Latest news with #IsARiverAlive?
Scotsman
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Robert Macfarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival: 'when you put yourself in remarkable places, surprising things happen'
One of the greatest nature writer and poets of his generation ponders the life and uncertain future of the world's waterways in his new book Is A River Alive? Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Robert Macfarlane holds up his hand on the Zoom screen to show me a strip of red fabric knotted round his right wrist. It was put there by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, before he set off on a 100km kayak journey down the Mutehekau Shipu (or Magpie) river in Northern Quebec. She told him: 'Only time or the river will remove it'. 'It has this rather awkward knot,' he says, tugging on it to show me. 'So when you're sleeping or resting something digs into you. At the beginning I thought that was annoying, but later on I thought it was brilliant. It's a reminder, like the pebble in the shoe, it reminds me what I learned on that river.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Writing his latest book, Is A River Alive?, involved a lot of learning, about the parlous state of rivers in the UK and around the world and about the growing Rights of Nature movement which seeks to grant them legal status, a kind of personhood, so they can be better protected. But the learning he's really talking about here is experiential, the hard-to-explain ways in which his perspective shifted during the writing of this book about the natural world, about life itself. Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth It's his most personal, most passionate book, fuelled with an urgent, driving energy. He is not a neutral observer, he is writing to convince the reader. 'I remain very much involved, legally and in terms of activism, with all of the rivers, all of the people in the book. This book has continued to flow through me and through my life and shape it and I think it will do so probably for the rest of my life.' He points to his only tattoo, on his wrist next to the red fabric, the Cuneiform characters for 'river' from the epic of Gilgamesh, which forms a kind of bubbling undercurrent to Is A River Alive? The book charts three extraordinary journeys: a hike into the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, after a mining consortium which would have destroyed it was successfully challenged under Ecuadorian law; the kayak voyage down the mighty Mutehekau Shipu, where river guardians are currently fighting a vast hydro dam development; and a journey through Chennai, India, where the river Adyar is 'as close to death as any river I have seen in my life' from industrial pollution. If a river is alive, of course, it can also be killed. It's a book which 'wears the question at its heart on its sleeve'. I ask him to what extent he knew the answer before he set out. 'I think I began in a false sense of certainty,' he says, thoughtfully. 'It was only later I realised that I had begin in doubt. The question mark mattered, this wasn't a declaration. It was a multi-year, multi-continent grappling with a very complex set of questions. I was aware I was dealing with a vast and ancient philosophical conversation about what constitutes life.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It took him out his comfort zone, because the personhood of rivers challenges 'conventional western' ways of thinking. The book isn't a marshalling of arguments, it's an account of experiences, a shift which happened in the imagination, perhaps, one might say, the spirit. It finishes with an epiphany on the Mutehekau Shipu which is (even for Macfarlane) hard to put into words. One review in a science magazine described parts of it as 'fundamentally unscientific'. 'It doesn't come easily to the rationalist mind. One is wary of woo-woo. There is a tussle between philosophical traditions which twists through the book. I learned to feel my own intellectual inheritance of rationalism. I think by the time the third journey [in Quebec] began I rapidly lost any sense of embarrassment at the idea that one might relate to a river as a friend or a force or a being. The more I met people and ideas which challenged that hard shell of certainty and began to dissolve it, the more fascinating it all became.' Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. Macfarlane has been described as 'the great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. His bestselling first book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003, established him at the vanguard of what has been called The New Nature Writing. He followed that success with books like The Old Ways and Underland, made television programmes and created projects like Lost Words, which has produced books, music, exhibitions and education resources. He writes lyrically, poetically, and speaks much as he writes. Riverine metaphors flow through our conversation: he talks about the book's 'tributaries', the concepts which are now beginning to 'irrigate' the law. He apologises for 'meandering'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He asks me – as he likes to ask everyone – about the 'rivers which flow through your life and your memories'. I tell him I grew up between the Dee and the Don in Aberdeenshire, which immediately leads him to make a comparison to the Tigris and Euphrates ('The Mesopotamia of Scotland!'). We talk about Nan Shepherd, the North-east writer whose book The Living Mountain has been hailed posthumously as a classic of nature writing. Macfarlane was instrumental in bringing it back to the public eye. 'She and I wouldn't reach for the same forms of language, but I think we're moving towards the same conclusions. She writes about life as a quality brought into being by relation, the mountain lives in its complex totality of air and water and plant and human and weather and rock and time. I think my book argues for life always lived in relation, rather than Newtonian single units of self.' It is certainly a book written in relation to other people. I admit to Macfarlane that I imagined him to be a lone adventurer, but this book full of people, larger than life characters like mycologist Giuliana Furci, who has a sixth sense for finding rare mushrooms, ebullient land rights lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Yuvan Aves, the inspirational self-taught naturalist Macfarlane meets in Chennai. 'I think in the 2000s I would have been that lone traveller, but there has been a trajectory towards conviviality, company and community. In this book I'm alone for approximately three minutes. I love writing about people. I've always found that, when you put yourself in the way of remarkable places and remarkable people, surprising things will happen.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad How hopeful is he for rivers? In England and Wales there is no river which has a 'good' rating from the environmental agency. Scotland has some rated higher, but that brings with it a danger of complacency. On Sunday, at the Book Festival, Macfarlane will share a stage with writer Louise Welsh who is currently exploring a new legal status for the Clyde. While more people are prepared to speak out for rivers, the opponents of river rights are often powerful, wealthy and without scruples. 'I've seen river guardians and activists working in incredibly demanding and often dangerous circumstances where standing up for water rights or land rights is not a hobby, it's your life. These people are not despairing, so for me to do would be a luxury. 'I feel so hopeful because this extraordinary movement has sprung up in the UK and organised itself across communities in a way I could never have predicted in the five years I've been working on the book. It is already changing everything. It will take 20 or 25 years for that change to materialise in a revived river system in this country, but I have absolutely no doubt that it will happen.' A few days before our conversation, the local council in Southampton adopted a river rights motion along the lines the book described. A copy Is A River Alive? was waved during a speech to support the motion. Macfarlane is clearly pleased. 'It's exciting to see these ideas moving into policy-making. It's not that the book caused that, but it has been a small part of the catalytic process around that thinking. That's another reason to feel hopeful.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
The Hindu
02-08-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Is a River Alive? Unpacking the Politics of the Rights of Nature Movement
Published : Aug 02, 2025 14:11 IST - 8 MINS READ In a 2014 keynote address on writing in the anthropocene, the author Ursula K. Le Guin suggested a simple antidote to extractivist ideologies: 'One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as 'natural resources', is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.' This theme, of finding fellowship with ecosystems, of finding how best to channel human language to express the experience of a non-human other, forms the crux of the environmental humanities and literature scholar, Cambridge University professor, and bestselling nature writer Robert Macfarlane's recent book, Is A River Alive?, which sets out to 'imagine water otherwise'. It attempts to 'daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us'. The answer to the question the title poses is yes, a river is alive, in what seems a no-brainer—as Macfarlane recounts in the book's introduction—to the author's 9-year-old son, Will. Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane Penguin Hamish Hamilton Pages: 384 Price: Rs.1,699 Set in the cloud forest of Los Cedros, Ecuador; Chennai, India, home to the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum rivers; and Nitassinan/Canada, through which the Mutehekau Shipu river (also known as the Magpie) runs, the book explores past and present manifestations of the global rights-of-nature movement, animating the land- and waterscapes through which it runs in vivid, compelling detail. The debates surrounding an ecosystem's aliveness—which, paradoxically, makes it killable—loom large over the places and people the book undertakes to represent. Also Read | India's environmental pioneers: The forgotten story At one level, Macfarlane's intention is crystal clear: 'Rivers should not burn. Lakes should not need funerals. How has it come to this?' The many rivers embodied in this book are embattled to this day, denizens of the natural world over whom communities, environmental defenders, corporations, and governments have historically tussled. Macfarlane names them as his co-authors, averring that 'this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages'. He is accompanied in his sprawling transcontinental sojourn by some key humans as well: through Los Cedros by the mycologist Giuliana Furci, the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and the lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito; through Chennai by the naturalist-educator-writer Yuvan Aves and various other members of his Palluyir Trust; and along the Mutehekau Shipu with the 'river-people' and fellow kayakers Wayne Chambliss, Raph, Danny Peled, and Ilya Klvana. Landmark legislations To set the stage for these three far-flung encounters, Macfarlane chronicles celebrated rights-of-nature rulings such as the the passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act granting legal personhood in 2017 to the Whanganui river in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Uttarakhand court's recognition of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as living beings later in the same year. Such landmark legislation as the enshrining of the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitution and the ensuing recognition of the personhood of Los Cedros cloud forest in 2021, provide precedent and inspiration for further ecological action. An intricate welter of stakeholders and interests is revealed as Macfarlane digs deeper into each of the three cases. And yet, this global story on a grand scale is anchored to a tiny chalk stream near Macfarlane's home in Cambridge, to which the book and its author repeatedly return. Is A River Alive? is a soul-stirring paean to nature, deeply felt and thought, marvellously meditative, awash with literary, historical, and metaphysical detail representing indigenous voices and schools of thought as well as more canonical presences from Europe and North America. It is penned with imagistic ingenuity and precision by a seasoned scholar-practitioner and writer of place with the ability to instantly, intimately, render the unfamiliar familiar: 'The interior of a cloud-forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green. To be inside a cloud-forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized.' On the other hand, a dead olive ridley sea turtle on a Chennai beach is shockingly strange, simultaneously inducing grief and horror: 'Her eyes have been eaten from their sockets by the ghost crabs. This is the fifth turtle corpse we've met that day. The geometry of her shell-scales is beautiful even in death. She stares sightless from blue-white eyeholes.' The turtle serves as a stark reminder of senseless human cruelty and violence, juxtaposed with the reeking, mortally wounded rivers of Chennai and its overflowing beaches. Fusing riverine and human consciousness Also unfolding in this section is the remarkable life story of Yuvan Aves, his escape from a physically abusive stepfather, and eventual emergence as an ecological activist and educator during and after his years at Pathashaala, a J. Krishnamurti school on the outskirts of Chennai. Finding an admirer in Macfarlane, Aves' first book, Intertidal (2023), bears witness to the ravaging of Chennai's water bodies and marshlands even as it stands testament to human fortitude and the resilience of the natural world. Far from Chennai and on the road in Nitassinan/Canada next, Macfarlane describes the juggernaut that is hydroelectric power (its convoys advancing inexorably towards the Romaine river project) in contrasting strokes. 'A bird with a voice of water trills on, unseen. Vast, triple-wagoned trucks thunder eastwards, shaking earth and whipping tree branches with their back-blast.' Macfarlane counters these forces of industry by flinging the reader into a splendid, spinning, stream-of-consciousness vortex, fusing riverine and human consciousness towards the end. The book's exquisitely textured cover, designed from a linocut by the artist Stanley Donwood for both the UK and US editions (published by Penguin and W.W. Norton respectively), pays tribute to maps of the ancient Mississippi river imagined and crafted by the cartographer Harold Fisk in the 1940s: 'In them, the Mississippi comes to life: twisting like mating snakes, writhing with river ghosts.' In deep trouble Anyone reading Is A River Alive? should revisit in tandem Krupa Ge's ground-breaking 2019 book, Rivers Remember, a fiercely anguished insider account of Chennai's waterways that Macfarlane references alongside Nakkeeran's Neer Ezhuthu (also published in 2019). Ge's book, the first to fully acknowledge the trauma of the Adyar, Kosasthalayar, and Cooum, combines personal and intergenerational knowledge with painstaking political and legal explication to shine a light on the same Chennai rivers Macfarlane meets in 2025. She highlights the gruelling conditions under which sanitation workers, health workers, fishing communities, community organisers, and—astonishingly—Eelam refugees worked to alleviate suffering during the dread-inducing December 2015 'man-made flood'. Read together, the two books memorialise a unique culture of water storage and stewardship vanishing before our eyes, in which tanks, streams, ponds, rivers, and ocean were venerated throughout the Tamil region. Can rights-of-nature proponents truthfully engage with the material conditions under which humans live and work worldwide as part of the fight? Dwelling at length on whether rivers are alive is arguably a privilege. In the Global South, nature is not typically experienced at leisure through a window or contemplated in tranquillity as a painting in a frame. Macfarlane's own chaotic Chennai experience proves this point. For anyone seeking to protect the natural world in these contexts, there can be no ignoring the situation of communities whose livelihoods depend on the industries and governments that power nature's exploitation and destruction. Even as I write, Tamil Nadu is planning a 92 kilometre sealink flyover along its East Coast Road to ease traffic congestion—a heavy infrastructure and investment project with grave consequences for marine life, environmentalists assert. Will such 'progress' really benefit a choked city and its inhabitants, continually reeling from cycles of flood and drought? As recent protests against deforestation in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Manipur in the midst of heatwaves and other signs of a rapidly accelerating ecological crisis illustrate, the natural world is in deep trouble. So are humans. The plot thickens. Unconvinced by what he sees as Macfarlane's irrational animism, the writer and evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper dubs Is A River Alive? 'anti-science' in his recent review of the book for New Scientist. Rivers simply are not living beings, in Hooper's estimate. But he does admit the need for ecological thinking that emphasises the interconnectedness of all life forms to replace 'the Cartesian justification for exploitation'. Hooper's blithe confidence in science and scientific reasoning is somewhat troubling as is his wholesale rejection of Macfarlane's premise. Implicit in Hooper's dismissal of 'spiritualism' as unscientific is the erasure of traditional/indigenous ways of knowing, and centuries-old practices of situated cognition and wisdom that Macfarlane has, to his credit, assiduously assembled and honoured throughout. Also Read | Moments in the sands of time Must science always advance at the expense of the soul? Has not this sort of either-or framing deepened divides and brought societies and cultures the world over to this current, polarised pass? 'Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe,' Le Guin concluded in the same keynote address from 2014 with which this essay began. In her view, science has the capacity to 'increase moral sensitivity' while poetry can 'move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings'. If the twain shall ever meet, perhaps science and poetry can together keep us all alive. Akhila Ramnarayan is a writer, theatre actor, indie musician, and college educator at Krea University.
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Business Standard
02-07-2025
- Science
- Business Standard
Rivers as kin, not property: A powerful case for ecological empathy
There is hope that we can conserve what remains and revive what has been lost of our rivers - but it begins with acknowledging that a river is a living, breathing entity Listen to This Article Is A River Alive? Published by Norton 374 pages ₹3,646 Robert MacFarlane is well-known Cambridge University scholar who has written several books on the theme of the fragility of nature and its relentless spoliation in the service of extractive and profit-seeking corporate interests enabled by complicit state authority. His latest book blends together travel writing, biography and science to create a compelling narrative about the umbilical cords that connect humanity to the natural world it inhabits. The title of the book presages what follows — the notion that life animates the rivers, mountains, forests, and the oceans around us, that
Scotsman
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Book Festival: Non-fiction Highlights
The theme of repair is explored from many different angles in the non-fiction strand of this year's EIBF, writes Susan Mansfield Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A broad, deep river of fascinating non-fiction runs through the Book Festival programme from day to day, which seems an appropriate metaphor because one of the highly anticipated visitors is Robert Macfarlane, with his new book, Is A River Alive? (9 August). In addition to this solo event, he will join Louise Welsh, who has campaigned for the Clyde to be granted personhood, and barrister Monica Feria-Tinta, to talk about how seeing landscape differently might help to preserve it (10 August). Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth These events are part of the strand of the programme responding to the theme of repair, which is explored from many angles. William Dalrymple and his fellow podcaster Anita Anand look at looted artefacts, the journeys they have taken and the possibilities of repatriation (13 August). Philippe Sands QC talks about working on the prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (10, 11 August). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Naga Munchetty calls out at misogyny in the health service, and the struggles women face accessing treatment (23 August), Poppy Oktcha and Kathy Slack explore the reparative powers of gardening (10 August) and Hanif Kureishi tells a very personal story of repair following the catastrophic fall which left him paralysed (15 August). Hanif Kureshi He is just one of a rich crop of writers bringing their memoirs to the Book Festival. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will unveil her hotly anticipated book (14 August), and fellow politicians Diane Abbott (21 August) and Chris Bryant (20 August) lift the veil on Westminster and their own lives. Veteran activist, journalist and filmmaker Tariq Ali talks about his memoir, You Can't Please All (13 August), tracing some of the key moments in recent history which he has witnessed in his 81 years. Yulia Navalnaya visits the festival to speak about her late husband Alexei Navalny, Russia's opposition leader, whose prison memoir was published after his death in a Russian jail in 2024 (22 August). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yulia Navalnaya Leading Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov details the experience of living in a country at war in his memoir, Our Daily War (19 August), and leading Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li brings a grief memoir like no other, a book in which she processes the suicides of her two teenage sons (10 August). The festival offers many opportunities to pick up insights on world events. Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum joins Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, to discuss reporting from the frontline of Donald Trump's second term (17 August). Leading commentator on race, Ta-Nehisi Coates, talks about his new book, The Message, which explores race relations around the world and questions the messages we tell ourselves (16 August). Closer to home, former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish and James Mitchell, director of the Academy of Government at the University of Edinburgh, reflect on the years since devolution, the achievements and challenges (18 August), and Alistair Moffat presents his new book, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland since 1950, rich with personal recollections (19 August).
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
