River Rights for a healthier Tyne catchment
Love our Tyne is a community organisation working to secure recognition of the rights of the River Tyne, its tributaries and the wider catchment. The work sits within the Rights of Nature and River Rights movements.
Throughout history, indigenous communities living in harmony with their environments have frequently considered natural features as having inherent, sometimes spiritual, identity and rights. This ‘More Than Human’ world includes living organisms but also physical ones such as mountains, rivers and lakes. Over time humanity has tended to move away from a position where it sees itself as a part of the natural world to one where nature is a set of resources to be exploited and often abused or destroyed for human benefit.
The Rights of Nature and River Rights movements seek to better protect the natural world through the recognition and acceptance of nature’s rights including the right to representation. Love our Tyne wants to establish a locally led, non-statutory expression of the intrinsic rights of the river and the duties and responsibilities of people, businesses and organisations towards the river. This has already been achieved elsewhere in the UK with some local authorities deciding to recognise the rights of their local rivers (for example the Ouse in Sussex and the river Wye).
The specific rights will be those which the communities along the Tyne decide they want to recognise but they can be expected to include the right to flow, the right not to be polluted and the right to exist as an ecologically functional, natural habitat. The aim is for these rights to be generated from widespread community engagement and consultation before being taken to parish, town, area and county councils for adoption. At which point the rights of the Tyne rivers should be represented in relevant local authority decision making. In some places this is already done by a member of a decision making body being given the specific role of making representations on behalf of a river.
Love our Tyne hopes to see local groups established along the length of the North, South and main Tyne rivers. These local groups will be linked through a Love our Tyne network but will be independent, focussing on local river priorities.
Establishing the rights of a river may seem to be an odd concept. But to be clear, this is not about establishing a legal right or attributing personhood to our rivers. It is about the moral imperative to value, protect and enhance the rivers by community action and securing recognition of the rights of the River Tyne.