Although many legal systems do have regulations in place to protect water, they cannot provide the necessary protection. Professor Kment’s presentation reported on alternative regulatory concepts which take a different view on the topic. Therefore, Professor Kment argued in favour of granting specific rights to natural resources to achieve both better environmental conditions and a cultural reconciliation between Western societies and indigenous people.
 Granting nature rights is not entirely new. In many countries (e.g., Bolivia, Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, and India), nature itself or single rivers achieved legal personhood. The presentation did not stop at the question of legal challenges involved in integrating rights of nature into modern legal systems. Using the examples of Whanganui (New Zealand), Mutehekau Shipu (Canada), and Klamath River (US) the strong cultural dimension of the topic, which has so far received little attention, was explained. By putting rivers on an equal legal footing with humans, more than just the protection of individual natural areas takes place: The indigenous way of life (culture) is recognized as an equal understanding of the world, and new protection concepts become part of the legal systems. Personified natural entities can, for example, no longer be “possessed” or “used”. This does not heal all the historical wounds of colonization that lie dormant in several societies in the world (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc.), but it is a remarkable offer to indigenous people to walk the path of reconciliation with their fellow citizens. However, it must be noted that the concession of rights to nature is also accompanied by the compulsion to accept the rules of the superior legal and thus cultural order. This remains a drawback, as many legal figures of the Western legal system severely disrupt the order of life and basic spiritual beliefs of the indigenous peoples.