Restoring human relationships with rivers must focus on local agency and ecological entanglement, not just large-scale industrial intervention.
With Laura Giraldo-Martínez and Juliana Steiner, we wrote a short blog post for NYU’s More-than-Human-Rights project, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all.
“The river is not dead: Care, culture, and the Bogotá hydrocommons” turns on the Colombia’s Bogotá River, for decades choked by domestic and industrial waste and labeled “biologically dead.” Legal rulings and massive infrastructure projects have promised to restore it, but these efforts often reduce the river from a living being with its own agency to an object of technocratic management. In the post we share who through entre—ríos we argue for a different paradigm, one that understands rivers as vibrant bodies embedded in webs of human and more-than-human relations and deserving not just restoration but also care.