IF THESE HILLS COULD TALK

Environmental activists are pursuing legal steps that would allow natural entities to sue in their own defense through a human spokesperson. But maybe it’s the conversation, and not the law, that matters most.

- Elizabeth Miller

When the Colorado River went to court in 2017, attorney and activist Will Falk was tasked with speaking on its behalf. But this was no typical client. To understand what the river might say if given a chance to testify, Falk set out to travel the Colorado’s entire length. He started by searching for where the first threads of snowmelt begin stitching together a body of water that supplies 40 million people as it runs through seven western states and into Mexico. Off the northern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, he dug the plaque that marks the river’s headwaters out of a foot and a half of October snow, then hiked upstream along the trickle until ice and snow turned him back.

Next, Falk drove downstream toward the river’s terminus at the Gulf of California, passing farms, fish hatcheries, dams, coal-fired power plants, and uranium mines. Stopping at the riverbank along the way, he’d watch the water and consider the questions he asks his human clients: Who are you, and what do you need?

“The Colorado River, she wants to be a river, and a river delivers water to whoever needs her,” he determined, and that means not just people, but places, plants, and animals from her headwaters to where her waters should join the sea —something the Colorado River hasn’t done for decades. “She wants to flow to the ocean, to have poison taken out of her, to repair the riparian communities and the places that have dried up because of humans taking too much water.”