Save rivers, pleads Robert Macfarlane

The Hindu

a day ago

In his latest book, Wild Fictions, Amitav Ghosh writes about the role of a novelist as opposed to that of a historian. 'The historian's past has a sweep that the novelist's doesn't. The difference is between observing the flow of a river from the shore and from within the waters: the direction of the current is the same in both cases, but a swimmer, or a fish, has at every moment a million different choices and options.'
The point that Ghosh, reflecting on his own work as a novelist is making, is that of immersion. Novelists have to respond to what characters feel, touch and fall into, unlike historians who may discuss wider trends.
Natural spirits
Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is not a novel, yet he dips into the waters, novelist-style, of the characters that pepper the pages, mycologists, musicians, activists, grieving friends, hermits, and rivers. The book takes us in close proximity to three rivers, and the perils they face – the mist-shrouded Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the deadened Adyar in Chennai, and the turbulent Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. What Macfarlane attempts is more than a simple personification of rivers. By visiting each river, navigating them, and staying by them, he attempts a character sketch which is at once bewildering and animated. To save a river, one might expect a tabling of their ecosystem services, their PH values, their gallons of water, irrevocable proof.
Yet the book offers something different: it suggests that rivers are too much of the 'other' to be neatly tabulated. Macfarlane makes the political choice of rebelling against human-made boxes, painting a complex picture that is beyond simple objectivity. It suggests older ways of knowing rivers. Ecologists might call this 'ecological character,' a word that exists in India's Wetland rules (2017). The author suggests an animacy of the river beyond human-centring: this isn't anthropocentric, it is enlarging the meaning of life, he argues. In 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand delivered a landmark judgment, emphasising the 'physical and spiritual sustenance' of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, making them legal persons. This was later stayed by the Supreme Court.
Life at Ennore creek
The book takes us close to the people who think in this manner and defend rivers. The mist-laden Los Cedros is threatened by gold mining, yet this is a reserve that was protected by law in a landmark judgment that upheld the Rights of Nature and protected the reserve from mining. We meet Giulina Furci, who finds fungi new to science in the shadow of the river. The Adyar river and Ennore creek are polluted beyond belief, yet the author finds life struggling through while walking with environmentalist Yuvan Aves. The eddying Mutehekau Shipu is threatened by a dam, yet we see why the river means so much (a legal person with a right to live as per Innu declarations) even as the human party gets bitten by blackflies.
This book is entirely show, not tell. There are no sermons on why you must protect nature, only monographs on what, or who, the rivers mean. In the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, the book offers a view of the world where the person and the river, or the person and nature, are seen in relation to each other. 'To be is to be related,' as Aves says in the book.
New ways of seeing
The author offers a vocabulary for this new way of seeing the world, a world-building, so to speak, in which rivers write time and features: he cites the Maori phrase—'Who are your waters' (mine, for example, would be the Yamuna), he writes on the Los Cedros: 'River and cloud can't be separated—each authors the other.' When a river spiral throws him upstream, he suggests he is going back in time. In a dream, he sees 'grief-cutter ants,' a play on leaf-cutter ants. Macfarlane thus moors his identity around rivers, the riverbed and the catchment—'everyone lives in a watershed.' Each character we meet is carrying grief: the death of a parent, the death of a sister, the death of a friend, the death of landscapes. It is the river that heals them, gives them purpose, buoys sinking spirits.
Returning to Wild Fictions, one more parallel rings true. Ghosh writes: 'High modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes… We are slowly beginning to understand that in order to hear the earth, we must first learn to love it.'
Love, grief, and hope flow through this book. Let the author lead you downstream, let the river toss you and nourish you, and then you can answer the title's question for yourself.
The reviewer is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful - Tales of 15 Iconic Indian species.