16-05-2025
‘Why do companies have rights, but not rivers,' asks nature writer Robert Macfarlane
Even before he began travelling along the rivers of Ecuador, Canada and India for his new book, nature writer Robert Macfarlane spent hours beside the 10,000-year-old chalk springs of Nine Wells, near his home in Cambridge, England.
These streams drew life to the region, as rivers tend to do: at first, they fed the birch and hazel trees; then the deer and foxes; then people, kings and a city. 'These streams are where a river is newborn,' says Macfarlane, 48.
His new book, Is a River Alive? (May 2025; Penguin), focuses on what happens further downstream, in three massive river systems: the Rio Los Cedros (River of the Forest of the Cedars) in Ecuador, now under threat from gold mining; the choked, polluted and encroached-upon creeks, lagoons and rivers of Chennai; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River of north-eastern Quebec, which was granted personhood in 2021, following a pitched campaign led by the indigenous Innu people.
For two years, Macfarlane has toured these regions, trying to answer the questions: Who decides what is and isn't alive? How is this changing? And what does it mean to recognise, both in law and the imagination, that rivers (as well as mountains, glaciers, forests) are living entities?
'In a sense, Is a River Alive? is a love letter to rivers, and their many defenders,' says Macfarlane. 'The book is also a political and philosophical confrontation.'
Over the years, we've accepted the idea that a corporation can have rights, including the rights to privacy and fair trial, Macfarlane adds. Isn't it strange that we're uncomfortable saying the same of a river's right to flow, go unpolluted, or bring life to the earth around it?
Excerpts from an interview.
What first sparked your love for nature?
I grew up as a climber, in a family of mountaineers. My grandfather, Edward Peck, was a mountaineer. My parents have returned time and again to the Himalayas.
As a child, holidays meant going to the mountains. And when you go to the mountains, you go to the rivers too — they give energy to each other. So my first book, Mountains of the Mind, came from a question I've had since childhood: Why do people climb these peaks?
I was born in Oxford and grew up in the countryside of Nottinghamshire. So I read my way into a love of landscape, as well as walked my way into it. In my teenage years, I became fascinated by poetry about nature. I went on to study literature at Cambridge and Oxford.
Over time, almost everything I did began to fall within the field of environmental humanities, which I sometimes describe as the borderlands where nature, culture and politics meet. I now teach literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge.
Is a River Alive? lives in this tangle of complexity too.
What led you to ask this question, about a river?
It emerged from a bunch of ideas, in 2020. I've always been interested in who decides what is alive and what is dead. That question is deeply tangled with empire, religion and philosophical worldviews.
The worldview I've inherited, probably best described as 'rationalism', sees animals as more alive than plants, humans as more alive than animals, and water, rock and large natural systems as sort of passive, inert resources.
Countries such as India have long recognised rivers as living entities in myth and religion. India is also one of the early nations to recognise river rights under the law, in 2017. Also that year, the Whanganui River was acknowledged as an 'indivisible, living whole', under a Parliamentary Act in New Zealand.
In each of the three regions in the book, rivers are under threat. But they are also being radically reimagined as alive and life-giving. I realised that is how I want to think about life.
In the book, you discuss this idea with people from indigenous communities, among others. What did you learn?
No landscape speaks with a single voice, but one thing that connects these voices is relationality — the understanding that our life is continuous with and linked to the life of water, and all the lives that water makes possible.
Ecuador's constitution was the first in the world to recognise the Rights of Nature (including right to respect, and maintenance of life cycles), in 2008. What was it like travelling through this landscape?
(Before Ecuador) I had never been in a jurisdiction where nature's rights were legally recognised. It was exciting to enter that legal space, which is also a morally imaginative space.
I also felt this uncanny resonance with the Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest written work of narrative literature, from c. 2100 BCE Mesopotamia). It features a sacred cedar forest that is eventually destroyed in the epic. So in Los Cedros, in Ecuador, I found myself wandering, you could say, in a forest made at once of literature, art, chlorophyll, birds, and possible destruction.
What will it take for more countries to take this step?
I applaud any efforts, legal or cultural, that cause us to rethink the fundamentally anthropocentric laws that have come to govern all jurisdictions.
We've accepted the idea that a corporation can have rights, including to privacy and fair trial. It's a narrative that has been exported around the world by colonialism, by legal structures of property and ownership.
At the same time that those laws were being framed, in England, the river was being redefined as a resource: it could take our waste away, provide power, fill our glasses and cups. This narrative is so utterly dominant around the world that we have created dam structures that have measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth.
We've forgotten that rivers are also life-givers.
The movement to recognise the rights of nature is more than symbolic; it is a philosophical confrontation. That not a single river in the UK is in good health is proof that the stories we've been telling about our rivers have been desperately inaccurate.
What is it like writing about nature as we fundamentally alter it?
I think hopelessness is a luxury. So the book, and I, live in the flicker between light and shadow, damage and healing, hope and despair.
