‘Is a River Alive?’: Radical resistance and solidarity between humans and the natural world

When poet, environmental activist, and lawyer Will Falk served as “next friend” to the Colorado river, filing the first US lawsuit seeking to establish personhood for an ecosystem, he knew from the start he was fighting a lost cause. The case (Colorado River Ecosystem vs The State of Colorado) was swiftly dismissed by the federal court in April 2017. Later that same year, Will – a dear friend and my former student when he was an undergraduate at the University of Dayton, hence my use of his first name – sent me How Dams Fall, a searing, haunting tract chronicling his 4000-mile journey along the Colorado river, during which he lived hand-to-mouth out of his beat-up Jeep Grand Cherokee. After that journey with his first book, there could be no doubt in Will’s mind that a river is not only sentient but speaks to us, although most humans and their governments don’t care to listen.

The many gut-wrenching, heart-stirring, fire-breathing conversations I’ve had with Will over decades, conversations in which he became the teacher and I the student, conversations that felt like songs traversing in an instant the personal, literary, and political in strange and exquisite synergies, have impressed upon me the profound...

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