rights of the Deep text notes, legal personhood still delimits moral agency to humans only. It is dangerous to be an environmental defender, not least of Indigenous heritage, and spaces for pluralism – where voices of nature might be heard on their own terms – are becoming highly charged.

I am an anthropologist of water and anthropologists know these tensions well, even as the discipline stemmed from such tensions. I was invited by curator Marleen Boschen to write this piece from this perspective. Where I work in Palestine/Israel environmental narratives can occlude dispossession and ecocide, yet the possibility of rights for Palestinian relations with waters can feel like a vital opening. If a starting point is the recognition of interconnection, it is deeply important. On the afternoon of the roundtable, we sat on the top floor of the Tate overlooking the gentle tide of the Thames while the buildings of the City of London gleamed in the sun. The layers of ecology, politics, economics, history and law that Rights of Nature frameworks navigate were laid out before us.

In Anne Robertson’s contribution, we heard about these interconnections from the position of an environmental scientist. Trained on British soils and waterways, Robertson shared the trajectory that led her from examining pristine water environments to recognising that all ecological systems are impacted by human intervention. She now investigates the hyporheic zone, a dynamic interstitial space where streams meet groundwaters, where important exchanges of connectivity occur. Hyporheic zones are key to deciphering river health. At its interface, contaminants from pollution, farming or pesticides can break down in the rapid underflow, indexing the impact of human agency in fresh waters. This is now the focus of Robertson’s work. With a group of lawyers and ethicists looking at the rights of rivers, she contributes a view of river health. Interdisciplinarity – another meeting point across difference – is, for Robertson, the most effective approach to enacting a framework of river rights.

Carolina Caycedo brought us into contact with water as kin through embodied forms, in the shape of her Serpent River Book (2017), extending accounts of extraction or pollution into sites of political violence. Caycedo explained how the book was informed by the rivers of Colombia, where she is from, where the Magdalena River is said to kiss the Caribbean where it opens into the sea. The Muisca people call it the Yuma, named after the land of friends, where people would gather in community with the river. The Yuma is under the protection of two legal frameworks: one for the rights of its restoration after the building of the El Quimbo Dam in 2015, and one for reparations in the name of transitional justice, as part of The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (FARC) and Colombian government peace process. Nature here is a victim of war just as human bodies are. The Serpent River Book archives these zones of extraction, armed conflict and community. It is named after the four serpents from Indigenous Amazonian cosmologies, traversing the waters, air, cosmos and spirit realms that humans cannot touch. The book unfolds in a concertina of angled pleats; once open, it meanders like a river. Caycedo asked us to collectively unfurl its pages, carefully turning one leaf at a time, holding the paper in our hands as it stretched out across the room. As we looked at its images of misty forests, maps and restricted zones, people spoke of the fragility of the book and recalled other struggles for justice around rivers.

These enclosures and civic commitments were the focus of Matthew Bird and Natasha Padbury from LOO. They brought the conversation about living in reciprocity with water back to Lewes, where they live. Against a backdrop of archival images of the River Ouse, Bird and Padbury read a poem to bring its voice into the space. They poured a glass of its water into a metal bucket so that it was with us in material and sonic form. We heard about their group’s formation, benefitting from their collective expertise in environmental law, local government, community engagement and the arts. To connect the town back to the river, they have hosted river festivals, town meetings and campaigns. In response to the use of rivers as dumping grounds for sewage by water companies, they penned the charter of rights for the Ouse with communities along the river, district councillors, legal advisors and a steering group of organisations from the catchment area (Local Rivers Trust and Sussex Wildlife Trust), inspired by the Rights of Nature framework. For them, it is still a paradigm shift to think away from human terms, to consider being in relation with nature, to craft a culture of care.

The tensions at the heart of the Rights of Nature framework ran throughout the day. In the open discussion with Emma Critchley and Anne Robertson moderated by Pietro Consolandi, we talked about where they emerge in geopolitical, legal and disciplinary spheres: how to find common ground across vastly different spheres in the advocacy of rivers; how to transform understanding into embodied practices, against engrained divisions in Western paradigms; how to hold both local and global sites in mind without losing grounded specificity or sacrificing global reach.

Curator Nabila Abdel Nabi hosted the final dialogue with Carolina Caycedo and LOO. The frictions within the Rights of Nature movement surfaced in personal and embodied encounters, rooted in sites of injustice and marginalised epistemologies. To be connected with water bodies – from one’s heritage or the place where one lives – ‘means committing’, Caycedo stated. For her, this involves ‘spiritual fieldwork’, fostering transcendent relations away from the colonial gaze. For Natasha Padbury a similar sentiment arose after years of swimming in the polluted Ouse. Sustaining these movements is not easy. It demands exhaustive effort on limited resources. It requires channelling rage in the face of intertwined struggles: where ecocide is genocide, where the defence of environments faces threats of death, where accountability is still unfolding.

Across each intervention, the question arose about the limits of the language and concepts put to use. Terms such as ‘more-than-human’ fail to land in common speech, and ideas of kin come from situated Indigenous cosmologies which might not be appropriate to transpose elsewhere. As Caycedo reminded us, ‘language contains violence, and like the river it is flowing’, and so it too will change. In wider just transition movements, we might find ways forward.

Responding to the growing Rights of Nature movement, scholars interrogate its limits with further questions still: Who listens to the river, and what if the interpretation of its voice undermines the lives of its custodians?2 How can Indigenous concepts of damage fully become enshrined in Euro-Western law? What is lost in the moments of translation, and how do these travel? Are Rights of Nature yet another guise for conservation or Eurocentric appropriation? In Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Malcolm Ferdinand calls for a view of ecological justice that dismantles colonial legacies as inseparable from addressing ecological repair.3 What kinds of human assemblies or frameworks might we need to challenge ongoing formations of dispossession and to find recognition and kinship with waterways and lands? What became clear through ‘Voices of Water‘ is that one starting point is the building of connection from where one is, sharing the ethics of Indigenous scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith or Max Liboiron. In the holding of a part of the ocean’s depths and in the unfurling of a river-as-book, we did more than engage with its plural forms of knowledge. These actions involved handing delicate objects from one person to another, acknowledging the task ahead of collective care for fragile ecologies despite all challenges, creating what Abdel Nabi spoke of as being in ‘constellation with one another’ – webs of connections with strangers, in this shared space. When we read we sounded aloud as one, echoing the chorus of voices that crafted the Rights of the Deep, reflecting the oneness of all waters. We embodied its values, even if for just a moment.