When the nature writer Robert Macfarlane tells his young son Will the title of his new book, “Is a River Alive?,” his son thinks the answer is obvious. “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad,” he says, “because the answer is yes!”
Will would be shocked to find 30-plus pages of research notes at the back. Children, Macfarlane observes, view the world with an openness. Human and non-human life on the same plane. Searching for a similar sense of clarity, he instead finds a torrent of follow-ups: How do you know what a river wants? Who can speak for a river? What does a river say?
BOOK REVIEW — “Is a River Alive?,’’ by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 384 pages).
In this probing and sensitive quest, Macfarlane explores these questions and all their implications. “How we answer this strange, confronting question matters deeply,” he writes. “How we answer it now is of great importance to our ability to know, love and live on this Earth in ways that will help us do it justice and abide with it.”
As rivers face growing threats across the globe — from climate change to mining, pollution, and the construction of dams — Macfarlane seeks answers in the hopes that he may change some minds and save some lives.
We meet three rivers in different states of being: threatened, dead, and saved. Each of them has won some form of protection through the Rights of Nature movement, which holds that nature has rights, much as humans do.
In Ecuador, there is the Río Los Cedros, which flows out of the high-altitude cloud forest that drips with moss and mist. In southeast India, toxic waters wash through the city of Chennai and into the Bay of Bengal. Oxygen-deprived and choked with bacteria and heavy metals, they are deemed “unfit for any kind of life form.” And in eastern Canada, a river known to the Innu people as the Mutehekau Shipu crashes and slices through the oldest rock in the world on its way to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
Guiding Macfarlane on these journeys are passionate, and often strange, river protectors: a mycologist, an eco-scholar, a man who buries himself naked underground to experience seismic shivers. Each of them happens to have recently lost a loved one — a father, sister, and dear friend — and starts their expedition with raw grief. Macfarlane observes how the sheer aliveness of the rivers washes over them and loosens grief’s grip.
How do you know what a river wants? Who can speak for a river? What does a river say? Macfarlane explores these questions and all their implications.
In the cloud forest, Giuliana Furci, the mycologist, shows off an eerie knack for finding tiny, rare mushrooms. Tramping through the green, she feels a mushroom’s presence, marches off 15 yards and around a corner, only to return with a new-to-science sample. “I thought I’d lost the power, that death had drawn it from me,” she tells Macfarlane. But then she reflects, “Meeting the forest, the river, you all — these things filled me up with life again, and I felt my power return, and I was ready to greet the Psilocybes when they were ready to greet me!”
Macfarlane is an acclaimed and prolific author, but even devoted fans will encounter new parts of his biography. In Māori, he writes, meet someone new and you may be asked “Ko wai koe?,” meaning “Who are your waters?” Macfarlane’s waters are a fragile, spring-fed chalk stream that gurgles a mile from his home in Cambridge, England. The stream is a steady current that flows through the book, as he returns to it between his travels.
Chalk streams are a rare freshwater habitat, named for the underground chalk aquifers that clarify their crystal waters. England is home to 85 percent of the world’s chalk streams, but most are either polluted or over-extracted. In the summer of 2022, Europe’s hottest on record at the time, rivers across the continent turned to sludge and Macfarlane’s beloved spring stopped flowing entirely.
While the Rights of Nature movement is gaining momentum, Macfarlane notes that many cultures have held similar worldviews for thousands of years. This chapter of history began some 50 years ago, in a desultory lecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Environmental law professor Christopher Stone wanted to grab his students’ attention. “What would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like?” he asked. One in which “Nature had rights. Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals.” Stone explored the idea in his landmark 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” kickstarting the modern Rights of Nature movement.
Stone inspired like-minded scholarship and legislation around the globe, setting the stage for grassroots legal battles against extractive industries, from proposed mines to pipelines. Increasingly, these efforts are emerging victorious. Macfarlane charts the recent win the Río Los Cedros had in Ecuador, where nature’s rights have been enshrined in the constitution since 2008. In 2021, mining in the cloud forest was ruled to violate its rights, and prospecting companies were forced to vacate. The river and forest are “life systems whose existence and biological processes merit the greatest possible legal protection that a Constitution can grant: the recognition of inherent rights to a subject,” the chief judge wrote in his ruling.
“I can’t help but feel a fundamental incommensurability between the stiff discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘standing’ and this quicksilver being running three yards away from me.”
This is the legal side of nature’s rights, Macfarlane admits, which offers a sense of moral clarity to protecting entities like rivers. Just as you shouldn’t kill a human, you shouldn’t kill a river. That was the thinking behind an activist’s phone call to the police station in Agra, India, in 2017. The Yamuna River was the victim of an attempted murder, he claimed, and the state, which allowed the river to be polluted, should be held accountable. The officers laughed him off the line. Macfarlane writes, “Perhaps, though, there is no good reason to believe that this new framing will get us out of our old conflicts, or slough off the confusion, bad faith and apathy that bedevil any attempt at betterment.”
For others, Macfarlane notes, this framework provides a way to leverage contemporary legal contexts for long-held ways of being. “For Innu communities, rivers are considered the veins of the territory,” wrote Uapukun Mestokosho, a young Innu woman. “More than just waterways or resources, they are living beings with their own spirit and agency — and they deserve respect.” She became involved in securing rights for the Mutehekau Shipu, the first river rights in Canada.
But for the people for whom this is a novel idea, it is much easier to say that a river is alive than to truly believe it. Macfarlane grapples with this everywhere he goes, fighting to change his mind, as resolute as a dam. “Is this really a ‘legal person’?” he asks himself at one point. “I can’t help but feel a fundamental incommensurability between the stiff discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘standing’ and this quicksilver being running three yards away from me.”
To guide him, he consults texts, practices, and movements from around the world. He isn’t satisfied with changes to mere laws or grammar (he refers to rivers “who” rather than rivers “that”); he wants to change minds. Macfarlane seeks a reimagining of our relationships with rivers — and all the transformative possibilities that could bring.
As in his previous book, “Underland,” Macfarlane’s prose is relentlessly gorgeous. Under his command, even unsightly things are beautiful. Mold in a damp book is “invisible life, drifting on the air, settling in the text.” On a hot day, flies are “scribbling the same message over and over again in floating patches of sun.”
He is an observant and thoughtful guide, often in awe of the baffling majesty of the non-human world, and attuned to the quirks of time. Covered in rock grit after a long day’s paddle, he is “wearing both gneiss almost as old as the Earth, and photons fired from the sun eight minutes ago.” He is also sensitive, prone to slipping tears into the very waters he is writing about.
“Is a River Alive?” is a passionate invitation to think differently. Macfarlane’s musings can be abstract, and, at times, sentimental. But his devotion to fully immersing his mind and body in pursuit of unlearning is admirable. Yes, a river is alive, he finds, but this life is different from much of life as we know it. Water is weird, and his time on these rivers transports his mind to strange and unfamiliar places. “If you interrogate a mystery,” he thinks to himself at one point, “don’t expect answers in a language you can understand.”
Lina Tran is a writer from the Alabama coast who is based in Chicago.