Rights of nature - will a charter protect the River Ouse?

Pollution, growing water demand, climate change and lost habitats – UK rivers face growing pressures. In Sussex, councillors in Lewes have voted to draft a charter to protect the local river in law. Matthew Bird explains how and why

Last year, I went with friends to see the documentary Invisible Hand at our local cinema. The film is about communities in the US attempting to use so-called Rights of Nature to protect local ecosystems.

At the time, I was serving on Lewes District Council in Sussex and, with another councillor, had previously brought two motions on water quality in the River Ouse. However, despite numerous discussions with Southern Water and a series of fines imposed by the Environment Agency, polluting incidents kept coming, unabated.

After the film, we had a lively discussion about the issues it raised. To cut a long story very short, a group of us formed a campaign group, Love Our Ouse, to celebrate the river and focus actions to protect it.

The Ouse is a 58-km river system, its source near Slaugham in mid-Sussex and its mouth at Newhaven in Lewes district. It’s home to several notable and rare species, including sea lampreys and the cherished and iconic local species of sea trout. The Ouse has a storied history; people in its catchment have long depended on it for fishing, agriculture, industry, recreation and culture.

The 11 million bricks used to construct Balcombe Viaduct were brought up the Ouse by barge. So was the stone from Caan in France that built the Priory at Lewes from 1078. The last cement works in Lewes closed during the 1970s, ending a long period of industrialisation on the Ouse.

The river has been heavily modified in the past. The Lower Ouse was canalised and straightened during the 1790s and several locks have been installed on the Upper Ouse.

More recently, there has been increasing, high-profile outrage about the scale of pollution in the river, focused primarily on Southern Water and the seeming inadequacy of regulators and policies to protect the Ouse. There are 123 legally allowed Southern Water discharge points along the river, but in reality, there are 1,244 discharge points.

Polluted UK rivers

Over time, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the narrow, if understandable, focus of the water-pollution debate. It’s a familiar pattern – pollution, incident, outrage, water-company spin – that leaves local communities feeling powerless.

We wanted to disrupt this pattern. Inspired by our viewing of Invisible Hand, we decided that the Rights of Nature concept might be that something.

Rights of Nature is a way to re-think our relationship with nature – from one of dominance to one that recognises interdependency and respect. It’s about recognising, for example, that a river is its own entity and not something that exists only in relation to other things.

Around the world, some rights that apply to people have been extended to corporations. A company – which is, essentially, a social construct – is recognised as a legal entity distinct from its individual decision makers. If we can define a corporation as having rights, it doesn’t seem a great leap to suggest that nature has similar rights.

In September last year, with other partners, Love Our Ouse put on a River Festival that attracted 1,600 people. As part of the festival, we organised a Rights of Rivers workshop, co-ordinated by the Environmental Law Foundation and a barrister from Lawyers for Nature, that invited people to explore what a declaration for the rights of the River Ouse might look like.

Suggestions were similar to those of the Universal Declaration of River Rights, an initiative spearheaded by the Earth Law Center that more than 200 organisations from 40 countries support.

The declaration, which governments around the world already use as a template to draft legislation to protect their rivers, establishes that all rivers shall possess, at minimum, six fundamental rights:

• The right to flow
• The right to perform essential functions within their ecosystem
• The right to be free from pollution
• The right to feed and be fed by sustainable aquifers
• The right to native biodiversity and
• The right to regeneration and restoration.

That framework helped us to draft a Rights of River motion to present to Lewes District Council. The motion was based on consensus building, a first step in a two-year journey towards drafting the formal declaration and to appoint a recognised representative to speak for the river – at planning meetings, for example.

We presented the motion to council in February. It prompted an impassioned debate as councillors spoke about their own relationships with the river. In the end, the chamber passed the motion – with just two votes against.

River Ouse charter

The reaction to the Rights of River motion has been incredible. National broadsheets and radio stations covered the news. Love Our Ouse has spoken at conferences and on a podcast with Al Jazeera. We’ve been contacted by other river-focused groups, the Wildlife Trusts and local authorities wanting to pass their own Rights of River motions.

We’ve received lots of offers of help to explore and develop the final draft of our river charter for the Ouse. Excitingly, we’re working with a lawyer who helped to write rights for nature into the state constitution of Ecuador.

And we’ve helped several Masters students who’ve chosen the Rights of Nature as their thesis topic and are partnering with Roehampton University and others on a bid to develop a national Rights of Nature network.

We don’t yet know what the legal application of the Rights of River might look like. It could be a patchwork approach applied locally as conservation covenants or specific agreements with landowners.

We’re probably some way from a nationally applied mechanism, but I remember the early days of the sustainability movement, when people dismissed sustainability as a fringe idea that would never become mainstream.

Already, through community engagement and bringing river mapping to local events, we’ve seen how Rights of Rivers offers people a chance to engage with the Ouse using a framework that illustrates how so many of the issues it faces are interconnected.

And so, when we talk to young people about what the “Voice of the River” might look like, for example, we see them start to think about the river as its own entity – not just as something that exists in relation to people.

On November 24, Lewes will host a Right of Rivers summit, where we’ll join up with interested parties from across the UK working to shift our relationship with nature – at a time when nature faces so many threats from human actions.

Matthew Bird C.Env works as climate lead at Sussex Wildlife Trust. He was cabinet councillor for sustainability at Lewes District Council when it passed the Rights of Rivers motion and is a town councillor and mayor of Lewes