Honouring Rivers with World Rivers Day
World Rivers Day: Honouring the Lifeblood of the Earth
World Rivers Day, celebrated each year on the fourth Sunday of September, is a global event that shines a spotlight on the vital importance of rivers. Originating in British Columbia and founded by Canadian river conservationist Mark Angelo in 2005, the celebration has now grown to involve millions of people in more than 100 countries.
Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet. They nourish ecosystems, sustain communities, and carry the stories of cultures that have flourished along their banks for millennia. From providing clean drinking water and fertile soil to offering spiritual inspiration and recreation, rivers connect us all in countless ways. Yet, they also face mounting pressures—from pollution and climate change to overuse and habitat destruction.
World Rivers Day is both a celebration and a call to action. Communities gather to clean local waterways, restore habitats, learn about cultural connections, and advocate for river protection. It is a reminder that caring for rivers means caring for life itself.
As we mark this day, we are invited to deepen our relationship with the rivers around us: to walk beside them, listen to their stories, and commit to ensuring that they continue to flow clean and strong for generations to come.
“We cannot protect something we do not love; we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense. “ - Richard Louv, The Nature Principle. 2012
Rights of Rivers (a history)
“We will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them.” Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? 2025
In 2017, after 160 years of Māori petitions, New Zealand legislature granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua), providing legal recognition of Te Awa Tupua as “a living and indivisible whole comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating its tributaries and all its physical and metaphysical elements…and recognising it at law as a legal person with corresponding rights, powers, duties and liabilities. This was a paradigm shift from speaking about the River to actively speaking to the River as a community. At the Act’s heart is the acknowledgement the Whanganui River is alive, and an ancestor to the Whanganui iwi (tribe). The Act speaks of the river as an ‘indivisible and living whole’, ‘a spiritual and physical entity with a lifeforce’. The Te Awa Tupa Act echoed like a bell around the world. Since then, other nations have followed suit in an effort to protect the environment.
In Canada the Mutuhekau Shipu (Magpie River, Quebec) was granted legal personhood in 2021 after petition by Innu First Nations.
Rights of rivers include: to flow, to be respected, maintain biodiversity, maintain integrity, be free from pollution, to sue.
Rights of Nature
“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
The concept of Rights of Nature challenges the way many human beings see the world, a mindset of the natural environment being seen, either actively or passively, as a commodity to be dominated and exploited for the sake of profit or consumption. This idea is deeply encoded in global institutions, including our legal systems.
Rights of Nature proposes a shift in our way of thinking about the complex interrelations between humans and nature.
According to the concept, humans are part of the web of life linked with other-than-human beings (plants, animals, rivers, mountains, oceans and all ecosystems) which have equal and intrinsic rights to exist, regenerate, evolve and thrive. Rights of Nature aim to provide guarantees for the protection of life on earth through our current legal and political system. (Lawyers for Nature)
Voices of Poets
At the River Clarion
“I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition.”- Mary Oliver, At the River Clarion
Where Many Rivers MeetAll the water below me came from above
All the clouds living in the mountains
gave it to the rivers
who gave it to the sea, which was their dying.
And so I float on cloud become water,
central sea surrounded by white mountains,
the water salt, once fresh,
cloud fall and stream rush, tree root and tide bank
leading to the rivers' mouths
and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea,
the stories buried in the mountains
give out into the sea
and the sea remembers
and sings back
from the depths
where nothing is forgotten.-David Whyte 2004