For centuries, industrial economics generally treated forests, rivers, minerals and ecosystems primarily as resources.
Some communities are experimenting with fundamentally different legal frameworks.
New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua legislation recognizes the Whanganui River as a legal person and explicitly describes the river as an interconnected living whole from the mountains to the sea.
That is an extraordinary cinematic bridge between Indigenous knowledge and modern governance.
Not: What can we extract from nature?”