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the river told me

2022-05-12T16:50:07.143Z


The low flow of the Paraná and the fires of recent years have reactivated in Argentina the ancient debate on how to protect nature. A bill proposes to make it a subject of rights


Since we talked with the river god, we had not resumed a dialogue of the order of mythology, until we named a river "legal subject".

How do you converse with what has been objectified and discredited to those who do so because they are telluric and emotional?

Only the native peoples, in a low voice, insisted on chatting.

Surrounded by journalists, Berta Cáceres, a Lenca indigenous leader against the privatization of the river, stated that no dams would be built.

How does she know? they asked.

— The river told me.

In the Andean region, the issue was spoken loudly.

Ecuador weaved the indigenous worldview with the Constitution to give the floor to a subject without a voice, to Nature.

Eduardo Galeano intervened on that occasion: “She is not a postcard to be seen from the outside;

she has her life cycles that must be respected ”and, then, the literature that also makes her revolts, defined voting with an allegory.

Bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes, glaciers and underground aquifers must be considered as subjects of rights.

If there is any doubt, Galeano continued, the species, the bodies of water, are not abstract entities like the companies that do enjoy rights;

they are real, alive and tangible.

Damage is always binary: separation is the necessary condition for domination.

Culture/Nature, such as Mind/Body have not been resolved and we already know which speaks louder.

Anthropology places the human in the center for the government of everything "living", but that throne is empty.

Disconnected from his natural essence, he only has the capitalist machine to swallow Nature, but he will not calm his dilated stomach until the ecological bomb explodes in his hands.

In the political problem of that separation, wet borders are laid —a “flooded stripe”— as if dividing rivers were not a fiction.

The Paraná Basin crosses five thousand kilometers of Latin America.

Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, what are these words for water in any of its states and for its biotic community full of microplastics?

Centrality is also cultivated in languages, forgetting the cosmic and telluric dimension of sacred languages.

For example: we have the Paraná, the father of the rivers, which flows from the Amazon to the sea and also the Mama Cocha, the mother of the waters, to talk about.

In the drift of the basin, the echo of the brave women guardians of the coast is heard along with the furious cry of the amphibians, the cururú and the frogs.

That muddy, dynamic and awake river emits a thunderous sound that rises from the Garganta del Diablo when it reaches the falls.

You can hear the beating of the fast currents against the protruding stones and the green murmur of the calm water of the Iguazú, a tributary of the Paraná.

At the crossroads, the different bodies surrender with their tides to the great brown river.

But now the hubbub quiets down and an inhabitant of the delta, of the Island, asks from the shore, what's going on friend, your brown water doesn't come back.

Night comes, warmer, calmer.

The dredgers, which are the muscles of agribusiness, turn on their mechanical noise, extract the silt from the bottom so that the giants of the water can pass loaded with chemically intoxicated grain, oil and fresh water that they steal in the ballast of those ships.

With just a little light in the cabin they trepan the bed of the main artery of the Basin, which in their civilizing language, is called: waterway, a river highway that no longer exists.

While the political monkeys howl for the detained bulk carriers, the drought advances silently and, soon, the river naked of water disturbs our sight with a marine graveyard.

Among our garbage, there are catfish, bogas and ladles, motherfuckers and palometas;

the rays or mongrels, with their poisonous stingers, that look dying.

They are names that people gave him,

The brown spread is colossal, excessive in beauty and abundant in death.

López Brach's portraits show the hydric stress with all the fauna in tow.

The urgent currency privatizes the water, bottles it, the dam, hides the industrial waste;

he doesn't wait for the Basin to recover.

Perhaps that mud that is now in sight, keeps for the Earth a memory of itself, of that broth of origin, of the water.

Libertad Demitropulos, an Argentine writer, asks in

El Río de las Congojas

: “Is this a river or a person with a divine loin, or is it a force that has escaped from the hands of Tupasy, mother of God, or Ilaj, or my eyes that are beginning to get tired of mirroring the tantity of that body without a body?”

We have broken another world, in addition to the envelope in which life develops, which is the world of language.

This biosphere understood as the "world of signs and meanings" in which we all interact is a system that flourishes by communicating, but if we collapse it, chaos ensues and no conversation happens.

With the limited atmospheric reality, with no place for other voices, a single point of view is achieved that fights for the empire of words, discourses that leave a harmful mark are enabled, in practices that extract words and destroy their meaning.

Can the river god converse with the money god?

What are the stories that they speak to themselves to excuse themselves from so much death?

What is the version of the constructors of slogans and the one of the sculptors of economic theories that spread like cancers?

How do we make way for other sayings and for the entire biosphere before the final impoverishment?

In every social movement, the story is very important and every now and then it happens that the humanities at risk accumulate enough vitality for alternatives that seem fictional to operate.

In catastrophes there are linguistic miracles that organize knowledge differently, but if one is cautious nothing happens.

Words, turned decisions, can use the tools of language and its skilful mechanics, not only to condemn us, but also to recover the terrestrial, atmospheric and luminous spectacle.

The river will be a subject and will have rights.

Once Nature has been decommodified, it will have a relationship of coexistence.

Quique Viale is part of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature;

he illuminates the non-human subject, disputes his right to existence.

He already did it with Pino Solanas, filmmaker and politician: they made fun of it in the holy Chamber of Senators.

They are going to bring a tree to court!

Then the most sensible thing, the least strange, will be to exchange a word with the river god, especially if it is about protecting the water from ourselves.

Within that conversation the impossible will become inevitable.

At the end of the poem Otoñea, the poet Adela Bash writes:

"The water stammers, anarchic and sacred."

*At the time of the article, in Argentina, the deputy Leonardo Grosso has presented the project to turn Nature into a subject of rights and in March, the Wetlands Law promoted without success since 2013. Lake Tota and the river Atrato in Colombia, the Ganges in India, the Wuanganui in New Zealand, the Mar Menor in Spain are legal subjects.

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Source: elparis

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