…a blog written by Buglife Cymru, Natur am Byth, Scarce Yellow Sally Conservation Officer, Sarah Hawkes.
Over the last few months I have heard a couple of talks about ‘Riverkin’, an idea proposed by Julia Ortega and Josh Cohen, from Leeds University.
The idea is a re-awakening of a much older concept that has long been present in traditional societies across the planet, including our own early society. The current perilous, polluted and unhealthy state of our much-loved freshwaters and their inhabitants has been regularly talked about in news bulletins. Julia and Josh set out to find ways to counter the inadequacy of our current laws about river management and restore the emphasis on good river health.
These two scientists reflect on the fact that our society’s view of rivers has moved away from ‘a relationship of care and partnership’ with a landscape to a ‘relationship of privatisation and ownership’.
They call this the ‘Thingification’ of rivers. For the past few hundred years, and particularly since the industrial revolution, thinking of rivers as ‘things’ has made it easy to treat rivers, and landscapes, as resources to be exploited.
Talking instead about rivers and society having an ancestral relationship to us, a kinship and shared history, brings to mind Darwin’s entangled bank where many different species of animal, plant, bacteria, the underlying geology and the overlying weather and climate, operate together in relationships that maintain the overall health of the whole bank.
When things are going wrong, the whole bank is affected. When the bank community interacts with the sort of care and respect necessary in any strong community, the bank is healthy. This does not mean constancy, but the whole can work together to meet challenges and recover, making changes where needed, thriving together through good years and bad.
Scarce Yellow Sally (Isogenus nubecula), the main protagonist in Buglife’s project on the River Dee near Wrexham, is one of the many animals dependent on, and contributing to, the health of the river and its landscape.
Since first hearing of the Riverkin idea this summer (at the Freshwater Biological Association Annual Scientific Meeting 2025) I have found myself intrigued by the concept. I live near a tributary of the Welsh Dee and to me the river flowing through my valley and all the streams flowing into it, have been part of what makes my home. I care about the river and so do my neighbours. The river is a constant source of conversation.
“Is the river high and will there be floods?” We speculate as to why.
“Is it full of soil and debris?’ We speculate on where the land is being lost from.
“Is it dry, lower than we have ever seen it?” We wonder if there will be enough water for the fish.
“Have we seen many mayflies or salmon this year?” We ask what the birds will eat and the anglers catch if the biodiversity disappears.
In a real sense, the river in my home valley is my kin, our community’s kin. It feels good to me to have the relationship named and valued.
Family relationships are not, of course, always easy, but when there is something wrong or is upsetting our kin, the family tries to reset the balance.
When a river or other part of the landscape is identified as a ‘commodity’ we collectively forget how important it is to our community. The company ‘owning’ the commodity will simply look elsewhere if the ‘thing,’ the commodity, runs out or fails, but the community left behind dealing with the damage to their ‘kin’ has a much greater loss to attempt to recover from.
On and around the Welsh Dee, and on many other rivers, pollutants and climate change are upsetting the health of river and landscape. Now seems a good time to rethink our relationship with rivers and aid the health of whole communities.
Riverkinship, already being practised in other parts of the world where rivers have been granted ‘legal personhood’ (In New Zealand on the Wanghanui River, the Magpie River in Quebec, Canada, and all rivers in Bangladesh), is an idea we could adopt more widely here.
A different but similar approach is happening in rainforest areas in South East Asia, where local people are developing ways to share their understanding with tourists; about how they see themselves as part of, not separate from, the land and rivers. Here in the UK the Nidd Action Group and Leeds University are exploring riverkinship on the River Nidd in Yorkshire.
The River Dee, where I work with Scarce Yellow Sally, in Wales is an important commodity to the local water industry. It is the water source for Chester and important for abstraction by industry and farming. It is also important to the agricultural plains near Wrexham which it fertilises in flood years.
The River Dee and its banks are a playground for the local community, for river craft and anglers. It is a habitat for a particularly rich biodiversity, part of the local Important Invertebrate Area (IIA), Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), with several extremely rare invertebrates and fish, as well as the special assemblages of animals. For the people who live in the villages and towns along its banks, the river is likely in their thoughts most days, one way or another. The river encompasses human histories too, happy and sad, connecting and dividing communities and individuals. It would not be much of a stretch, for the villages the river flows through and supports, to think of the River Dee as kin.
The ‘Riverkin’ idea puts us humans back within the tangled bank, not standing over it. Thinking of ourselves as an integral part of the family, along with Scarce Yellow Sally and the other riverflies, with the Sand Martins nesting in the cliffs and with the Salmon when they come up-river to spawn, makes it easier to picture how our actions affect the whole river landscape.
Perhaps Aerfen, ancient Goddess of the Dee, needs an update and can help us all relate to the Dee? Long forgotten by most people, she was the ancient embodiment of the River Dee – the ‘personhood’ of the Dee. She was never an easy relative in the community – being by turns enormously generous (with fertility, food and transport) and terribly cantankerous (eroding banks, washing away trees and valuables with winter floods). But having that ‘personhood’ helped people understand the river.
Climate change and ‘Thingification’ are making landscape wide events and very local events, much more extreme. Renewing ‘Personhood’ to rivers might just help us all reconnect.
The idea has given me pause for thought as I contemplate the future for Scarce Yellow Sally and the rest of the biodiversity of the River Dee. I’d be interested to know what you think.
Find out more about the Scarce Yellow Sally Project here.
Main Image Credit: The River Dee © Sarah Hawkes