Can a river be a person?

 If there is a subject, must therefore be an object? 

Well if you study grammar it seems to be so. 

I give you a banana, I'm  the doer, the subject.

But lets say that we are interrelated. 

Lets, for instance say that we are nature. 

Is that a good way to protect nature? 

Maybe, but we now live in Anthropocene. 

We have influenced the the whole surface of the earth. 

We are the strong part now, but that may make us sad too.

We cannot longer count on nature as something immense  that will always be there for us to use.

We have to care for nature as an old mother.

We have been her naughty child and now she is in danger. 

Without her we will be lost too. 

So maybe each one of us can be a guardian for birds, insects and fish.

But some insects shall have a value even if they not are good for us. 

We have  knowledges that a tree or a bird have not. 

We are in a way superior - anyway if we really starts to behave starts to behave like homo sapiens.

Maybe, in the long run, we can invent technology so we can live like we live today in the rich part of the earth. 

But until then we have to use the surroundings in a much more wise way. 

Maybe not fly soo much, maybe not buy so much stuff. 

We have to protect the Amazonas, and if we can, the coral reefs .

Living in the Anthropocene is a big adventure. 

But we may first have to stop and really feel the sadness, inside, as we do when someone  near and dear  die.

Nature as we know it are dying. 

With nature preservation and such we can help nature to grow in a new way. 

We may also be sad because we cannot live like we have done. 

But changes and sadness is a part of life, isn't it? 

So we can all of us look at our acts. 

What small acts have I done for nature today (maybe  feeding the birds in winter). What have I done that can harm nature? Did I really have to buy that cloth? Maybe a second hand one could have been enough. Did I really need the car today? 

Which politician shall I vote for if I care for my grandchildren? 

Martin Buber wrote the book "I and Thou" to make us aware of that we can use the word  "you" instead "it". I -You is about relations but "it" is about objects and so can "him" "and her" be.

It may be possible to do the same with a wild animal, I think. 

Then we are really interrelated, at least for a while. 

The fox can be seen as a person, maybe also the river. They can live in their own right. We can  them address them  as a You.

The fox and the river cannot do this to us - but in reality they are better practitioners of it then we are.

Another way to see it is; we have never fully been subjects or individuals. we have always been interrelated with things like water, maybe from a river. "You" and "I" may be more of empty concepts, though necessary in daily life - this is to go beyond Buber's I and Thou and go into modern terms as interrelations and into Buddhist philosophy.

The water will be fine without us, but not vice versa. To understand this is really to understand the beauty in a clean river, may it be a person or not. We can help the river to stay clean and then we help our selves.

In New Zeeland this has been known for long;  

From National Geographic: 

“The great River flows from the mountains to the sea. I am the River, the River is me.”

With these words, the Maori tribes of Whanganui, New Zealand, declare their inseverable connection to their ancestral river. The river rises in the snowfields of a trio of volcanoes in central North Island. The tribes say that a teardrop from the eye of the Sky Father fell at the foot of the tallest of these mountains, lonely Ruapehu, and the river was born.