Jay Owens | Rights for Gods
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18 June 2026<br>Rights for Gods<br>Jay Owens<br>Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookShareEmailPrint
‘How Dirty Old Father Thames Was Whitewashed’ (‘Punch’, 31 July 1858)<br>The River Thames has many faces. William Morris described the upper reaches in the Cotswolds as the ‘far-off, lonely mother of the Thames’, a ‘sweet stream that knows not of the sea,/that guesses not the city’s misery’. At Oxford, the Isa or Ise (perhaps from the Brittonic Celtic isca, ‘water’) takes on the guise of Isis of Egyptian cosmology – until she is joined at Dorchester by the Thame and becomes Old Father Thames.<br>The ‘great Father of the British floods’, as Pope calls him in ‘Windsor-Forest’ (1713), is often represented as a muscular figure with flowing hair and beard, like Poseidon, sometimes carrying an urn or horn of plenty as he feeds the nation with both nature’s bounty and, through maritime trade, the empire’s.<br>‘Behold!’ Pope writes, ‘I see, I see, where two fair cities bend/Their ample bow, a new Whitehall ascend!’ But the river wasn’t so glorious close up. A century and a half later, it stank, as the growing city of 2.4 million – the largest in the world at the time – reached the limits of its ad hoc sanitation system. Two hundred thousand cesspits released their waste into drains and tributaries that flowed into the river, the city’s sewer. During a heatwave in June 1858 the smell drove MPs out of the Palace of Westminster. Punch reported that ‘the one absorbing topic in both Houses of Parliament … was the Conspiracy to Poison question. Of the guilt of that old offender, Father Thames, there was the most ample evidence.’ In the magazine’s cartoons the once proud old man was now bedraggled and filthy, Dirty Father Thames, his trident a bit of estuarine junk impaled on a stick.<br>Another century and a half on, Britain’s waterways remain filthy and flowing with sewage, as well as fertiliser and pesticide pollution, thousands of tons of macro, meso and microplastics, and an array of toxic PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’. The Thames may be cleaner than when it was declared biologically dead in 1957, but other rivers are close to ecological collapse, suffocated by algae, fungi and weeds that bloom in the run-off from industrial farming.<br>On 1 June, Natalie Bennett, a former leader of the Green Party, waded into this slurry with the first reading of a private member’s bill in the House of Lords. The Nature’s Rights Bill calls for Nature (capitalised) to be recognised in law as ‘a legal subject and rights-bearing entity’ with ‘inherent rights’ to exist; to maintain its natural cycles, processes, ‘diversity’ and ‘abundance’; and ‘to be free from pollution, contamination and degradation that threatens ecological integrity, resilience or health’. The bill recognises ‘the rights of Nature … as the foundation of human life, society and economic activity’ and would impose a legal duty on individuals, businesses and public bodies to operate inside safe ecological limits, with ‘a duty of care towards Nature’. A Nature Guardianship Council, Nature’s Rights Tribunal and Bioregional Councils would be created as governance structures.<br>It’s the first time that the rights of nature have been formally considered at Westminster. It could not be more different from the instrumentalised, financialised model of nature that talks of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’, in which rivers, forests, meadows and mudflats are assessed in terms of their benefits to people. All this has been quantified – a paper in 1997 pegged the total value of the biosphere at $33 trillion per year, more than global GDP – and financialised as carbon offsets, land-management payments to farmers, and markets in ‘biodiversity units’ and ‘nutrient mitigation credits’ sold to property developers. On this view, nature is a fungible resource to be owned, used, traded and degraded.<br>Bennett’s bill comes from the opposite position, proposing that...