Don't get caught up on the word "river," which is just a specific example. The general case is "ecosystem."
The corporate entity only "has rights" because it is a collection of people, and those people have rights.
Ecosystems aren't collections of people.
Is the implication here that "only people have rights," therefore ecosystems shouldn't? Correct me if mistaken. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that ecosystems have rights because corporations do.
This is indeed the status quo, but it's hardly immutable. Consider that 200 years ago neither women nor slaves were considered legal persons. Restating the status quo isn't an argument in its favor.
Rivers, of course, are not people nor are they composed of people. Nor are ecosystems. People might be affected by, for example, what happens to a river. All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
Isn't that definition exactly the problem? An ecologist would disagree of course, but how curious that every other species is considered part of the ecosystem, but we are not! We're subject to all the same ecological laws.
The humanity vs. nature separateness is of course entirely invented. But it's built into our very language: consider the other-ing effect of the term "environment" for instance.
> All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
You have it flipped around. The legal wrangling is almost entirely on the part of polluters seeking to avoid accountability (to great success, I might add). It helps that the 'environmental regulations' are written by the polluting industries themselves.
They use poorly characterized mass flows through the environment (there's that word again) and pollution etiologies (often "poorly characterized" because the company covered up its toxicity research, eg PCBs) like a cryptocurrency tumbler, laundering away their own liability for poisoning their neighbors. It's unconscionable.
is that a generic legal principle?
Why not? We restrict the liability of people, just because they're 'acting together' (a corp). To make that trade off fair, it seems like we should limit their 'rights' together as well. Corporations are sort of fundamentally unfair as they exist in the US, because they get almost all of the rights a real person does, but they have almost none of the responsibilities or liabilities a real person does.
Either [a] corporations should be required to be responsible for their actions (eliminate all limited liability, leadership and shareholders should become personally liable for most actions of the corporation they lead/own), or [b] corporations should loose a lot of their rights as a tradeoff for the reduced responsibilities and liabilities (like the ability for a corporation to have 'free speech').