by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk here)
May 5, 2025
Peru’s Marañón River was granted personhood in 2024, a decade after I made her personal acquaintance.
In 2015 I spent two weeks with my husband and other global volunteers gathering research data with Earthwatch in the Amazon’s Loreto region.
Dr. Richard Bodmer, the principal investigator, invited grad students and volunteers for field research, as he had every year since 2009.
We helped count and categorize pink river dolphins, giant otters, caimans, macaws, and other species, while living on a 100-year-old riverboat restored from the Rubber Boom era.
After floating down the Marañón River, we moored on the Yarapa, a river that flows into the Amazon near the confluence of the Ucayali and Marañón. The confluence marks the beginning of the Amazon River.
This continuing Earthwatch project provides the scientific foundation for biodiversity conservation for the region.
Their goals include sustainable resource use and community-based conservation, monitoring impacts of climate change, and wildlife trade and recovery of endangered species.
Over the years, results have been utilized by multiple Peruvian agencies to manage wildlife and monitor subsistence hunting by the Kukama and other indigenous groups.
We scarcely saw any others on the river except when we traveled to visit a village. It wasn’t always that way: scientists estimate the 1492 population along the massive river system was 10 million people.
A Spanish expedition half a century later included a Dominican friar who wrote of “densely populated villages along the riverside, including one that stretched on for many miles.”
Gaspar de Carvajal described “networks of wide roads, beautiful plazas and fortified palisades, carefully cultivated farms, and painted pottery as fine as many in Spain.”
Ninety percent of this indigenous population was decimated in the ensuing decades and centuries. Explorers in the 1700s presumed the Amazon had never been populated by humans.
It’s ironic but apt that the 900-mile Marañón River has now been declared a person. How and why is largely due to a woman who grew up on the banks of the Marañón, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, of the Kukama community.
For years, Canaquiri Murayari witnessed oil contaminating their community’s drinking water. The Peruvian agency for investment in energy and mining, Osinergmin, acknowledged more than 80 oil spills from barges along the pipeline between 1997 and 2022.
The oil spills kill sacred riverine species as well as contaminating their water and food. Communities living near drilling or spill sites show high levels of lead in their blood. Their urine shows high levels of mercury, arsenic and cadmium from consuming river fish or vegetables grown near spill sites.
A spill in 2000 emboldened Canaquiri Murayari to mobilize a group, calling it Asociación de Mujeres Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (Hard-working Women’s Association.) They marshaled for strikes, declarations, meetings, and roundtable discussions.
“They don’t listen to us,” lamented Canaquiri Murayari.
Finally, she connected with the Legal Defense Institute (IDL) in 2014. After another decade of legal wrangling, the federal court ruled for the Kukama.
For the first time in Peru’s history, a river was granted legal personhood. In theory, this allows it to exist, to flow free from pollution, and to “exercise its essential functions within the ecosystem,” among other rights.
Last month, Canaquiri Murayari was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work. The prize is awarded annually to grassroots environmental leaders on different continents.
For her part, Canaquiri Murayari says the work is just beginning. The Kukama now have the opportunity to challenge activities that infringe on the river’s rights.
Earthwatch research will likely help in these challenges. The 15 years of Bodmer’s research have generated results which are intriguing and crucial.
Jaguars and pumas, for instance, take almost 10 times the large terrestrial prey as do subsistence hunters; thus, subsistence hunting can have a place in jungle management policy.
Drought and simultaneous heat dome have caused a decrease in primate numbers, especially the squirrel monkeys: a cautionary story in climate change.
If all goes well, these and other species can be managed sustainably for the earth, the Amazonians, and that Very Important Person: the Marañón River.
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.