Hetherington, K. (2025). The Time of Ghost Rivers. Environmental Humanities, 17(3), 657–675.

Abstract

This article begins with a funeral, a memorial for a small urban river buried by the city of Montreal. Conversations about the memorial turned on the question of what it meant for a river to be dead, or how we might think of it persisting in some form: a ghost that demands active memory. Using this story as a starting point, the article explores the ghost river, its various revivals in the present, and the halting attempts by urban actors to form relations with it. It argues that the ghost river, and the mourning rituals that surround it, mark an emergent way of relating to the urban environment in a late industrial moment when the taken-for-granted temporality of infrastructural progress is changing. Ultimately it speculates on whether funerals for the not-quite-dead might offer a useful starting point for thinking about the new environmental puzzles of the Anthropocene.