Robert Macfarlane's new book asks a question he couldn't ignore: Is a river alive?

Globe and Mail

a day ago

When I mention to Robert Macfarlane that I live next to a buried river – Garrison Creek, which runs unseen, but is frequently smelled, through Toronto's west end – his eyes visibly brighten. He leans closer to his computer screen. 'Are they going to daylight it?'
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He's referring to the practice – executed with socially transformative results in cities such as Seoul, Seattle, Singapore and Munich – of exhuming such 'ghost rivers' from their concrete tombs. I tell him that the idea has been proposed by local and environmental groups, but has yet to gain real traction.
'It's such a powerful metaphor, isn't it?' he says. 'But daylighting is also a literal act: returning a river to the sun. A river we cannot see or hear or name becomes a river that is redundant to the imagination and resource to the system only.'
Robert Macfarlane near the River Cam which flows through Cambridge, England, where he lives.
Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail
Macfarlane, 48, speaks almost as lyrically as he writes. Over the past two decades, the Cambridge professor of literature and environmental humanities has emerged as one of the world's pre-eminent nature writers – an inheritor of the mantle of authors such as Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez (a friend of Macfarlane's until his death in 2020).
Macfarlane approaches his subjects with the soul of the logophilic poet he once aspired to be (a body of water is described as having 'lacustrine calm') and an unerring eye for great narratives. He's covered much of the world's topography in award-winning books such as Mountains of the Mind (mountains), The Wild Places and The Old Ways (pathways), and Underland (subterranean landscapes). His book Landmarks, meanwhile, was a celebration of the often endangered words people have used to describe the natural world.
So turning to rivers, as he has done in his latest book, bears a certain logic. But while Is a River Alive? aligns stylistically with Macfarlane's previous work – overflowing (all water metaphors to be forgiven in advance), as it is, with gorgeous, vivid prose – it is far more political than its predecessors. 'Across 10 previous books and more than 20 years of writing,' he writes in the introduction, 'I have never before known a subject with the urgency of this one.'
Although he didn't write while he was on the river, Macfarlane filled his notebooks with his impressions of what he saw and experienced when he came ashore.
Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail
He didn't originally plan to write about rivers per se; he was interested, rather, in what we mean by 'life.' He began by jotting down three questions: Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? And is a river alive?
'They were all good questions to spend time with, but it was that third one that just plucked at my sleeve and wouldn't let me go.'
This was in 2020, just a few years after the Rights of Nature movement was given a major boost by the granting of legal personhood to New Zealand's Whanganui River after sustained pressure from Maori campaigners.
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At the same time, rivers in England, Macfarlane's home country, were facing a deepening crisis. Overwhelmed and instrumentalized into invisibility and incapacity, the majority were effectively dead. And the problem, Macfarlane soon realized, was global in scope. 'That's where it felt like a writer could step into the space and begin to tackle the stories we tell about rivers and the ways we imagine them.' That writer, clearly, would have to be him.
His research for Is a River Alive? took Macfarlane to three places where local river protectors have used imaginative techniques to cope with existential threats: mining, in the case of Ecuador's Los Cedros River; industrial pollution, for the rivers and estuaries of Chennai, India; and megadamming for the Mutehekau Shipu, also known as the Magpie River, which runs through Innu territory in northeastern Quebec.
In 2023, Macfarlane travelled to eastern Quebec in order to follow the course of a river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as (among other names) the Mutehekau Shipu.
Robert Macfarlane/Supplied
The book also takes us to the psychic and intellectual spaces where Macfarlane ventured as he attempted to answer the question in the book's title.
While he came out on the pro-rivers-are-alive side (he uses the pronoun 'who' when referring to rivers), he readily acknowledges how difficult and counterintuitive the concept can be for those, like himself, raised on rationalism (his parents and brother are doctors).
Conferring rivers with personhood, he writes, isn't the same as anthropomorphism. 'To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of 'life', and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.''
Those who still find the notion a tad flaky might consider the fact that corporate personhood has been naturalized in many countries for years. The idea reached its most extreme form in the U.S. after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, but even in Canada, corporations have many of the same Charter rights as human Canadians, including freedom of expression.
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give nature formal rights in its constitution.
Robert Macfarlane/Supplied
Macfarlane approached each of his planned three river journeys differently, and with different companions. In Ecuador, he hikes and clambers through one of the most biodiverse regions of the world, the high cloud forest around the Rio Los Cedros, in search of the river's source. With him are a mycologist, an environmental-rights lawyer ​and a musician.
In Chennai, he gets a tour of the city's toxic, sludgy rivers – victims of the area's unregulated heavy and chemical industries – by a young, self-taught naturalist who, along with a small group of fellow activists, is taking brave steps toward their resurrection. (The 2017 granting of legal personhood to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, theologically considered deities, was inspired by New Zealand's Whanganui River ruling.)
Amid the depressing carnage are moments of wonder. In a lake sanctuary reeking of nail polish, Macfarlane sees what he calls an 'avian Venice' – a floating city of birds. Where Chennai's rivers meet the Indian Ocean, he helps a local patrol move sea-turtle eggs to a place where hatchlings are less likely to get confused by the city's bright lights during their seaward scramble.
After a patrol moves the nest from a polluted river, a baby sea turtle makes its way to the Indian ocean.
Robert Macfarlane/Supplied
The book's transcendent third section describes the 160-kilometre kayak trip Macfarlane took down the lower Mutehekau Shipu toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This time his entourage consists of his polymathic eccentric friend, Wayne, two francophone backcountry guides, Raph and Danny, and a local fisherman named Ilya.
Here, Macfarlane's writing takes on a flow and intensity verging on the spiritual. (He isn't religious, but has admitted to falling back on the language of religion when trying to capture nature's sublimity). A thrilling, harrowing account of his journey down the river's rapids is told, appropriately enough, in what amounts to full stream-of-consciousness.
'I am still very far from being able to take that in, let alone comprehend it. I think perhaps I will always be coming to terms with it,' Macfarlane writes of his experience in Quebec.
I ask him to expand on those cryptic lines. 'Words were just pouring through me. It was very, very strange and powerful and for a writer to feel that they were being written by a force utterly alien to them was perplexing and thrilling.'
Before embarking on that final trip, Macfarlane had consulted with Governor-General's Award-winning Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho, who'd been instrumental in having the Mutehekau Shipu declared, in February, 2021, 'a person with a right to live' – the first river in Canada to be so recognized. After offering guidance for his river journey, she'd tied a bracelet of red cloth around Macfarlane's wrist.
'The other bracelet you must leave on your wrist. Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it,' said Rita Mestokosho. Macfarlane still has the red thread bracelet.
Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail
When I ask if he still has it, he pulls back his sleeve. 'It's here, over my pulse, next to the only tattoo I have, and will ever have': the cuneiform symbols for river from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Literature's oldest written story means a lot to Macfarlane. He's studied it in multiple translations, made an album based on it with musician Johnny Flynn and is currently working on a graphic novelization of it.
At the heart of Gilgamesh is a sacred cedar forest that gets destroyed by extractive interests, so when Macfarlane realized that the Ecuadorian cloud forest he'd be travelling to, Los Cedros, literally translated to 'the cedar forest,' he got chills.
It's testament to the impact writing the book has had on him that Macfarlane has gotten involved with several related causes (in addition to the many he's already involved with). He joined the board of the Los Cedros Fund and continues to follow the fate of the Mutehekau Shipu – which could yet be dammed – through Mestokosho, with whom he has developed a close friendship. Is a River Alive? also inspired three 'water-songs,' one of which, he says, will be sung at springs and rivers at risk.
Macfarlane was drawn to the Mutehekau after it became the first Canadian river to be recognized as a 'legal person' in 2021.
Robert Macfarlane/Supplied
'I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty,' Macfarlane writes.
So in what frame of mind, I ask, did he end them?
'I ended unsure of what I'd seen and sensed, unsure of what power would make of such ideas, which are at once the strongest forces that we can muster and profoundly vulnerable to the sharp teeth and heavy blows of power.'
He pauses. 'I couldn't have known that I would be publishing this book into a British context in which our rivers are all dying, and a North American context in which the war on life is accelerating to calamity pace. In which clean air and water regulations are being rolled back with greater speed and scale than by any administration before.
'And so the ideas at the heart of the book – of life as a web of relations, of the ancient compact of life that flows between humans and freshwater – feel at once more fragile and more crucial than at any point in my life. I don't mean that in a grandiose sense: that the book has some great conversional power to it. I mean that although the ideas and the places and the rivers I've spent time with have been ancient on the one hand, they have felt very urgent on the other. As a writer, that feels like the right place to be.'