The Australian river legally recognised as a ‘living entity’ - Australian Geographic

Rivers cannot help but be beautiful. It takes considerable time, money, and will to despoil one.

This presumption of man’s dominion over nature runs far back in Western culture, at least to the Bible’s opening verses. It also underpins the language of environmental economics, which frames the living world as a storehouse of ‘natural resources’, as if it were waiting – like a pile of Lego blocks – to be transformed by man into something useful