A Documentary Movement

Rivers of Life

If we could speak like water, we wouldn't hurt so much.
Sound On
The Rivers The World Calls Persons

Rivers of Life

a documentary movement, told one river at a time

A group at a turbulent point in their lives sets out to find a river the law now calls a person. They come home speaking a different language.

Descend

We name a thing to hold it — and lose the part of it that was alive. Rivers of Life is what happens when a group of friends stops naming the river, and starts learning to speak her language.

Why Now

Not a film series. A movement — building the case, river by river, that the living world deserves the dignity of a person.

8
Rivers already granted personhood, worldwide
I
Chapter complete — the Magpie, Canada
II
Next chapter in development — Ontario
A life's work, one river at a time
The Series

Every chapter, a new river becoming a person

Across the world, courts and constitutions and Indigenous nations keep arriving at the same idea: a river can be a relative, not a resource. Each chapter of Rivers of Life goes to stand on the bank of the next one.

Chapter I · Complete

The Magpie River

Muteshekau-Shipu · Quebec, Canada

The first river in Canada granted legal personhood. We drove a caravan of RVs to its banks to find out what that means — and left having learned to speak her language.

Enter the Chapter
Chapter II · In Development

The Wabigoon

Ontario, Canada · Proposed

A river poisoned by mercury at Grassy Narrows, and the growing case — built in this project's own research — for granting it the same rights as the Magpie. The next journey north.

The Map of the Movement

Where the world has already decided

Magpie · Canada Filmed Wabigoon Proposed Whanganui Aotearoa · 2017 · First on Earth Ganga & Yamuna India · 2017 Atrato Colombia · 2016 Vilcabamba Ecuador · 2011 Klamath USA · 2019 Turag Bangladesh · 2019
Filmed — Chapter One
Rights already granted
Proposed — Chapter Two
The Philosophy · Etuaptmumk

Learning to see with two eyes

One Eye

Western Science

Precision, evidence, the language of ecology. Left alone, it treats the river as an object — a resource to optimize, a problem to engineer.

The Other Eye

Indigenous Knowing

The river as a living relative, held in reciprocal community across generations. This eye gives us the will to protect what serves no short-term interest of our own.

The crisis was built inside one way of seeing. The way out cannot be found inside the same one.

Come Downstream With Us

A movement needs many waters. There is a place in this river for you.

For Producers

Fund the series

Chapter One is complete and proven. What's next is a returning, ownable format on the rights-of-nature movement — one iconic river at a time.

For Artists & Actors

Lend your voice

Narrators, musicians, poets, on-camera voices — a canvas for artists who want their work to mean something beyond itself.

For Partners

Amplify the movement

Environmental organizations, Indigenous councils, storytellers — help these rivers be seen. The more eyes on the water, the more it is protected.