<story><title>The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/04/maori-river-in-new-zealand-is-a-legal-person/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chriselles</author><text>I spend a LOT of time on the Whanganui River.&lt;p&gt;What a great article, thanks for sharing!&lt;p&gt;If it is a legal person then I know quite a few people who would like the Whanganui River to be held accountable for its actions in the destruction of personal property. Haha.&lt;p&gt;About 20km up the River is a wool shed I’ve been visiting since 2011.&lt;p&gt;On it is a marker of the highest known modern flooding level.&lt;p&gt;It was shockingly high.&lt;p&gt;Since that time there has been 2 major bouts of river flooding.&lt;p&gt;The most recent was metres above the last record high(above wool shed roofline).&lt;p&gt;That river is bipolar.&lt;p&gt;Absolutely beautiful and deceptively dangerous.&lt;p&gt;The Whanganui River is like an old girlfriend who will always have my heart, but it’s best we spent most of our time apart.&lt;p&gt;It changes literally right before your eyes.&lt;p&gt;Riverside erosion in real time, and rain upriver can raise the river height and speed faster than any other river I have spent time on.&lt;p&gt;It’s like nature on time lapse.&lt;p&gt;A good friend and mentor is on the local Iwi(Maori Tribe) governance board.&lt;p&gt;The best part is there is no mobile phone connectivity up the river.&lt;p&gt;Only hardline or satphone.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/04/maori-river-in-new-zealand-is-a-legal-person/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>Legal personhood is much misunderstood.  There is no grand set of rights attached to all persons.  There are an infinite different types of persons, entities to which some rights are attached but never all.  We in the west normally understand &amp;quot;persons&amp;quot; as in flesh-and-blood physical people but even then what rights a person has depends on all sorts of things, from the location of their birth, to their age, sex, mental capacity, education or wealth.  And yes, race can still alter a person&amp;#x27;s rights under the law.  What matters is not the &amp;quot;person&amp;quot; label but what rights this court is willing to recognize at attach to this new type of person.</text></comment>