Legal Personhood and the Ontologies of Living Water Bodies: Yoonha Kim
READING GROUP RECAP
On May 8th, the Natureculture Lab Reading Group welcomed Yoonha Kim (inherit.heritage in transformation, Berlin) for a conversation on legal personhood, living water bodies, and the ways communities and activist groups reimagine relationships of care, kinship, and naturocultural entanglement.
Drawing from her ongoing research on the Korean tidal flats known as getbol, Yoonha introduced the complex ecological and cultural histories of these coastal environments, which are currently threatened by governmental land reclamation projects and extractivist imaginaries. The session explored how struggles for the protection of tidal ecosystems are also struggles for ecological memory, cultural continuity, and alternative forms of collective stewardship.
Through the story of the migratory journeys of the bar-tailed godwits — known by the Māori as Kūaka — the discussion traced connections between distant coastal territories, from Alaska and Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Korean tidal flats where these ancestral birds stop along their routes. These multispecies movements invited reflections on how migratory birds, wetlands, and human communities are bound together through shared ecological relationships that challenge conventional ideas of borders, ownership, and conservation.
The conversation examined the work of initiatives such as the Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group, whose activism mobilizes alternative understandings of heritage, kinship, and coexistence. Their efforts demonstrate how ecological survival is inseparable from cultural practices and collective futures, while highlighting forms of environmental activism grounded in maintenance, care, and relational responsibility.
A central theme of the session was the emergence of legal personhood as a framework for recognizing the agency and rights of rivers and other living ecosystems. Alongside discussions of the Korean context, participants reflected on the case of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the possibilities and limitations of rights-based approaches to environmental protection. The discussion drew on the suggested reading by Cribb, Macpherson, and Borchgrevink (2024), Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River: collaboration and pluralism in implementing the Te Awa Tupua Act, to consider how legal recognition can support, but also requires ongoing relationships of collaboration and care beyond legal structures alone.
Together, the readings and discussion opened broader questions about how ecological governance might move beyond approaches that treat land and water as resources, toward understandings of rivers, wetlands, and other environments as living entities embedded in networks of cultural, ancestral, and multispecies relations.
