The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.

Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.

Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.

“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”

According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.

The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.

“The Earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” Nobis said. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”

The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.

The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.

That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.

“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.

Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.

Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.

In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.

“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.

Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.

Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?

“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.

He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.

“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.

Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.

Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.

But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans.

States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.

“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. 

The post Does the Mississippi River have rights? appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

More than 90% of Americans access drinking water through public water systems, which are regulated at the state and local level, according to the government-standardized data portal USA FACTS.

During 2021, there were 153,501 total water quality violations across all U.S. states and territories. Of the total violations, more than 63% were found because of issues with monitoring and reporting by regulatory agencies. 

The high proportion of monitoring, reporting and public notification violations raises questions about how well tens of thousands of public water supply systems test for and report potential health violations to EPA and the public, according to a USA FACTS report released in November 2022.

While the total number of violations in 2021 is lower than the 10-year average, the frequency of drinking water violations does not appear to be decreasing over time, according to the report.

In states such as Iowa and other big agricultural states — with extensive crop production and livestock farming, which involves the use of fertilizer, pesticides and manure — runoff from these activities contributes to water pollution. 

These pollutants, particularly nitrates and phosphates, can enter water bodies, causing problems such as harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion and degradation of aquatic ecosystems.

The post Most water quality violations are from monitoring and reporting issues appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

If rural communities aren’t proactive in providing a good quality of life to senior citizens – most of whom are Baby Boomers – they will leave the towns, and communities will be left with a sharp drop in rural populations, according to researchers who are studying how seniors can best age in place.

David Peters, professor of rural sociology at Iowa State, co-authored a paper with Ilona Matysiak, a visiting scholar at Iowa State and associate professor of sociology at Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, Poland, that was published in Journal of Rural Studies.

“If there’s not services in those towns, for those seniors, if there’s not activities, if they don’t feel valued, they’ll leave and we’ll see a sharp drop in a lot of rural populations,” Peters told the Daily Yonder. “And that has implications for local government aid that’s based on headcount.”

He added that given the size of the Baby Boomer segment of society, and the fact they tend to be disproportionately located in rural communities, people could see double digit drops in population in the next couple of years.

“Smaller and more remote communities usually do not possess enough resources and economic base to maintain local healthcare facilities or grocery stores,” Matysiak told the Daily Yonder. “It is also more difficult to attract medical professionals or entrepreneurs to work and live in such communities, as salaries are usually lower, and a rural setting does not provide similar career development opportunities to that in larger cities.”

“In the case of local businesses and small medical practices, there is often a problem with the lack of successors,” she added. However, according to Matysiak, it is in the best interest of small towns to try and cater to the seniors, whether it’s healthcare or entertainment, to help retain them as residents.

According to the research, “rural communities can maintain a good quality of life among older residents thanks to building cooperation between relevant local institutions as well as partnerships with external organizations that facilitate aging-related service provision. Importantly, people’s community engagement and participation in decision-making is crucial for both age-friendly and intergenerational planning”

The researchers used data from the U.S. Census and Iowa Small Towns Project, which has surveyed residents from 99 small towns in Iowa every ten years since 1994 to examine “senior smart towns.” Senior smart towns are communities where seniors can live on their own “safely, independently and comfortably.”

And despite what some may think, rural America is growing. 

Over a third of rural counties experienced population growth because of a rare combination of natural decrease and net migration between April of 2020 and July of 2021. Between 2010 and 2020, only 13% of rural counties experienced population growth in this way, according to University of New Hampshire demographer Ken Johnson.

Johnson said that in counties that receive an influx of seniors—many from retirement migration, and especially to high amenity areas like recreation and retirement counties—they represent a significant amount of human capital and expertise.

The survey questions relate to quality of life, use of local services, perceptions of community leaders, social capital, civic engagement and community attachment. For this study, Matysiak and Peters focused on small towns with a higher percentage of people aged 65 and older compared to other rural communities.

In addition to keeping rural populations afloat, keeping older residents in a rural community is a good idea because they can provide guidance to the younger generations.

“Senior leaders have a lot of experience,” Peters said. “They have a lot of connections, … and they can be a resource to mentor younger leaders.”

“Many of these migrants have years of experience in big bureaucratic and professional organizations,” Johnson said. “They know how to write grants, work in complex bureaucracies and have broad professional contacts. Often that can give the communities that they move to an advantage in gaining access to grant funded federal and state programs that might expand health care and cultural opportunities. Communities must ensure that they take advantage of all this expertise among new migrants who have chosen to come to these communities.”

For younger people hoping to change the status quo in a community, seniors can also provide their social standing and their gravitas in the community to say things can change, in addition to having time and money to spend on local projects, Peters said.

“So you can really draw on seniors as a resource in the community to do all sorts of community projects,” he added. “They also give back in other ways by volunteering, providing guidance, providing their time and money, as I said, and I think that’s what makes these smart senior towns also just good communities to live in overall, even if you’re not a senior.”

In other cases, seniors remain in their communities for a variety of reasons, Johnson said.

“Many have spent decades in the community and have deep ties to the people, institutions and organizations in their communities be them religious, social, or fraternal,” he said. “It is difficult to give up these ties to migrate to a new location and have to start over building this web of relationships later in life.”

The post Research: Seniors Play Vital Role in Rural Communities appeared first on The Daily Yonder.