Published by Alexander
February 2024
You can listen to this piece narrated by the BAFTA-winning actress Jessie Buckely by subscribing to Alexander. Click here for an audio preview.
It takes me about an hour to walk across Basòdino’s body. Its flesh is grey, corrupted, wet and flecked with grime. My steel-spiked boots break through its crust and meet clear water underneath. Each step adds, in its own small way, to the collapse. Liquid trickles everywhere, seeping in the holes I’ve made. In places it is crystalline, in places it is slush. Newborn rivers, mere weeks old, have gouged ravineholdings in the ice, carved out cliffs and cornices. Sometimes they cut deep enough to reveal the blue that glows inside: a blue from another age, a glimpse into what has passed.
My boots reach snow, then naked rock. The solid ground feels strange. As I look back at what I’ve crossed – no more than a kilometre of pallid, gently sloping ice – a little bird flutters down and settles on the emptiness. It seems an emissary from another world, or from the future.
Further on I come upon a handful of pale bones wedged in an ice-melt rivulet. Ibex, I presume. I nudge them with my boot to send them spiralling downstream. Then I follow their descent towards the green valley below, where, yesterday, I took part in a ceremony to mourn this dripping glacier’s death.
The ceremony started with 200 people carrying rocks in their hands, winding up the mountain to build a makeshift cairn. Some held chips of pale gneiss, others lumps of granite. Their clothes were colourful. Some were members of a choir, dressed all in red or yellow or blue. In anticipation of a funeral I had dressed in black from head to toe. I was by far the most sombre-looking person there. Even the attending priest was wearing jauntier clothes than me. With the colours and the flags, the mountains soaring all around and the bright blue sky above, the procession had the look and feel of a Himalayan pilgrimage.
But this was the Swiss Alps. And officially the event was not being called a funeral. Partly out of consideration for its Catholic attendees – for whom the word funerale implied, presumably, a soul – the event was billed as a cerimonia, or ceremony.
In procession, carrying our rocks, we followed a narrow track that switchbacked up the mountainside until we arrived at a small plateau. The choir had assembled there, lined up on either side. Each of us had to walk a gauntlet of voices singing something slow and sad, a tunnel of polyphony, and with the dazzle of the sun and the splendour of the mountain peaks it all took on a dreamlike quality. We were invited to sit down, arranged around the slopes.
Beside me sat a small man with a sun-creased face and an impish smile. This was the meteorologist Fosco Spinedi, who had taken it upon himself to act as my translator. The singing crescendoed and faded away. On the far side of the valley, a thousand metres higher up, cloud blew from the mountaintop to reveal the mottled corpse of Basòdino. Giovanni Kappenberger – a red-clad, white-bearded glaciologist with bright blue eyes who had been singing with the choir – stepped forward from the crowd and began to say goodbye.
The dying giant
Basòdino is, or was, was the largest glacier in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, on the Swiss-Italian border. It lies below the sharp grey peak of Mount Basòdino, sprawled across the mountainside like a stained white blanket. A cable car runs from the village of San Carlo, in the Bavona Valley below, to the station of Robiei, at 1,940 metres of altitude, where an ugly concrete hotel stands below the concrete wall of a hydroelectric dam. A signed Glaciological Trail skirts around the glacier’s base, with the option of ascending a slope of scree to reach the grubby, gushing lip that marks the lower boundary of the ice. This is a distance that grows longer every year.
Information boards show the lines of retreat, the glacier’s decade-by-decade withdrawal further up the mountain. The ice was there in 1850. The ice was there in 1920. The ice was there in 1950. The newly-exposed rock – exposed to daylight so recently that plants have not yet grown – has a polished, glassy look, gleaming with the ice-melt rivers dribbling from above. Basòdino is still two kilometres squared and 40 metres deep in its deepest part – a substantial body of ice, if you have nothing to compare it to. But it is now 20% of what it was in the mid-19th century, when the Europe-wide cold snap known as the Little Ice Age ended.
From here – perhaps from the hotel terrace, eating ravioli and drinking beer – you can look at those naked granite slopes and see Basòdino’s future. Over the next decade, the ice will become increasingly fragmented, riven by crevasses and eventually splitting into two or three large chunks. A similar process has already happened: in 2008, the northernmost part of the glacier became detached and is now a smaller ‘glacieret’ with its own name, Cavergno. In ten years, only a few stumps of ice will remain. In 15 years, at the most, Basòdino will be gone.
In a way it is gone already. Already its Wikipedia page refers to it in the past tense. You can still walk across it, but Basòdino is technically not a glacier any more. Glaciologists call it a ‘dead ice body’.
The act of declaring a glacier’s ‘death’, however, is controversial. Does it have to have melted completely, the entirety of its mass passed from solid to liquid state? Or is a terminal diagnosis – five, ten years – enough? Sometimes glaciologists say a glacier is considered dead when its ice is no longer visible, though it may simply be buried under rocks and sediment; sometimes when it becomes too unsafe for scientific monitoring. It is not simply about lack of ice – Basòdino still has some 25 million tonnes of it – but, crucially, lack of movement. For glaciers are not frozen things but slowly flowing rivers.
Their pace can vary massively: some move at a rate of metres per year, some metres per day. The bigger they are, the faster they are. They flow under their own vast weight, which deforms the ice crystals at their base as they glide like slugs on trails of their own lubrication. As the ‘grounding zones’ at their bottoms grind over boulders and other obstacles, the surfaces of glaciers buckle and contort, producing badlands of crevasses that resemble frozen rapids. Fallen rubble from above is carried downhill on gritty moraines, much as cascading rivers transport floating debris.
This gradual but inexorable movement is what makes glaciers glaciers, and not mere volumes of densely packed old snow. They may change their pace from decade to decade, or even from month to month, moving faster in summer and slower in winter – but they are never still. When a glacier stops, it dies.
If a glacier can die, was it previously alive? The question is not altogether fanciful. On a microscopic level, there is more to seemingly barren ice than meets the eye. Recent studies have revealed that glaciers are vibrant ecosystems, teeming with tiny organisms: they are frozen rivers no less alive, in biological terms, than their liquid counterparts. Bacteria and algae live on and deep within the ice, breaking down ancient organic matter and producing waste in the form of methane. Chlamydomonas nivalis, a red-tinted, photosynthetic algae that thrives in cold conditions, sometimes gives rise to ‘blood snow’, where snow and ice blushes pink and smells of watermelon. Microbial life has even been found at the bottom of glacial grounding zones, where no sunlight penetrates, just as life is known to thrive at the bottom of the deepest oceans.
Glaciers are said to have heads and tongues, and end in snouts or toes. As well as flowing like rivers, they are said to walk or crawl. They give birth, ‘calving’ to form icebergs. The language scientists use to describe them is charged with animal imagery, with life and death. And it is largely scientists – glaciologists such as Giovanni Kappenberger, who has studied Basòdino for 30 years – who have started organising ceremonies for dead ice.
Valediction
The choir sang as the mourners shuffled forward. We laid the rocks that we had brought – mine was a piece of gneiss sparkling with mica specks – around a log that had been carved by Kappenberger with the simplest of inscriptions: Cerimonia commemorativa per ricorde i ghiacciai scomparsi, ‘Memorial ceremony to remember the disappeared glaciers’, and the date, 12 September 2021. Basòdino was not named, as if it were not important. Cloud rolled on the mountaintop and the glacier came and went from view, by turns dazzling and dull, as if passing in and out of existence. Each time the veil drew back I half expected it to be gone.
The service had lasted about an hour. My new friend Spinedi translated for me, hissing loudly in my ear. After Kappenberger’s speech a succession of speakers took the mic. A grandmother from an organisation called the Association of Climate Seniors remembered being told of the glacier’s ‘eternal snow’ as a child. A 17-year-old schoolgirl spoke of her disbelief that it would all be gone before she is 30. A Nepalese resident of Ticino spoke of glacier loss in the Himalayas, a region already suffering some of the worst extremes of climate change: avalanches, dam collapses, desertification. And a young climber with a chapped red face read the dedication he had left on Mount Basòdino early that morning, scaling the summit after dawn. A bystander provided an ad hoc English translation: ‘After years of discreet and gurgling fusion, the glacier has quietly left us. All mountaineers and friends announce the disappearance of the glacier. The ceremony will take place at 11 o’clock. And let the waters run in peace.’
The Catholic priest went last, a tall, broad-chested man in a pale blue shirt and trousers. ‘It is all mumbo-jumbo to me,’ Spinedi said in a loud whisper, but he translated nonetheless: it took in a sermon on ecology, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ – in which he called for a global ‘ecological conversion’ to protect the environment – and mankind’s divinely appointed role as stewards of the Earth.
Despite Spinedi’s cheerful heathenism, the familiar priestly intonation clearly tapped into something deep in many of those listening. Latin murmured around the hillside in response to the father’s prayers. Once the stones were in their heap, the priest brought the ceremony to a close, reading aloud from his red leather Bible and sprinkling holy water from a silver aspergillum. He flicked some droplets over the cairn, some at his makeshift congregation, and some at distant Basòdino hazy on its mountaintop – shrouded in white cloud, lying in its open casket.
This is not the first time a glacier’s passing has been mourned. In 2019 a plaque was installed on top of a volcano in western Iceland to mark the death of a glacier called Okjökull. Jökull is Icelandic for ‘glacier’, so the vanishing of the ice has eroded the name as well: now it is simply Ok. The ceremony, which took place in a moonscape of barren brown rocks and debris, was attended by scientists and prominent politicians. The plaque’s inscription, composed by the writer and former presidential candidate Andri Snær Magnason, was short and pointed:
‘A letter to the future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’
A month later a ceremony took place in eastern Switzerland at a glacier called Pizol, which has lost over 80% of its ice since the mid-2000s. It was explicitly funereal. Hundreds of mourners dressed in black, including men in black top hats and women in widows’ veils, climbed the mountain to say goodbye, accompanied by the doleful moaning of a three-metre-long alphorn. This was followed in 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, by a smaller gathering at another Swiss glacier, Trient. In proper Swiss democratic style, the passing of Pizol was mourned in German, Trient in French and Basòdino in Italian, marking three of the country’s four official languages. A fourth ceremony, in the minority language Romansch, took place in 2023 at a glacier called Morteratsch. A few months later the death of Pasterze, the largest glacier in Austria, was marked by religious leaders and a coffin carved from ice.
Another way glaciers die is bureaucratically. The World Glacier Inventory, established in 1986 by the WGMS and updated every few years, categorises over 130,000 glaciers by name, ID number, latitude, longitude, total area, mean elevation and class (which includes continental ice sheet, valley glacier, mountain glacier, ice cap, glacieret and other taxological distinctions). Removal from this register depends on physical disappearance. At the time of writing, Pizol, Trient and Basòdino are still listed on the inventory, despite being dead in technical terms. Iceless Ok – entirely vanished – has been struck from the list of names.
In ten years’ time Basòdino’s name will also be expunged from this inventory, its status changed from alive to dead, extant to extinct. It will join approximately 500 other glaciers that have vanished in Switzerland since 1850, many of which passed away unnamed, and thousands more across the Alps – around 90% of the range’s ice – that are predicted to disappear before the end of this century.
Mass balance
The night before the ceremony, Giovanni Kappenberger had invited me to join him at the hotel restaurant with his wife Irene, a veteran mountaineer. Over a meal of meaty lasagne, he talked about his involvement in previous glacial happenings: he had been at Pizol in 2019, and had also helped to organise a famous stunt in 2007 on Aletsch, the longest glacier in the Alps, during which 600 people stripped off their clothes and posed naked on the ice in order to raise awareness about global warming. He described his expeditions to study glacial retreat in Nepal, where he had seen at first hand how precipitous glacial retreat is causing rockslides, avalanches, floods and water shortages. But mostly he talked about his decades-long professional and personal connection to Basòdino, a career he summed up as ‘thirty years of mass balance’.
Mass balance is what determines a glacier’s bodily health. A well-adjusted glacier is poised delicately between accumulation, the annual snowfall building up at its head, and ablation, the loss that occurs through melting or sublimation. In order to calculate this balance you need at least one measurement in spring, when accumulation is at its peak, and another in late summer, after the season’s ablation.
Since starting his work in 1991 Giovanni has visited Basòdino four or five times every year. He has spent over a hundred days trekking back and forth across the ice to check his monitoring sites, which are marked by slender poles that protrude like acupuncture needles. He has tracked Basòdino’s decline both in balance and in speed. At the start of his career the glacier was losing half a metre of ice depth and moving five metres every year; now the rate of loss has doubled and the flow is almost at a standstill.
I tried to visualise what that meant: a waist-high depth of ice vanishing across a whole mountainside in the space between one Christmas and the next. It seemed impossible.
Kappenberger went on to describe the albedo effect. He talked animatedly, occasionally pausing to scribble calculations on his place mat with a pencil. As with glacial mass balance, this equation is a simple one. The more ice vanishes, giving way to rock, the less reflective ice there is to bounce back solar radiation. Rock is darker and so absorbs more heat, heating the mountainside and leading to more ablation. This is one of the main reasons that temperatures are rising in mountain regions, and in the Arctic, at up to double the rate of anywhere else on the planet.
That much is predictable, Kappenberger told me. But – as he has seen at Geren, a much smaller glacier ten kilometres to the north – the phenomenal rate of melting produces regular surprises. Some months before, Geren’s tongue had calved into a striated iceberg bobbing in a mountain lake, something that no one had foreseen. His face lit up as he told me this. For glaciologists, climate change is not only alarming but also profoundly fascinating, an ever-expanding field of research that brings new discoveries every day. Kappenberger and his colleagues are witnessing things that no scientist has seen before. ‘It’s something we did not expect,’ he said. ‘This iceberg is beautiful. And that’s the future too.’
We ate tiramisu and drank a digestif made from bitter herbs. ‘How does Basòdino’s death make you feel?’ I asked. ‘Is it sad?’
It seemed a reasonable question to ask a man arranging a funeral for something he had devoted three decades of his life to understanding. But for the first time since we’d met, Kappenberger fell silent. He took an uncomfortably long time to respond, wiping his white beard carefully with his napkin, while Irene looked away. I had the idea that I might have offended him, that the question was somehow inappropriate.
‘It is a step,’ he said at last.
Did he mean that Basòdino’s death is a step in the geological time between the Holocene and the Anthropocene: between the stable climatic period that has endured for millennia and the warmer, more chaotic world that human actions are creating? A step from one state to the next, in objective scientific terms? Or did he mean something more personal, reflecting his long involvement with the ice, the metre-by-metre ablation that has tracked the years of his life? Was it perhaps a step in the progress of his own grief?
Rites of passage
Humans have always used ceremonies to mark the major thresholds of life: births, marriages, deaths, loss, grief and celebration. Rituals act as holding vessels to contain the uncontainable, to help communities and cultures process existential overwhelm.
There is no precedent for marking the mass death of glaciers, vast entities whose presence has shaped these mountains since before recorded time – or if there is, it has not been seen for 11,000 years. When the Last Glacial Maximum ended and Europe’s ice sheets shrank away, leaving scars upon the land that can still be seen today, did ancient hunter-gatherers, facing a world in rapid flux, respond with gestures, offerings, songs?
Of course we will never know. The 21st-century farewells that have emerged in Iceland and Switzerland, with their plaques, alphorns and stupas – drawing from a ragbag of symbolism from Catholic to Buddhist – are tentative, faltering attempts to grapple with a profound change. The eco-philosopher Timothy Morton coined the word ‘hyperobject’ to describe phenomena whose effects are too overwhelmingly vast and complex for anyone, scientist or not, to truly understand. Climate change is the prime example: its impacts are so widely distributed through space and time that it has a kind of scrambling effect, eluding our comprehension. Glacial melting produces the surreal impression of time sped up, as changes that once took hundreds of millennia now happen in a century. The vanishing of a glacier is surely such a hyperobject – beyond our intellectual or rational reach.
There is another example in the not-so-distant past of ritual being deployed in response to glacial change – but it was spurred by accumulation, not ablation. In the 17th century, residents of the canton of Valais, alarmed by the inexorable growth of the Aletsch Glacier – which, at its height, threatened their homes with destruction and their farmland with catastrophic flooding – sought divine intervention to turn the frozen tide. Starting in 1674, German-speaking Catholic villagers made an annual pilgrimage to a chapel near the village of Fiesch to pray for deliverance from the ice.
It took 200 years, but their prayers seemed to work. In the mid-19th century, Aletsch began to retreat, first gradually then rapidly. The shrinkage started at the toe and crept steadily up the valley. Successive generations of farming families saw the behemoth draw back, and they hammered home their prayers. Its withdrawal left a grubby tideline on the mountain walls. The Aletsch is still Europe’s largest glacier, but since 1870 it has lost 3km of length. By 2100 – according to the most conservative climate models – it will lose 12km more, over half its current mass. The least conservative models suggest it will all but disappear.
In 2009, local Catholics – perhaps the descendants of those pilgrims who once prayed for its demise – sought permission from the Pope to alter the historic prayer, beseeching Aletsch to return and fill the void that it had left. Where previous generations dreaded flooding, these present-day inhabitants foresaw a shortage of water as their frozen reservoir retreated year by year. Pope Benedict XVI gave his blessing and the words were changed. The liturgy now includes the line: ‘Glacier is ice, ice is water, water is life.’
Two years before this papal intervention, Kappenberger had helped to organise the Greenpeace naked photoshoot on Aletsch. The hope was that such events might help to stop global warming. There is a stark difference between then and now. These funeral-like ceremonies are not attempts to prevent the ice from vanishing. They are admissions that we have failed, that action has come too late.
‘It is a step,’ Kappenberger said.
He paid the bill and we said goodnight.
Everything flows
I want to zoom out now, away from that mountain in Ticino. What I had been told was true: the ceremony was not a funeral. Despite the priest, the eulogies, the monument, the mourners who came to say goodbye – despite the language of life and death – nothing really died that day. The vanishing ice is not a death but a transformation. I traced it with my fingertip on one of the gorgeous topographic maps that Switzerland produces so well: Basòdino’s afterlife, or rather, its reincarnation.
Gushing down the mountainside in countless streams and waterfalls, the glacier’s released meltwater initially gathers in Lake Zött, constrained by the concrete wall of the hydroelectric dam. From this bright green glacial lake it flows into the River Bavona and down the steep, forested valley that I ascended in a cable car, until it joins the River Maggia at the village of Bignasco. Thirty kilometres south of there the Maggia pours into Lake Maggiore at Locarno near the Swiss-Italian border, which empties into the River Ticino, which in turn empties into the Po, the longest river in Italy, which carries melted Alpine ice hundreds of kilometres eastwards into the Adriatic Sea and the Mediterranean. That is where Basòdino will go. But it will not stop there.
A schoolchild could explain what happens next: the evaporation of water into clouds, the condensation and precipitation of clouds as rain and snow, the eternal recycling between solid, liquid and vapour. As temperatures climb, Basòdino’s melted ice may not return as snow – at least, not in this geological age – but it will certainly return, and never stop returning. The adapted Aletsch prayer might be adapted once again: ‘Glacier is ice, ice is water, water is river, river is life.’ And in the same year that a glacier in Switzerland passed away, or passed into something else, a river in Quebec, Canada became a person.
Rights of nature
The Magpie River is white water thundering over rocks; pine forest clustered on the banks, home to caribou, moose and bear; rapids and waterfalls; a fierce, wild, dangerous river. It flows for 200 kilometres south from near the border with Labrador, running through the ancestral homeland of Nutshimit, where the Innu people have hunted, trapped and fished for thousands of years. Its Innu name is Muteshekau Shipu or Mutehekau Hipu, ‘river where the water passes between the square rocky cliffs’.
Quebec shares a border with New York State, a region whose booming energy needs are driving a rapidly growing demand for hydroelectric power. The Innu people feared that the wild Magpie would meet the same fate as the nearby Romaine river, which is now home to four hydroelectric dams that have drowned ancestral hunting grounds and turned much of the river into a vast, placid lake. After nearly a decade of campaigning by an alliance of Innu and First Nations groups, ecologists and environmental activists, in February 2021, the Magpie River became the first natural feature in Canada to gain legal personhood. It was granted nine rights, including the right to live, exist and flow; the right to evolve naturally; the right to regeneration and restoration; and the right to take legal action.
The Magpie was not the first body of water to achieve this distinction. It is part of a cascading trend that, amidst ecological collapse, is filtering out across the globe. As Europe’s glaciers are mourned – as tentative not-quite-funerals fumble towards a ritual form that can hold the enormity of the changes we are living through – a parallel movement is emerging in other parts of the world. Rather than grieving dying ice, it celebrates living water.
The origins of this movement date back to 1972, when an essay entitled ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ by the US law professor Christopher D. Stone argued for extending legal rights, and the concept of ‘personhood’, to natural features. Trees and rivers should not be regarded as ‘things’ to be exploited, Stone argued, or even as property to be owned, but rather as living entities with their own inalienable rights. Crucially, they should also be able to have those rights defended by lawyers in court. Forests could sue logging companies; lakes could sue polluters.
As Stone pointed out, rights have never been fixed and have hugely expanded over time. Not so long ago only white adult men were considered legal persons in Western jurisprudence. In a series of progressive leaps, the definition was forced wider to encompass everyone – regardless of “nationality, place of residence, gender, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status”, as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights put it.
The extension of rights to non-humans may seem a greater leap, but there is clear precedent. Animals have limited rights, some vastly more than others. Much more bizarrely, corporations – entirely abstract entities that exist in no physical sense – have been regarded as legal persons since a US Supreme Court ruling in 1886. Today, all around the world, they exercise their rights to own assets and property, to enter into contracts, to lend and borrow money, and to take other corporations to court.
When millions of people accept this premise every day, the step to rights for natural features doesn’t seem so great. If a corporation can become a person – can be regarded as a living, even a sentient being – then why not a redwood tree, a cloud forest or a lake? Why not a chalk stream teeming with kingfishers and trout?
The movement scored its first big victory in 2008, when Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution. That amendment has since been successfully used to protect rivers and forests from road expansion, oil drilling and mineral extraction. In 2014, the Te Urewera rainforest in New Zealand’s North Island became the world’s first natural feature to be given personhood: formerly a national park, it was redefined as a juristic entity that ‘owns itself’, with its interests represented by Māori custodians. Three years later an act of parliament in New Zealand recognised the country’s third-longest river, the Whanganui – which flows 290 kilometres from the volcano of Mount Tongariro through forest, valleys and bushland to the Tasman Sea – as ‘an indivisible and living whole’ with ‘all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.’
These examples inspired legislation around the world. In that same year, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India recognised the Ganga and Yamuna – rivers both sacred to Hinduism – as ‘living human entities’. Bangladesh extended rights to all rivers in the country. In Victoria, Australia, the state parliament recognised the life (though not the personhood) of the Yarra River and appointed a council of Aboriginal elders to act as its legal voice. And in early 2021, the Magpie became a person too.
Not all these gains have been permanent. Despite the fact that millions of Hindus worship them as goddesses, India’s sacred rivers had their personhood blocked by the country’s Supreme Court. The request to do so came from local authorities, who feared a deluge of litigation. A ‘bill of rights’ declared for Lake Erie in the US was similarly struck down. The technicalities of personhood vary from one legal system to the next, and the legislative language is opaque and complicated. But it is not the small print that interests me in these cases.
What unites these declarations, and dozens of others from Mexico to Colombia, Uganda to Bolivia, is a profound conceptual shift from objecthood to subjecthood. In legal systems around the world, supposedly lifeless matter has suddenly become animate. Even as our glaciers die, our rivers flood with life.
River gods
Three months before I went to Basòdino, I stood in the English midsummer rain to witness a declaration of rights for the River Cam. Flowing through the heart of Cambridge, past the dreaming spires of 800-year-old colleges, with swans and painted narrowboats serenely floating on its waters, the slow green river seems the quintessence of civilised Englishness. A hundred or so attendees had gathered where it runs through the parkland of Jesus Green, wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas, talking politely and passing round cake. There was a gazebo with brightly coloured bunting. To the rhythm of a samba band a dozen blue-clad River Sprites made sinuous motions with their hands, somewhere between activist theatre and a mummers’ dance. Banners read ‘Water = Life’, almost exactly the same wording as the Aletsch Glacier prayer.
Like the Basòdino ceremony, it began with speeches. The organiser Tony Booth, of the campaigning group Friends of the Cam, described the threats to the river from pollution and over-abstraction – the draining and diverting of water for agriculture and construction, which is depleting the aquifer on which the Cam depends. Paul Powlesland, a blue-suited barrister who co-founded the legal firm Lawyers for Nature, described the event as the first of its kind to happen anywhere in the world. Scrolls were handed out and unfurled. They dampened in the drizzly air as all of us, at Tony’s invitation, arranged ourselves in a circle to recite the river’s rights, directly inspired by declarations from New Zealand and Quebec. ‘The right to be free from pollution; the right to perform its essential functions of flooding, moving sediment, recharging groundwater and sustaining biodiversity; the right to feed and be fed by sustainable aquifers…’
With its mixture of solemnity and social awkwardness, it reminded me more than anything of a Church of England congregation. The recital ended with the words: ‘In declaring the rights of the River Cam, we are, at the same time, declaring the rights of all rivers. We pledge to act as Guardians of the River Cam.’
There was one significant difference between this event and the rights declarations for rivers like the Magpie and Whanganui. The words we said in Cambridge were purely symbolic. They had no legal standing. But these rights of nature campaigners had simply declared them anyway. Because legality, I learned , was almost beside the point.
Hearts and minds
Paul Powlesland, the lawyer, agreed that the legal status of the Cam after the ceremony finished would be the same as before. But, he suggested, something had changed that was perhaps more important.
The rights of nature movement is twofold, operating on different levels. On one, it is tactical: a clever legal mechanism that has effectively hacked the system to secure greater protections for nature by means of stronger legislation. On another, deeper level it is unashamedly spiritual, a return to what can only be described as a form of animism.
This belief – that everything in the universe possesses sentience, spirit or soul, from rocks, trees and waterfalls to kingfishers and corporate lawyers – has long been banished from Western rational thought and from religion. It has also been banished from the law, which places great importance on property ownership: property, by definition, cannot start owning itself. But the law can change.
‘What actually is the law? Where does it come from?’ asked Powlesland. ‘We’re so used to the idea of it being handed down from on high, and the only way to change it is to ask nicely. But that’s only one way the law is changed. The American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights were not only unlawful but treasonous – but they became a reality. I wonder if we can do the same with nature’s rights.’
It was surprising to meet a lawyer for whom the significance of the law seemed, at best, secondary, but Powlesland played the role of a lawyer gone rogue with a trickerish pride. Once a member of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, with a corporate career ahead, he experienced what he described as an ‘ecological epiphany’ in his twenties and is now a houseboat-dwelling defender of the rights of riverine beings. Later that summer, he explained, he was planning a ceremony of his own, inviting people from different faiths to declare the rights of the River Roding, an unsung tributary of the Thames on which he has made his home.
For Powlesland, the significance of these events was not in governmental acknowledgement, but the start of a more profound shift in social perspective. During his time living on the Roding he has fished out various offerings – Hindu votive charms, an African idol, and once, oddly, a Quran – which hint at the spiritual connections that different communities have to the water.
‘The river is what unites us,’ he said. ‘It’s sacred.’
After the reading of rights, a woman in a hijab volunteered to sing a much older declaration: the Islamic shahada, or declaration of faith. Islam emphasises that water is the foundation of life. The Quran begins with Allah dividing the sweet water from the salt, the rivers and lakes from the seas. Ritual purification in water is a fundamental part of prayer. As the Arabic words rang out across Jesus Green, I was taken aback by their strength and clarity. There was no mumbling awkwardness there, only passionate conviction.
A legalistic document modelled on a bill of rights; the Englishness of a village fete or a church service; the neo-pagan antics of the dancing River Sprites; and now an Islamic expression of faith – the Cambridge ceremony was a confusion of cultural references, an invented ceremony repurposed from other traditions. But how could it be otherwise? The event was something new. As with the glacier funerals, feeling their way towards ritual form at a time when the pace of climate breakdown outstrips cultural change, there exists no precedent for the ‘proper’ way to mark such things. It has simply never been done before, and can only be improvised.
It took me a while to work out what was missing at the ceremony. The declaration was delivered in an inward-looking circle, with people intoning the words to each other rather than to their intended recipient. At no point did anyone think to address the actual river. Until, right at the end, Powlesland stripped off his lawyer’s suit and jumped in the water, to applause. If his intention was to spark a wild rush from the banks he must have been disappointed; cold rain was falling, and most people stayed warm and dry on the riverbank. But his plunge shifted focus to the river for the first time that day.
People rolled up their sleeves and dipped their arms in the water. ‘Nice to touch it,’ said a woman near me – though she might have been speaking to herself. ‘It all felt a bit disconnected, didn’t it? It feels good to connect.’
There was a time when no one would have struggled with that connection.
Deep time
Zoom out again, not spatially but temporally — away from the Cambridge spires, boats and passing traffic. Before the Cam was called the Cam, before its older name, the Granta. Before there was a city here. Before there were any cities. Jesus Green is not a green but a marshland thick with reeds. The riverbanks are densely packed with willow and alder trees. The river is much broader now, two or three times its modern width, spreading and meandering, merging into lake and fen. A fish jumps; ripples spread. Mist rolls upon the water.
To a person standing in this place – leaning on a spear, perhaps, ankle-deep in sediment, hunting eels or waterfowl, or preparing to make an offering – the world is potent, numinous. Everything has a voice. The living river is a person, as the willow tree is a person, as the dragonfly is a person, as the heron is a person. No one calls this ‘animism’. It is simply how things are.
We do not need to plunge into ancient time to find this way of seeing things: it is still alive today. All the successful modern attempts to breathe life into rivers again – to give them back their personhood – have occurred in countries with a strong indigenous presence. In Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, Bolivia, India, Australia, the United States, and most recently Canada, some cultures – despite the nature-denying, human-centric worldview imposed on them by colonialism – have never lost their understanding of an animate universe. Living rivers are not a semantic trick, but a statement of fact.
‘This river is alive, and she can speak. She can speak through us.’ This was the voice of Shanice Mollen-Picard, a young Innu filmmaker and activist from Quebec, who was part of the campaign to restore personhood to the Magpie River. Her words when she spoke to me were simple and direct, and contained more certainty than anything I had heard at that English ceremony. ‘I don’t consider the river a thing,’ she said. ‘She is a living being.’
Now, Mollen-Picard told me, her tribe is reforging a connection with the river after generations of interference with their traditional lifestyle and beliefs.
‘This was the river our ancestors, our elders, were always travelling, north of Labrador and back to Ekuanitshit where we are now,’ she said. ‘When I am on the river I can feel their spirit. When I hear the rapids, I can hear my ancestors talking to me. In the Innu vision the river is alive, it’s talking to us – the wind, the forest, everything.’
I asked: ‘If you’ve always believed that the river is alive, does personhood change anything? Does this legal language make you see the river differently?’
“This personhood was made by the law, by the government of Quebec, not by First Nations,” she said. “It’s just a mechanism. We can use their mechanism to protect our river – it works. But I don’t think legal personhood changes how I see the river at all.”
Her words were echoed by Erin Matariki Carr, an environmental lawyer living in New Zealand near the Te Urewera rainforest, the world’s first natural feature to become a person. Since 2014, its 2,000 square kilometres of emerald lakes, waterfalls, rivers and dense canopy have been considered one single living entity.
‘From my perspective and from my iwi’s, my tribe’s, perspective,’ said Matariki Carr, ‘we are children of the Earth biologically and historically, spiritually and culturally. Our bones are made of the same minerals. When you look at the river you know you are of that, not just you but your whole ancestry. There is a phrase you hear a lot: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, “I am the river and the river is me.”’
Again I asked what legal personhood could mean to someone who already believes in a river’s life. Does it change the way they see the world?
‘A really important part of this dialogue is, we are still colonised peoples,’ said Matariki Carr. ‘So much of our knowledge has been stripped from us. I don’t speak my language fluently, and as an adult I’ve had to come home and work on reconnection. My mum was never taught the language at all, my grandparents never allowed it. So we can agree that the Earth is our mother, and we are her children, and we have a responsibility to care for her. But on the other hand we’re still chucking out rubbish and burning plastic, doing things that are harmful to the Earth, that are inconsistent with our beliefs. We need to recognise that these behaviours are actually colonised behaviours.’
Like Mollen-Picard on the far side of the world, Matariki Carr made an explicit connection between rights for nature and the wider process of re-indigenisation. ‘What this tool of personhood has done is create a space for us to act as ourselves within the imposed colonial system,’ she said. ‘To live in accordance with our beliefs. And not only that, but it’s enforceable. When you read the management plan for Te Urewera, it’s like poetry – and it’s a legal document of force within the colonial courts. It’s exciting. It’s incredible. It’s the biggest shift in our legal system since colonisation.’
Where does a river start and end? It is not an easy question. The Māori conception of the world is what is known as whakapapa, a vast interconnected web that connects all things to all things, an intricate genealogy linking humans with the rest of nature. Everything is part of everything else. Nothing is divisible. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the eternal cycle of water as it passes from state to state, refusing to stop anywhere.
Does a river end at the mud of its banks? At the sea into which it flows? Does the sea end at a distant coast, or does it end in the cloud that forms when its water evaporates, or in the rain that falls from that cloud? Does water include the fish, insects and algae that live inside it? And does a river begin at its source, which may bubble up from underground, or are its origins in the mountain where its waters gather? Where do those waters have their source? To the Māori, the body of a river extends to the mist above its surface, into the vapour in the air, into the very atmosphere – which is to say, into everything.
‘I am the river and the river is me.’ Water = life.
Ascent
The heap of rocks was complete. The mourners had mostly departed. Kappenberger was drinking beer with the other organisers at the hotel, and the Catholic priest had swooped away down the valley in the cable car. Spinedi, my meteorologist friend, lingered beside me at the cairn. ‘How does it feel?’ I asked him.
Spinedi had known Basòdino since the 1970s, when he and his friends used to come here to explore networks of mountain caves; each time they emerged back into the light the ice was there to greet them. But initially his reply was as cryptic as Kappenberger’s had been. ‘We are not at the beginning, not at the end, we are simply in the middle,’ he said. ‘This is something that goes beyond a personal feeling.’ Before he left, he pointed to a narrow track up the mountainside, where he had a little hut. “I will sleep up there tonight,” he said. “Meet me tomorrow, after dawn, and I will show you the way to the ice.”
Spinedi’s small stone hut stood in a meadow of wildflowers. When I arrived the next morning, he filled a pan to boil coffee from a tumbling ice-melt river. When we started walking he set the pace, bouncing nimbly over rocks, telling me stories as we went. He showed me the entrance to the caves he had spent his younger life exploring. ‘In the 1970s, past this point, it was always winter here,’ he said. ‘Always you would be walking in snow. Now you have spring flowers in September.’ Ticino has plenty of rain – it is the wettest canton in Switzerland – so even after the glacier melts there will still be water here, but conditions are becoming less and less predictable: the past three summers, Spinedi said, had been respectively wetter, hotter and colder than normal. But he was sure that the people would adjust, as they always have. In the 19th century, some 30% of the valley’s population left because they had overgrazed the grass and felled too many trees. ‘There has already been an ecological disaster here,’ he said. ‘But we carry on.’
We carried on. The higher we climbed the more the granite had been smoothed, rounded into fluvial forms by the action of ice – not Basòdino but an older, vaster glacier, one that vanished long before there was farming here. When that glacier disappeared, humans stepped into its void. Fosco pointed to the high pass through which, many thousands of years ago, prehistoric hunters followed herds of migrating deer from what is now Italy, filling a new ecological niche. Was the world animate for them, I wondered, as it is for indigenous people today? Did the new-formed rivers speak? Did the vanishing ice say goodbye? We know nothing of their beliefs, only the few solid fragments they left, including potsherds and items carved from crystal. This translucent mountain quartz, once used to fashion spearheads, was sought again in the 1800s to export for chandeliers.
From spearheads to chandeliers, dams and cable cars: the glacier has been there all that time, accumulating and ablating, melting, sublimating and freezing, rising and falling like a tide. It is now at its lowest ebb. When it returns – if it returns – there may be spearheads being used in these mountains once again.
Spinedi halted at the stony shoulder of a long moraine, a bank of rubble heaped up by Basòdino’s now retreated snout. He explained where I must go from there: uphill until I reached bare rock, then soft snow, then hard ice. Our parting was brief, and by the time I next looked back there was no sign of him. I carried on up the moraine, through layers of time made visible: past the 1850 line, past the 1920 line, past the 1950 line, scrambling into the present day. It took an hour to climb 1,000 metres and 200 years.
As I reached the glacier’s edge and strapped crampons to my boots, Spinedi’s words came back to me: ‘We are not at the beginning, not at the end, we are in the middle.’ I thought of Kappenberger’s words too: ‘It is a step.’ As this ancient frozen body sloughs its form, and becomes something else, new life is flooding, symbolically and literally, into the world,. I was about to set forth on a vast potential river. Despite the language of death, no glacier dies when its movement stops, because of course its movement never stops; it only starts moving faster. The atoms of the ice before me, gleaming wet with heat, were vibrating into liquid, accelerating into gas. Rivers and glaciers start and end everywhere and nowhere.
And now I have crossed Basòdino and am on the other side, looking back at where I’ve come from, where we all have come from. The bleak expanse is cold and grey, and the green valley beckons. I offer up my own small prayer and leave the fading ice behind, passing onto solid rock.
It is a step.