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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Ashifa Kassam European community affairs correspondent

Bid to secure spot for glacier in Icelandic presidential race heats up

Glacier with red car and small white house in foreground
‘We are coming at this with both joy and seriousness’. Snæfellsjökull in Iceland. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Standing in the shadow of Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull, – a 700,000-year-old glacier perched on a volcano and visible to half the country’s population on any given day – in 2010, Angela Rawlings was struck by an unconventional thought.

“It suddenly just came to me. What if the glacier was president?” said Rawlings. It was a seemingly unorthodox way to push forward a movement that was already swiftly advancing; Ecuador had enshrined legal rights for nature while Māori in New Zealand were working to secure legal personhood for the Whanganui River.

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