Last week in New Zealand, the M?ori tribe won a battle to give Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) legal status as a living entity. This is the first time in world history this has happened. “The reason we have taken this approach is because we consider the river an ancestor and always have,” says Gerrard Albert. “We can trace our genealogy to the origins of the universe, and therefore rather than us being masters of the natural world, we are part of it. We want to live like that as our starting point. And that is not an anti-development, or anti-economic use of the river but to begin with the view that it is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief.”

~ From Sacred Ecology Facebook Page

Mountain River – photo by Vladimir Caribb, bigstockphoto.com