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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
National Geographic
02-05-2025
- General
- National Geographic
Are the world's rivers dying? Robert Macfarlane looks for answers in his new book
Have we broken the natural contract between humans and rivers? The nature writer debates our relationship with the world's waterways that inspired his latest book, Is A River Alive? "We need new thinking: our rivers have become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable. How did it come to this — and where do we go from here?", says Robert Macfarlane. Photograph by Getty Images; Marco Bottigelli This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK). Can you explain the concept of a river as a living being? At the heart of the book is the idea that rivers have lives, deaths –– and even rights. It asks readers to imagine rivers in these terms, and to see what consequences flow from that re-imagining. The book is a journey into the history, futures, places and possibilities of this ancient, urgent idea. I know that the notion of a river as 'alive' is a searching, confronting one, especially to those of us raised in the traditions of rationalism. It strikes at the anthropocentric core of many of our assumptions. But if you find it hard to imagine a river as alive, try imagining a dead or dying river. We know what this looks like, what it feels like: fish floating belly-up, channels choked with sewage and garbage, a river disappearing in its own dry bed. Unfortunately, many rivers in the world are dying. In England and Wales, in fact, right now we haven't got a single river in 'good overall ecological health'. This is a failure of imagination as well as legislation. To think of a river as alive is to begin to open new ways of relating to rivers; new ways to imagine freshwater otherwise. And God knows we need such new thinking: our rivers have become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable. How did it come to this –– and where do we go from here? What are the three rivers you visited for this book and why? I wanted to give the book the form of water –– of the water cycle, in fact. So, it begins and ends at the little chalk stream spring near my house, and in between it moves from the mountains to the sea, flowing downhill and gathering force, as a river does, before returning to its source. Over its course, the language itself becomes more and more liquid, as the book –– and I –– become 'rivered'. I made three substantial journeys/fieldwork trips in the course of writing the book (which has taken five years from beginning to publication). The first was to an Ecuadorian cloud forest named Los Cedros, the 'Forest of the Cedars', home to the headwaters of the Río Los Cedros, the 'River of the Cedars'. The second was to the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the watery city of Chennai in southeast India. And the third was to the wild interior of Nitassinan, the homeland of the Innu people (also known as Quebec), through which runs the Mutehekau Shipu (also known as the Magpie River), which I followed south for 100 miles from deep in the boreal forest to make sea-fall at the Gulf of St Lawrence, several hundred miles northeast of Montreal. Each of these rivers has become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called 'the natural contract'. Each is a place where rivers are understood in some fundamental way to be alive –– and in each place, too, the survival of rivers is under severe threat: in Ecuador from mining, in India from pollution and in Nitassinan from dams. Is a River Alive? is now published. Penguin, £25 "Rivers are our oldest singers, our oldest storytellers", says Robert Macfarlane. Photograph by William Waterworth Did a particular river inspire the idea for the book? Yes –– a tiny, fragile chalk stream, which rises as a clear-watered spring just a mile from my house, in a little spinney called Nine Wells Wood. I visit it several times a week and have done for more than 15 years: it's a place where a river is born. Spring sites are, I think, the most purely magical of landscape places: self-renewing miracles. This chalk stream is my timekeeper, my memory-keeper. But it's also desperately fragile: it's currently on life support (in the form of an augmentation pump) to keep it flowing, and it simply may not survive past 2050 if the current trajectories of climate change, pollution and abstraction continue uncheked. If rivers are alive, what might they be saying? Rivers are our oldest singers, our oldest storytellers. But we'll never 'speak river', because their language is incommensurable with ours. Rivers are, though, hugely powerful presences with which we can think and with which we can speak and tell stories. Early in Is A River Alive?, I openly name the rivers as my co-authors: I simply couldn't have written the book without them. I did much of my thinking of the book either on or by rivers, which could never have been done in a library or at home. Rivers shaped countless aspects of the book, from the geography of its overall shape (from spring to mountain summit to river mouth at the sea and back to the springs), which was based on the water cycle. This question reminds me of a beautiful story by an Indian river-rights activist called Shrishtee Bajpai, about a young Ladakhi girl living on the banks of the Indus who, when asked what rights her river has, said: 'The river has a right to sing!' It was at once a lyrical and an ecological observation: when the river is in good flow, it burbles over –– it sings. If it's low and dry and sluggish, it's silenced. We need our rivers to sing! Robert's favourite new nature travel books: Natural Connection, Joycelyn Longdon (Square Peg) The North Road, Rob Cowen (Hutchinson Heinemann) The Possibility of Tenderness, Jason Allen-Paisant (Penguin) Published in the May 2025 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK) To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).
