Do rivers have rights?

I spawn fish and I vote
A New Zealand court has recognised that a river has personality sufficient for it to have legal representation in order for its interests to be considered and its rights respected. The move is made in a deliberate echo or parallel of the legal "personhood" of corporations.

In both cases, corporations and natural entities, the personhood that is legally recognised is not identical with that of a "natural person", though it was the idea that corporations are persons that lay behind the 2010 US Supreme Court decision Citizens United that effectively removed any spending cap on corporate political "speech".* This is not the place for a detailed consideration of the history and myriad implications of this legal metaphor. My usual brief reply to this idea is that as long as the US starts applying the death penalty to corporations who commit grave offences, then they can continue with this somewhat odd word games.
*Also lying behind the decision was the equation that campaign money is a form of speech and so falls under the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech. I find both assumptions dubious.

In truth, I don't really know what to make of this development in New Zealand. It seems like an extension/application of the move made in 2009 by the new Bolivian constitution, which acknowledges that nature has rights. There may have been other ways of doing it, but I do think it is imperative that the ecological damage we are doing is brought more clearly and fully into our legal system. There are all kinds of difficulties with this task and I doubt there is a perfect solution. I would be very interested to hear reflections from lawyers (and anyone else) on the possible pros and cons of this precedent.

A variety of theological observations support some kind of legal recognition of creatures (and I'm not confining this word to living beings, but include rivers, mountains, atmosphere, oceans, etc.). The created order is declared "good" in the absence of humanity (Genesis 1); it is sustained and designed for goods that are not exhausted by human projects (Psalm 104); God cares for it simply because he made it (Matthew 6 & 10). In short, non-human creatures have intrinsic, not merely instrumental, worth and cannot rightly be appropriated by or subordinated to human projects without this being given due weight.

Corporations: psychopathic individuals or totalitarian regimes?

The 2003 documentary The Corporation outlined a critical history of these institutions that have so pervasively shaped modern society. The narrative briefly outlines the historical process through which corporations gained many of the same legal rights as natural persons before asking the illuminating question: if the corporation is indeed to be considered a person, then how might we characterise the psychology of this "person"? To answer it, the film compares the track record of corporate behaviour against a widely accepted list of symptoms of psychopathy from DSM-IV: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law. The conclusion (and the film's punch line): corporations frequently exhibit psychopathic behaviour.

A second comparison I came across recently juxtaposes transnational corporations with nation states. Large corporations encompass more employees and generate more turnover than the population and GDP of some nations. We consider it valid to evaluate the form of government, economic system and the political and civic freedoms of nations. What would it be like to make the same considerations of many large corporations?

• The right to vote does not exist except for share holders (analogous to land owners) and even there voting power is in proportion to ownership.
• All power issues from a central committee.
• There is no balancing division of power. There is no fourth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.
• Failure to submit to any order may result in instant exile.
• There is no freedom of speech.
• There is no right of association. Even romance between men and women is often forbidden without approval.
• The economy is centrally planned.
• There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.
• The society is heavily regulated, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can go to the toilet.
• There is little transparency and something like the Freedom of Information Act is unimaginable.
• Internal opposition groups, such as unions, are blackbanned, surveilled and/or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.

- From here.

So, are large transnational corporations more like psychopathic individuals or totalitarian regimes? And is anyone aware of insightful theological analyses of corporatism?