If a corporation can have rights, then why not the Mississippi River?

What if it wasn’t just humans who had rights?

What is a river: a highway? A blue line on the map? A habitat and a pantry? A technical challenge? And should it be given legal status and associated rights? In this essay, Fritz Habekuß takes the question famously posited by Christopher D. Stone in his 1968 text “Should Trees Have Standing?” and explores the case for the Mississippi to gain such a status. In doing so, he traces the complex cultural dynamics and industrial flows its watershed encompasses and the equally numerous ways these have been exploited. If a corporation can have rights, then why not the Mississippi River?