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The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rob Macfarlane : ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me'
Robert Macfarlane has been called the 'great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive?, was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written. Q: Your book is poignant and inspiring, but one part that made me laugh is where you first tell your son the title and he replies, 'Duh, of course it's alive. That's going to be a really short book.' So, I should first congratulate you on stringing it out for more than 350 pages! A: Ha! Well there were times I dreamed of writing the haiku version, let's say. But much as I would long for the answer to the question of the title to be as simple as [my son] Will found it, of course it is a profoundly difficult one. That's why the title is a question not a declaration: by means of travel, encounter and immersion, the book explores the tributaries and watershed of this vastly complex question of how we imagine rivers – and indeed how we imagine life itself. So I suppose you could say that answering the question of the title couldn't have taken any less time than it did, and couldn't have been written in any fewer pages than it was, much as Will would have encouraged me to be more precise. Q: The idea of a river being alive is quite heretical these days, isn't it? A: I love that description: 'heretical'. Yes! I'm already finding that I'm getting people online who are, on the one hand, saying: 'You idiot, of course a river is alive. Why bother even with the question mark?' And then on the other, I'm getting the rationalists who are like: 'You idiot, of course a river isn't alive. It's just H2O plus gravity. What kind of hippy nonsense are you spouting?' Q: As you point out in the book, even listening to a river was once punished by the lash. Separating people and nature needed violent enforcement … A: Absolutely. The history of the rise of rationalism required the extirpation of 'idolatry', as the New World conquistadors and colonists called it, a version of which was also carried out across the British landscape during the Reformation, when a purging fury was visited upon water in particular as a site of supposedly iconoclastic belief. I'm fascinated by the ways in which the drive to eliminate the dissenting autonomy of water – of running water, of rivers, of springs – has marched often in lockstep with power that seeks to eliminate all forms of spiritual relationships with land and water, replacing the sacred with the fiscal. We are seeing this accelerated now in America, where Doug Burgum, the secretary of state for the interior, at his Senate confirmation hearing, described America's public lands as America's 'balance sheet'. The assetisation of everything is under way. Everywhere now we see a war continuing to be waged between 'anima', between life, and a power that seeks to mortify that life because it knows that the imaginative 'deadening' of land and water is the best step towards maximum extraction. Q: Of all the books you've written so far, you state that none has felt as urgent as this one. Why? A: The world's ecological precarity, I suppose, is the plainest answer to that, and especially the precarity of the world's rivers and freshwater bodies. Q: Although much of the subject matter is quite grim in terms of the despoliation of ecosystems, what comes across is courage, intelligence, love and a desire to do right by future generations and other species. How did it evolve? A: This was initially imagined as a book about 'life'. That was ridiculous hubris, of course, but that was really the source: what are the stories we tell about what is alive and what is dead, and how does that compare to the stories that power tells about what is alive and what is dead? Rationalism and instrumentalism tell a presently dominant story about rivers as 'inanimate brute matter', to quote Isaac Newton; about rivers as nothing more than 'service providers'. But the total dominance of that story is perilous. I guess that, as a writer, one's job is to seek other, better, new-old stories about rivers and our relations with them. Q: You dive into the lives and deaths of rivers on four continents. But it is also very much about human activism – the defenders who are trying to prevent ecocide on the ground, and the Nature Rights advocates who are trying to change the law at a national or global level. What started you off on this? A: I wanted to immerse myself in the sheer tumbling vigour of the young rights-of-nature movement, which is one of the running currents in the book. I would wake up every morning, and there would be a new email, a new story, a new contact, a new case about rights of nature. It feels as if that movement is presently stepping forwards very consequentially in terms of re-imagining and re-storying the law in order to strike at some of the deeply anthropocentric foundations of almost all nation-state jurisdictions. Q: Despite the global reach, the different elements seem to be brought together by relationships? A: Absolutely. Other than that of the river, if there is a motif that weaves through the book, it's that of the mycelium. It's the mycelium that sets the night-forest alight in the first pages of the Ecuadorian section, and I hope it is the mycelium that is what might be called the visible 'ethos' of the book. All that emerges in the book emerges as a function of cooperation, of collaboration, of working together. I wanted to try to find a literary form and a kind of polyphonic texture, in order to reflect the many voices and agencies involved in river-thought and river-guardianship. Q: The book calls for revolution. How did you reflect this in the style? A: The revolution it calls for is a revolution of the imagination. The book's language is intended to speak to, and of, a changed relationship with rivers – an animated relationship. To give a simple example of this, I write throughout about rivers who flow, not rivers that or which flow. Now that feels totally normal to me. I'd love that usage to spread. Of course, it is already like that in other languages. In French, for instance, it's la rivière qui coule, le fleuve qui coule. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In English, we have no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river? At the level of form and pattern, I sought to give the whole book the shape of the water cycle. So we begin at the springs who rise near my home, and we end back at the springs. In between, the book travels up to the mountains and from there descends eventually to reach the sea at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. By the final pages, language has entered a sort of liquid state. Language has been rivered, as well as me. I strongly felt at times that I was writing with the river, or even being written by it. Q: How does that co-authorship with a river work? A: It is glaringly obvious to me that all thought is intersubjective. This book could not have been written by sitting still. It could not have been written from the archive. A great deal of it was written in its first form either on rivers, by the banks of rivers, or within earshot of rivers; having spent days following rivers, being buried within rivers, spat out by rivers. I find it bizarre that copyright law rejects the notion of nature or a natural entity as possessing the capacity to be recognised as a 'moral author' (to use the term of art from copyright law). As I think you know, [the Earth rights scholar] César [Rodríguez-Garavito], [the mycologist] Giuliana [Furci] and [the musician] Cosmo [Sheldrake] and I, as well as, of course, the Los Cedros cloud forest, have brought a case in the Ecuador court system to recognise the moral authorship of the cloud forest in the song that was written in the course of the book's research [called Song of the Cedars]. If you listen to the song, you can hear the voices of the forest (the howler monkeys, the bats, the wind, the rivers, the trees). They're performers of, as well as the co-thinkers of, that song. Q: The book starts and finishes in the little chalk streams of Cambridge. Do you feel people here have the same passion to defend rivers as those you met in India, Ecuador and Quebec/Nitassinan? A: I'm lucky to live on the chalk of southern England. We have around 85% of the world's chalk streams here in England. You could liken it to the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps; a super-rare, remarkable ecosystem. It has brought life to the landscape here, but now we have largely forgotten its marvellousness, its fragility and its rarity. Nevertheless, amazing things are happening in England in terms of what we might call the river guardianship movement: communities rising up to take water companies to court, hold government to account, train a small army of citizen scientists to monitor and test river health. This community response is born of the same impulses, it seems to me, which animate those communities I travelled with and spent time with in other countries. That is to say: born of a belief in water as life, and a belief that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. Q: One of the people in your book, the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, says humanity has never been in more urgent need of powerful storytellers to address the environmental crisis. But I've also heard friends say the time for stories is over, we now need action. How do you respond to that? A: Storytelling remains, to me, central and vital in its powers. I reject the notion that storytelling is a fundamentally passive posture. Rather, it can crucially catalyse the conversion of passion into action. It has ways of reaching both heart and mind that argument or polemic can't. Of course, there are bad stories told well by bad people, as well as good ones told well by good people. In terms of powerful storytellers for the good, as it were, I might take the example of the Innu poet, storyteller and community leader, Rita Mestokosho, who is an important character in the final third of the book. Rita is a lifelong activist for the Innu language, Innu people and Innu land. She sees no distinction between her work as a writer and as an activist. During the years of river research, I saw new-old stories being told again and again around the world, thrillingly and with consequence. Q: What would you like readers to take away from this book? A: I want readers to imagine rivers as having lives, having deaths and even having rights – and to see what flows from that re-imagining in terms of law, culture and politics. And I would like them to take the full downriver journey of the book, from mountain to sea. Q: And where do you go next? A: This book has taken a long time, but among its surprises is that it continues to flow; the stories, rivers and people who run through its pages continue to run through my life very consequentially. I remain closely involved with the ongoing guardianship of Los Cedros in Ecuador, and the need to support and maintain the implementation of the protective ruling there. Oh – and we've just completed a big cleanup fundraiser and organisation to airlift out a whole bunch of heavy-duty junk we found high up in the watershed of the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. Yes, Is A River Alive? just won't stop flowing!
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Nature's right to exist, flourish and persist
You have said you are 'north-minded,' drawn to high altitudes and high latitudes, to snow, ice, and rock, to mountains. You debuted with Mountains of the Mind but then your trajectory descends and your latest book is on rivers. Why? Mountains and rivers live in an ancient dialectic; mountains lend their gravity to rivers, as it were, and rivers in return sharpen and cleave mountains. So, in a strange way, turning to rivers felt like a coming home! I have always and will always be drawn, as a writer, to the limitless terrain where nature meets culture; where the complex and eventually unmappable reciprocities of imagination and landscape shape one another, dynamically. Is A River Alive? asks its readers to imagine rivers as possessing lives, deaths and even rights, and to see what consequences flow from that, in terms of law, story, song and, of course, the aliveness of rivers themselves. I've never known a subject like this one –– so urgent, so ancient, so torrenting –– nor known a book which continues to flow through my life long after I have notionally 'finished' writing it. I feel deeply passionate about the ideas, rivers and people who run through its pages; among them Yuvan Aves, the young Indian writer, campaigner and naturalist with whom I am fortunate to have been friends for six years or so now, and whose home city of Chennai is at the core of the central section of the book. The publishers have called Is A River Alive your most personal and political book. Does this description resonate with you? It is certainly the most personal and political I've ever written. The former, perhaps, a function of being nearly 50; the latter of the emergency in which the Earth finds itself, in terms of the living world, and the need to re-imagine so many of our laws, customs, perceptions and practices from the understanding of humans as part of a web or flow, not as the summits of a pinnacle or pyramid. Thinking 'with' rivers, as I found myself non-trivially doing in the course of writing the book, proved a powerful, even radical experience. Which leads us to the question of whether rivers have rights. What does this mean for you and are you optimistic about it? There is nothing so powerful as an idea that changes the world, and the ideas at the heart of the young Rights of Nature movement have the potential to do so. Since Ecuador recognised, in its Constitution in 2008, the inalienable and fundamental rights of Nature (Pachamama) to exist, to flourish and to persist, and charged the state with the guarantee of those rights, and with enforcing the repair of damage should those rights be violated, the world has seen the spread in number and consequence of Rights of Nature cases and thinking, across and up and down jurisdictions. The Parliamentary recognition in 2017 of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as a 'living entity' with attendant rights, for instance, or the 2021 ruling in Ecuador that recognised the rights of an astonishing cloud-forest would be violated if gold mining were to occur there. These have been gong-strike moments, the noise of which has resonated around the planet, and I believe are part of the path to a truer, more just future. If you find the idea of a river having rights initially confronting, remember that in European and American law, corporations have both rights and legal personhood (the right to bring suit in court). Why should a company founded two days ago have rights, but not a river that has flowed for tens of thousands of years? It's a form of socially normalised madness. You have filed a petition seeking that the Los Cedros cloud forest, Ecuador, be recognised as the co-author of a song. Please explain the reasoning behind this? To me it is self-evident that a forest might co-author a song with human collaborators, and bizarre that not a single jurisdiction in the world allows for a natural being or entity (forest, river, animal) to be recognised as a 'moral author' of a creative work. We brought this case within the Ecuadorian legal system where, as mentioned, the Rights of Nature are recognised within the constitution, after writing a song in the Los Cedros cloud-forest and with the Los Cedros cloud-forest: indeed, the many voices of the forest (barbet, howler monkey, river, wind, fruitbat) are literally present as singers on the song. You can hear it on any of the main streaming platforms: search for Song of the Cedars, and you will find the forest named as one of the song's authors! You are passionate about the river Cam in your backyard, about the dumping of sewage in rivers across the UK, whose waters — as you put it, 'have become undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable', but for this book you have explored other geographies, including India, Ecuador and Canada, to write about our polluted, but fiercely defended, rivers. Because these are all places in which rivers are being imagined otherwise. Rivers desperately need new stories telling about them –– and some of those stories are very old, and have been forgotten. The dominant story now is one of river as resource, not river as life-force. In India, in Canada/Nitassinan, in Ecuador, different forms of moral imagination are at work, or trying to be heard, and so I travelled there to meet people and places where radical revisions are being attempted to the natural contract. It was an honour to write about the rivers, marshes, lagoons and creeks of Chennai, and to do so in the company of –– and seeing through the eyes of –– Yuvan Aves and his fellow campaigners, who are trying to imagine and implement a just future for Chennai's many water-bodies, inspired by the Tamil word palluyir, meaning 'all of life'. In India, the paradox is especially sharp. We hold our rivers sacred yet are killing them in a multitude of ways. This is true also of the region you visited. You write that water was central to Dravidian culture which has eroded. How do you make sense of this? I struggled to make sense of it, in all honesty. This deep discrepancy between the religious recognition of rivers –– the Ganga, the Yamuna –– as sacred, and the ecological devastation of those same rivers is incomprehensible to me. If a river is divine, surely the imperative to keep its life flowing and its waters clear would be a beautiful and primary form of worship? You write that you found optimism difficult in Chennai, that you had never seen a river as close to death as Enmore Creek, or the Kosathalaiyar. Did you eventually find hope in the waterways of Chennai? Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline. I watched Yuvan and his friends and colleagues struggling to drive change for the better, despite the threats and power levelled against them; in the face of such courage and moral clarity, what right would I have to sit back and say that I despair? As my indefatigable friend Rebecca Solnit puts it, 'You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.' And hope is a discipline because it requires vigilance, concentration and lucidity to imagine other, better possible futures –– and then to push onwards in search of their realisation. And though there were times and stretches of the Cooum or the Kosasthalaiyar in which the river seemed as close to death as any I have ever known, there were moments of illumination and possibility – not least accompanying the 'Turtle Patrol' overnight, as it walks the beach to secure the safety of thousands of Olive Ridley Sea Turtle eggs each night during the nesting season. As sun broke on the night I had walked with the patrol, the first turtle hatchling of the season broke through the surface of the sand in the hatchery, and we carried her towards the surf, and watched as ancient instinct drove that tiny, perfect creature to seek the water. Hope, right there! You co-wrote a ghazal with Yuvan for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. Tell us more, and about the turtles you saw along the Chennai coast, both dead and alive Yes! A praise-song to these extraordinary deep-sea voyagers, these mothers who have been hauling themselves ashore on the coasts of what we now call India for hundreds of thousands of years, to dig their nests and lay their eggs. We wanted to celebrate them in verse and song, so we co-wrote a ghazal for the sea turtle. It was later set exquisitely to music for a nine-voice choir called HOWL: again, if interested people can listen to the song by searching for Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle) and HOWL on the main streaming services. But you are right that, of course, the story of sea turtles and Chennai is now one of death as well as life. Trawler-strikes and net-entanglements threaten the lives of sea turtles during nesting season in particular, and Yuvan and I saw many dead turtles washed up on the tideline, their eyes picked out by ghost-crabs. This year (2025) has been especially catastrophic for turtle deaths, with well over a thousand washed up on the greater Chennai coast alone. It's absolutely crucial that the government strictly enforces the exclusion zone which requires trawlers to stay a certain distance offshore and legally requires trawler nets to be fitted with TEDs (Turtle Excluder Devices) to minimise bycatch deaths. You find ways to champion people, including those from neglected, relegated geographies. I recall your support for the campaign against tree-felling in Telangana in 2021. What prompts you to care for places and landscapes unseen, of uplifting people that few in positions of influence do? You are too kind to say so. If even a fraction of this is true, though, well, I am glad. I guess it is in my nature to want to help as many persons (human and more-than-human) that I can. I have a voice of some volume, and I can't imagine not trying to use it on behalf of those who have had their voices muted by power or circumstance. To be silenced is not the same as to be silent. I also fundamentally thrive on collaboration with others; the world is a 'mycelium', a webwork of relations in which we are all entangled –– collaboration is an extension of these countless mutualisms. Prerna Singh Bindra is a conservationist, author and PhD scholar at CambridgeUniversity. She is @prernabindra on X
USA Today
02-05-2025
- Business
- USA Today
The Country Bookseller is a small-town store with a big-town selection
The Country Bookseller is a small-town store with a big-town selection Independent bookstores are the heartbeats of their communities. They provide culture and community, generate local jobs and sales tax revenue, promote literacy and education, champion and center diverse and new authors, connect readers to books in a personal and authentic way, and actively support the right to read and access to books in their communities. Each week we profile an independent bookstore, sharing what makes each one special and getting their expert and unique book recommendations. This week we have Jeanne Snowdon, owner of The Country Bookseller in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. What's your store's story? The store started in 1994 from one woman's dream and dedication. A teenager she later hired stayed for 22 years and helped elevate the store to what it is today. I will soon be the third owner, making my own dream come true while feeling humbled and aspiring to build on the legacy of the two remarkable women before me. What makes your independent bookstore unique? Our shop has proudly served our community for more than 30 years, earning the affection of both local residents and the many tourists who visit each year. One of the most prosperous years in the store's long history was the year of lockdown during the pandemic, proving the dedication of the town residents in helping it remain a constant even through difficult times. We are a small-town store with a big-town selection. What's your favorite section in your store? The Children's Section is my favorite. It is colorful, has a great selection of books, and lots of natural light streaming in from two large window seats that look out over the waters of Lake Winnipesaukee. What book do you love to recommend to customers and why? I often recommend "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak. It is narrated by the figure of death, which sounds gruesome but isn't. The story is about a young girl who discovers the power of words. Her story is beautiful and sad, heartwarming and devastating. It is a story that will stay with you long after you close the book. What book do you think deserves more attention and why? "Raising Hare: A Memoir" by Chloe Dalton. It is the story of one woman's life-changing decision to rescue an orphaned baby hare she encounters in the English countryside while working from home during the pandemic lockdown. She takes us through the challenges she faced while discovering her newfound connection to nature and a passion for advocating for wildlife so they can coexist peacefully with humans. It is beautifully written and I felt as though I accompanied her throughout her journey. What books/series are you most excited about coming out in the next few months and why? Everyone is excited about Fredrik Backman's newest title, "My Friends," which comes out Tuesday. In nonfiction, I am excited about "Is A River Alive?" by nature writer Robert Macfarlane. Why is shopping at local, independent bookstores important? Supporting local businesses is more important than ever. You contribute to the strength of your community's economy by choosing to shop locally. Fostering connections with local business owners enhances community spirit and belonging. When the original owner of the bookstore needed to move locations down the road, the town residents showed up in droves, creating a human conveyor belt moving the books hand-to-hand down to the new location. What are some of your store's events, programs, or partnerships coming up that you would like to share? On Memorial Day weekend, we'll have a multi-author book signing. Several other New England authors will be joining us this summer for signing events promoting their new titles. In July, we will be hosting a nationwide 'Find Waldo Local" event co-sponsored by Candlewick Press and the American Booksellers Association.
