Latest news with #IsaRiverAlive?
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A New Way of Thinking About the Climate
In Bogotá, Colombia, where I am researching a unique Andean ecosystem, I've encountered the phrase 'Agua es vida' everywhere. From a city employee explaining why water rationing is necessary; from our nanny, who tells me that she would rather have days without electricity than without running water; from a man speaking about the pollution that mining precious metals for cellphone chips is causing on the Vaupés River. Water is life. The phrase has also been used as a rallying cry. Those organizing in opposition to pipelines in South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Rhode Island carry the dictum on their lips. I am tempted to dismiss it as cliché, an environmental platitude, yet there is something enchanting about these words, a kind of spell they cast, which gently tugs me toward some blunt, yet hard to grasp, truth. When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. 'You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,' she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. 'You and I are women; we give life,' Angela countered. She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. 'The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.' I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division. Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise. Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don't have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction. By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not. The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. 'Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,' Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them. Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.) [Read: As the climate changes, so does fiction] Some view the solution through a legal lens. If we can recognize these 'brutes' as beings to whom basic rights are granted––think: the river's right to flow unimpeded and unpolluted––our relationship to nature will evolve. This kind of thinking has led to the rise of a growing global phenomenon known as the Rights of Nature movement. Ecuador, Panama, New Zealand, Bolivia, India, and even some cities in the United States have––thanks, in most cases, to pressure from local Indigenous groups––enshrined the rights of nature in their governing documents. These rights can serve as potent legal tools in the battle to stop practices such as fracking, mining, deforestation, and the damming of rivers. Early on in his book, Macfarlane recalls telling his son the title of his project. The son's response is plain: 'Well, duh, that's going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!' Of course a river is alive. The pair have recently visited springs near their home. 'I cannot quite understand why we are going,' Macfarlane writes, 'but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood's cool.' There they discover that the water has all but disappeared after months of record-breaking heat. Through the book, father and son will return regularly to these springs, bearing witness to their changes. This punctuated in-placeness is what makes the three longer journeys Macfarlane undertakes––to an Andean cloud forest; a wounded river basin in Chennai, India; and an undamned river in uppermost Canada––land effectively. To learn to recognize the aliveness of what we have been taught to think of as inert matter demands, above all else, time and attention. To see a glacier retreat, we need to watch its movements for years; to know how a river wanders, we must walk its banks during both flood and drought. Most of the children in my life stare awestruck at the natural world. Trees speak, mountains ponder, hummingbirds have secret missions all their own. With time, this enchantment usually passes. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, argues that this is, in part, a linguistic problem. In English, we use the impersonal pronoun it to speak of animals, plants, bodies of water, geographical features. We say 'a river that flows' as opposed to 'a river who flows.' As I read Is a River Alive?, I found myself underlining sentence after sentence as verbs animated the world. 'Leaves nod in the rain.' 'Mist hangs in scarves.' 'The light of the rising sun sets the world ringing like a singing bowl.' Macfarlane's prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one's child-mind and its inherent wonder. Agua es vida. And yet this deep sense of enchantment and play is tempered throughout by grief—not only grief at the ways in which humans have fundamentally perverted so many of Earth's most magnificent rivers, but also grief of a more personal nature. The researcher seeking rare fungi at the Los Cedros cloud forest, in Ecuador, has just lost her father; the young man fighting to restore India's Adyar River was beaten by his own; Wayne, Macfarlane's traveling companion down the Mutehekau Shipu, in Quebec, dreams of encountering a dear friend who recently died. In the face of these losses, each person travels to a water body, dwelling in and alongside them for weeks or years. Each is, in turn, overtaken by powers much larger than the self. And I won't say they are healed exactly, but their time spent on the rivers seems to lighten their individual burdens. 'Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,' Macfarlane writes. 'Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.' Then Wayne cautions, 'This kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany; it's a chronic rather than acute process.' [Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently] The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has critiqued Macfarlane's earlier work as falling into an environmental tradition that she shorthands as the 'Lone Enraptured Male.' In these stories, as she frames it, white men sally forth into the wilderness, where they have some kind of conversion experience, then return to normal society enlightened and changed. Some of that is certainly at work here, especially in the book's final journey, a two-week whitewater-kayaking trip. But for the most part, Macfarlane doesn't dwell too long on his own experience, opting instead to listen to those who live alongside the water bodies that he is, admittedly, just visiting. For instance, Macfarlane is accompanied at Los Cedros by a wide-ranging cast of characters: the mycologist in mourning, who discovers a new species of fungus that provides further protection to the forest; an expatriate who has camped there for years to keep the place from falling prey to illegal attempts at mining; a legal scholar 'trying to generate and accelerate the ripples of Rights of Nature thinking worldwide.' A few years prior to Macfarlane's sojourn, foreign companies purchased the right to potentially mine at Los Cedros. But when they began circling with chain saws, de-limbers, and log loaders, locals testified to the impact such actions would have on the river that runs deep into the forest. The judges who ruled that mining copper and gold would violate the river's rights—they also join Macfarlane at Los Cedros. Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible. Unlearning our obsession with Cartesian thinking demands humility, a willingness to let the lines blur between us and that great plane of existence that we have learned to label as 'it.' Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future. Article originally published at The Atlantic
The Herald Scotland
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
The man who brought Scotland's beavers back: 10 books to read next
Parallel lines Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape, £20 From the author of the acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels, a novel about dysfunctional families and the reverberations of fateful decisions. It opens in a psychiatric hospital where Sebastian is recovering from a break-down. His therapist also has problems, including the behaviour of his adopted daughter Olivia, who turns out to be Sebastian's sister. A poignant, unsettling exploration of unexpected consequences and connections. Benedict Cumberbatch as Patrick Melrose, in the TV adaptation of the series of novels written by Edward St. Aubyn (Image: Showtime/Sky) Ingrained Callum Robinson Penguin, £10.99 A one-off memoir, with a unique charm, now available in paperback. As a boy, Robinson learned how to work with wood from his father, but it was not until he was a young man that his extraordinary talent emerged. Not that this made for an easy life. Revealing the personal struggle behind his professional success – and the perpetual dread of failure – Ingrained is a hymn to wood, to craftsmanship, and to the joy of making things that people and their descendants will cherish. The Propagandist Cécile Desprairies, trans Natasha Lehrer Swift, £14.99 A disturbing autobiographical novel from a respected French historian. The story of a child whose family's war-time collaboration turns the house into a nest of lies and unspoken fears, it is a truly shocking portrait of eager - in some cases fanatical – collaboration. The narrator's mother, the propagandist of the title, was so skilfully manipulative, she was nicknamed the Leni Riefenstahl of the poster. Despriaries' unflinching account makes uncomfortable reading especially, one suspects, for a nation that has still fully to address the whitewashing of many who were ideologically aligned with their Nazi occupiers. Germans parade on the Champs-Elyses in Paris, during the Occupation. (Photo by Albert Harlingue/) (Image:) Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton, £25 This lyrical and mystical exploration of the river suggests that rivers are alive in the same sense as we are - an idea that raises serious legal and political questions. This provocative book, Macfarlane writes, has been 'co-authored' by the rivers he discusses, rivers he calls 'who' not 'which'. Showcasing endangered examples on different continents – Ecuador, south-eastern India and Canada - Is a River Alive? is an urgent call to raise awareness of the dangers facing the world's rivers, and an attempt to encourage us to view them as sentient entities worthy of care and protection. The Book of Records Madeleine Thien Granta, £20 Canadian-born novelist Madeleine Thien admits that her latest book is 'a strange work'. It is also beautifully written. It opens with a Chinese father and his young daughter, Lina, finding themselves in a place known as The Sea. A ramshackle assortment of buildings, The Sea is where migrants and the displaced pause before continuing on their way. There is a peculiar feeling about this community, because it is made up of different times, with a 17th-century Dutch academic and a 1930s German philosopher living as neighbours. Lina's father knows he does not have long to live, and tries to prepare his daughter for her future. A beguiling novel about how to live a good life, and the role of history in our everyday. Read more Mona Acts Out Mischa Berlinski Summit Books, £16.99 A witty but insightful day-in-the-life story of an actor in crisis. Mona is having trouble with her doctor husband, and her irksome in-laws have colonised their Manhattan apartment. In a few weeks she'll be giving the performance of her life as Shakespeare's Cleopatra, a terrifying prospect for a woman of such fragile self-confidence. On impulse, she heads out, ostensibly for shopping, to visit her old acting mentor. Mona Acts Out describes that brief but transformative escape. An engaging, bittersweet novel. Foreign Fruit, A Personal History of the Orange Katie Goh, Canongate, £16.99 By tracing the history of the orange, which first was grown in China, Katie Goh also explores her own origins. Raised in Northern Ireland, and now living in Edinburgh, her family roots lie in China and Malaysia. Her search to understand her identity moves in tandem with this intriguing account of the orange and its cultural and economic significance down the millennia. An emotionally honest memoir that embraces colonialism, migration and capitalism and much else. Albion by Anna Hope (Image: free) Albion Anna Hope Fig Tree, £16.99 On the death of Philip, the patriarch of the Brookes family, the ancestral 18th-century pile will be passed on to his heirs. After half a century of miserable married life, Philip's widow can't wait to leave, but for their children prospect of inhering the house and its enormous estate is tantalising. One is keen to rewild, another hopes it will become the crucible for a new ruling class, while for a third it represents a chance to reunite with a childhood love. A sensitively-written family saga that encapsulates the state of society today. The Search for Othella Savage Foday Mannah Quercus, 16.99 Foday Mannah's debut novel is a crime story, based on a real case, in which women from the Sierra Leone community in Edinburgh go missing or are found murdered. When Othella Savage, the best friend of politics student Hawa, disappears, Hawa suspects the Lion Mountain Church they attend in Leith holds the answer. From the start, its pastor has made her uneasy. Set between Scotland and Sierra Leone, and recounted in a breezy style, despite its dark and dramatic plot, The Search for Othella Savage illuminates a different Edinburgh from that usually found in the city's detective fiction.
Atlantic
26-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
A New Way of Thinking About the Climate
In Bogotá, Colombia, where I am researching a unique Andean ecosystem, I've encountered the phrase ' Agua es vida ' everywhere. From a city employee explaining why water rationing is necessary; from our nanny, who tells me that she would rather have days without electricity than without running water; from a man speaking about the pollution that mining precious metals for cellphone chips is causing on the Vaupés River. Water is life. The phrase has also been used as a rallying cry. Those organizing in opposition to pipelines in South Dakota, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Rhode Island carry the dictum on their lips. I am tempted to dismiss it as cliché, an environmental platitude, yet there is something enchanting about these words, a kind of spell they cast, which gently tugs me toward some blunt, yet hard to grasp, truth. When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. 'You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,' she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. 'You and I are women; we give life,' Angela countered. She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. 'The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.' I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division. Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise. Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don't have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction. By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not. The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. 'Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,' Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them. Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.) Read: As the climate changes, so does fiction Some view the solution through a legal lens. If we can recognize these 'brutes' as beings to whom basic rights are granted––think: the river's right to flow unimpeded and unpolluted––our relationship to nature will evolve. This kind of thinking has led to the rise of a growing global phenomenon known as the Rights of Nature movement. Ecuador, Panama, New Zealand, Bolivia, India, and even some cities in the United States have––thanks, in most cases, to pressure from local Indigenous groups––enshrined the rights of nature in their governing documents. These rights can serve as potent legal tools in the battle to stop practices such as fracking, mining, deforestation, and the damming of rivers. Early on in his book, Macfarlane recalls telling his son the title of his project. The son's response is plain: 'Well, duh, that's going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!' Of course a river is alive. The pair have recently visited springs near their home. 'I cannot quite understand why we are going,' Macfarlane writes, 'but I hold hands with Will and together we cross the threshold between the hot light of the fields and the wood's cool.' There they discover that the water has all but disappeared after months of record-breaking heat. Through the book, father and son will return regularly to these springs, bearing witness to their changes. This punctuated in-placeness is what makes the three longer journeys Macfarlane undertakes––to an Andean cloud forest; a wounded river basin in Chennai, India; and an undamned river in uppermost Canada––land effectively. To learn to recognize the aliveness of what we have been taught to think of as inert matter demands, above all else, time and attention. To see a glacier retreat, we need to watch its movements for years; to know how a river wanders, we must walk its banks during both flood and drought. Most of the children in my life stare awestruck at the natural world. Trees speak, mountains ponder, hummingbirds have secret missions all their own. With time, this enchantment usually passes. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and author, argues that this is, in part, a linguistic problem. In English, we use the impersonal pronoun it to speak of animals, plants, bodies of water, geographical features. We say 'a river that flows' as opposed to 'a river who flows.' As I read Is a River Alive?, I found myself underlining sentence after sentence as verbs animated the world. 'Leaves nod in the rain.' 'Mist hangs in scarves.' 'The light of the rising sun sets the world ringing like a singing bowl.' Macfarlane's prose offers a glorious invitation to return to one's child-mind and its inherent wonder. Agua es vida. And yet this deep sense of enchantment and play is tempered throughout by grief—not only grief at the ways in which humans have fundamentally perverted so many of Earth's most magnificent rivers, but also grief of a more personal nature. The researcher seeking rare fungi at the Los Cedros cloud forest, in Ecuador, has just lost her father; the young man fighting to restore India's Adyar River was beaten by his own; Wayne, Macfarlane's traveling companion down the Mutehekau Shipu, in Quebec, dreams of encountering a dear friend who recently died. In the face of these losses, each person travels to a water body, dwelling in and alongside them for weeks or years. Each is, in turn, overtaken by powers much larger than the self. And I won't say they are healed exactly, but their time spent on the rivers seems to lighten their individual burdens. 'Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,' Macfarlane writes. 'Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it.' Then Wayne cautions, 'This kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany; it's a chronic rather than acute process.' The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie has critiqued Macfarlane's earlier work as falling into an environmental tradition that she shorthands as the ' Lone Enraptured Male.' In these stories, as she frames it, white men sally forth into the wilderness, where they have some kind of conversion experience, then return to normal society enlightened and changed. Some of that is certainly at work here, especially in the book's final journey, a two-week whitewater-kayaking trip. But for the most part, Macfarlane doesn't dwell too long on his own experience, opting instead to listen to those who live alongside the water bodies that he is, admittedly, just visiting. For instance, Macfarlane is accompanied at Los Cedros by a wide-ranging cast of characters: the mycologist in mourning, who discovers a new species of fungus that provides further protection to the forest; an expatriate who has camped there for years to keep the place from falling prey to illegal attempts at mining; a legal scholar 'trying to generate and accelerate the ripples of Rights of Nature thinking worldwide.' A few years prior to Macfarlane's sojourn, foreign companies purchased the right to potentially mine at Los Cedros. But when they began circling with chain saws, de-limbers, and log loaders, locals testified to the impact such actions would have on the river that runs deep into the forest. The judges who ruled that mining copper and gold would violate the river's rights—they also join Macfarlane at Los Cedros. Extending out from this water body is a rich web of human allies, each of whom plays a key role in its protection. Macfarlane makes this web visible. Unlearning our obsession with Cartesian thinking demands humility, a willingness to let the lines blur between us and that great plane of existence that we have learned to label as 'it.' Is a River Alive? illustrates what resistance to extraction can look like on the ground, and also what might be awakened in us when we begin to live with rivers, recognizing them as co-creators of our past, our present, and—more and more—our future.
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
‘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.
Economist
01-05-2025
- General
- Economist
What people should learn from rivers
There is an adage among journalists, known as Betteridge's law, which holds that 'Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'No'.' It is gloriously broken by Robert Macfarlane's new book, 'Is a River Alive?' Yes, the book answers. Yes it is: here are stories and observations and apprehensions that show how the lives of rivers and people interact with each other. Yes, for here that life is evoked in prose so forceful, thoughtful and beautiful that it can only be speaking the truth.
