We support the legislative initiative to give legal personality to the River Oder.

Aerial view of the Oder river in Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice, photo by Willi Wallroth.

Draft bill: https://osobaodra.pl/en/draft-bill/

Justification of the bill: https://osobaodra.pl/en/justification-of-the-bill/

As part of the public consultation, the Association conveyed its full support to the Office of the Chancellery of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland for the initiative of the Osoba Odra Foundation, finding in it – in addition to concern for the welfare of nature – also an element of dismantling the modern anthropocentric perspective on the world. We are of the opinion that the Culture-Nature dualism born in the Age of Enlightenment should be revised. The ecological catastrophe suffered by the Odra river in 2022 is just one example of the essentially incalculable destruction wrought within the natural environment by man invoking this principle, which maintains the fiction of the existence of two separate spheres: ‘things-in-themselves ’ and ‘people-among-themselves’.