The Whanganui river in New Zealand has been declared a legal person. Michael Runkel/Getty Images
COURTS in Ohio are wrestling with an unusual question: how do you weigh up the rights of two people when one of them is a lake?
For several years, Lake Erie has been hit by an annual bloom of toxic algae caused by run-off from surrounding farmland. , the contamination is so bad local people are warned against drinking water from their taps.
Existing environmental protections clearly weren’t working. So residents of Toledo, a city at the western end of the lake, took…
