Review: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
A linguistic feat lush with riverine vocabulary and prose that sings with poetry, this book boldly and persuasively asks us to reimagine rivers
Writer and naturalist-explorer Robert Macfarlane’s river journey begins at a modest but rare chalk stream (rivers arising from chalk bedrock) near Cambridge, where he is a professor. He is out with his young son Will, who questions him about the title of the book he is working on. “It’s called Is a River Alive?” says Macfarlane. “Duh Dad,” is the child’s immediate response, “It will be short book then, for the answer is yes.”
His instinctive innocent belief in the aliveness of rivers is echoed in ancient indigenous ‘languages of animacy’, which recognise the personhood of both humans and non-humans, reaffirming our kinship with the natural world. Macfarlane is more seasoned and knows this question to be political, if not polemic for its legal, economic and ethical implications.
It is also hard, acknowledges the author, to think of a river as alive. Civilisation has tamed our animacy; we find it easier to “picture a river dying” (think stagnant, putrid strands of sewage, think Delhi’s Yamuna). To think of it alive is counter intuitive; it requires unlearning. The book is the author’s riverine quest of unlearning that takes him across three countries — Ecuador, India and Canada — to meet with and listen to rivers; and their advocates, those who save them. This book is as much a story of these extraordinary water champions, who are as threatened as the rivers they love. Each journey forms a section, punctuated with a short pilgrimage to the unnamed spring in his backyard.
Macfarlane’s earlier works have explored mountains and diverse landscapes and our relationship to them; in this one he turns his attention to rivers. Like the others, this too is a linguistic feat, lush with riverine vocabulary and prose that sings with poetry: “Terns scissor past us, all knifepoints and origami folds”.
This book, though, is distinct in being political and urgent, while also deeply personal. It alludes to ancient animism and is a compelling literary introduction to the contemporary Rights of Nature movement for those unfamiliar with it. Macfarlane’s engagement is more expansive; besides the title is a deliberate question that he treats primarily with passion but also with philosophy, spirituality and science as he boldly and persuasively asks us to reimagine rivers.
Macfarlane urges new ways of seeing. He travels to the cedar forests of Ecuador where not one but three rivers flow – the Rio Los Cedros “at our feet” who “we can all see and hear”; the fungal river who runs “beneath our feet”, through mycorrhizal fungi as they connect millions of plants in the forest, and soaring above us is the “sky river”, carried and circulated via atmospheric currents. Note that who, a strand of personhood that runs through the book.
Macfarlane’s Indian sojourn is in Chennai whose stricken rivers – the Adyar, the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum are “as close to death” as anything that he has ever seen. I usually approach an account on India written from a Western-male centric point of view with some trepidation. How would an outsider parachuting into the country comprehend our knotty environmental issues? Macfarlane’s writing does not warrant the same reservations. He immerses himself in a place, its people, landscape, language — and the Chennai centrepiece is a product of his deep, empathetic engagement with the metropolis and its denizens, helped in no small measure by another extraordinary writer, naturalist and campaigner, Yuvan Aves (a caveat — I know them both). It’s an outstanding analysis, celebrating the city’s diversity and resilience, and an immensely moving account of its suffering. So toxic is Enmore Creek that people who live in its proximity dream of getting “asthma rather than cancer”. Spotlighting Chennai, a metric for India’s rivers, is timely — half of the country’s rivers are severely polluted, besides facing a multitude of other threats, symptomatic of waterways worldwide.
The last of Macfarlane’s far-flung journeys is a terrifying, wonderous and transcendental kayaking trip down the Mutehekau-Shipu or the Magpie River in the Innu Nation’s Nitassinan territory in Canada. “On the river, be the river” he is advised by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist. And so he is, “flooded from within”, the river flowing through his veins, its crystal-clear waters cascading over him, their flow and force mirrored in his prose as it rushes — no full stops — exploding with his experience, his ecstasy, as we, the readers whirl right along…
READ MORE: Interview with Robert Macfarlane - Nature’s right to exist, flourish and persist
And this river so alive, you can feel the pulse, hear the thunder, is all but doomed by a hydel-project, unless saved by Magpie’s band of defenders spearheaded by the Innu community. Do read this last section if you want a masterclass in travel writing.
A river (the Yangtze) impounded by 50,000 dams, others so toxic their touch blisters skin, a country where no rivers offer drinkable water, but buffering this despairing reality, the author offers geographies of hope. Notably among the wounded waterways of Chennai, in Vedanthangal sanctuary, “an avian Venice”, and in the little Olive Ridely turtle hatchlings who lived among the bloated corpses, a brutal bycatch of the fishing industry, which line the city’s coast.
Now the rivers have a persuasive, powerful voice in Macfarlane, who has cult status among nature writers. He takes pains to say the book was written with the rivers, not so much about the rivers; as Mestokosho tells him, “The river speaks through you.” It does. Macfarlane also tempers his conviction of a river’s consciousness with rationality and doubt: Do we risk distorting rivers, he asks, by folding them into our ideas of personhood? He does not anthropomorphize rivers, he gives them agency, reimagining them as ‘life-forces’, not resources to be exploited.
The author doesn’t explicitly answer the almost-rhetorical title question; his purpose is to draw us into this puzzle that led him across the globe and into himself, nudging us to seek our own answers, to rethink the human assumption of hubris and our relationship with the natural world.
Is a River Alive? is an important, courageous work that is also utterly beautiful and moving. It is destined to shift perceptions and inspire a new nature ethic the way Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life did for fungi and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass did for the wisdom of indigenous knowledge as a parallel to science.
Prerna Singh Bindra is a conservationist, author and PhD scholar at Cambridge University. She is @prernabindra on X.
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