Latest news with #RobertMacfarlane
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Irish Times
If waterways are neglected, they become undrinkable, unswimmable and then untouchable
A visitor from England at Lough Owel in Mullingar expressed surprise to me recently that locals were swimming in the lake. She could not understand how they would take such a risk. I assured her they had no reason to worry; the most recent rating for Lough Owel from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classed its water quality as excellent. It is also gratifying to be able to tell visitors that 96 per cent of beaches across this country are deemed to be of 'sufficient' quality to swim at, while there are 89 Blue Flag Irish beaches. England only has 76 Blue Flag beaches. As for rivers, the English have become accustomed to seeing them as a filthy threat. It is a theme elaborated on by celebrated nature writer Robert Macfarlane in his recent book Is a River Alive? . It documents a 'gradual, desperate calamity' that has afflicted English rivers; such has been the extent that a younger generation have no experience of what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wrote in April that he 'recently saw a Southern Water riverbank sign badged with a bright blue logo that read 'Water for Life'. The sign instructed passersby to 'avoid contact with the water. If you have had contact with the water, please wash your hands before eating'. In parts of this septic isle, fresh water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable.' Privatisation, lack of regulation and poor monitoring have all contributed to the sorry plight of the rivers as they are polluted with nitrates, chemicals and waste. READ MORE Macfarlane's focus on the rivers is not all bleak. 'Rivers are easily wounded. But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.' Veteran ocean chronicler David Attenborough has enunciated a similar message despite the gravity of what he has uncovered: 'We know already that the ocean can recover.' Restoration, he suggests, can be achieved by applying advances in scientific knowledge, while Macfarlane points to legislative initiatives in Ecuador and New Zealand to protect water. He highlights the importance, in England, of increasingly vocal 'citizen science and community groups' demanding action to prevent rivers being primarily seen as drains, channels or dumps. Ireland, Macfarlane has suggested, is 'to the forefront' of raising consciousness of these issues Macfarlane spoke about his river odysseys on RTÉ radio recently, noting that in England 'we have not a single river in good overall health' according to environment agency standards. The situation is not as dire in Ireland, but it is striking how quickly overall Irish river quality has declined in recent decades. According to the EPA's report Water Quality in Ireland 2016-2021, 'half of our rivers and two-thirds of our estuaries are not in good ecological health'. Only about 20 Irish rivers are in 'pristine condition' now, compared to 500 in the 1980s. Ireland, Macfarlane has suggested, is 'to the forefront' of raising consciousness of these issues because of the Citizens' Assembly on biodiversity loss chaired by Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin. The first assembly of its kind anywhere in the world, it recommended a referendum to amend the Constitution in order to protect biodiversity. Dr Bernadette White, from the Local Authority Waters Programme, told the assembly members that 'the majority of our high-status waters are not in good condition' and highlighted that 43 per cent of rivers have high nitrates. It was also noted that 92 per cent of problems relating to water quality are due to agriculture. It is a theme sprinkled on the current programme for government, with references to public bodies being required to integrate biodiversity 'into their plans and policies' and the need to 'commit to clear targets within the National Biodiversity Action Plan'. [ What is the water quality like at your local beach? Use our table to check Opens in new window ] [ Blue flags: Record number of Irish beaches and marinas win award for 2025 Opens in new window ] That plan, covering the years 2023 to 2030, declares a target: 'By 2030, 300km of rivers are restored to a free-flowing state.' But in relation to 'action', it more underwhelmingly states: 'Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Inland Fisheries Ireland, Office of Public Works and other relevant bodies will explore the restoration of 300km or rivers to a free-flowing state'. There is little indication that a referendum on biodiversity is a political priority for the Government. This is a pity, because a referendum would allow for sustained attention on this pivotal question and a focus on remedies as well as failings and the important work of the Rivers Trust, established in 1994. The assembly's report was clear about the State's failure to properly fund, implement and enforce existing policies, despite the declaration of a biodiversity crisis in the Dáil in 2019. Taking that further can also involve positivity about the future; as pointed out by Ní Shúilleabháin, a key message underpinning the work of the assembly was that 'we should be good ancestors in considering those coming after us'.
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
- 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.
Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Is the L.A. River alive? Robert Macfarlane would probably argue yes
From the second line of Robert Macfarlane's new ode to nature, I was caught in the current, rushed along the rapids of his exploration into a question with fundamental consequences: Is this river — that river, any river — alive? Not simply as an ecosystem or a home to animals, but is a river a living being itself? If so, does a river have memory and intention? What about needs or rights? Each question begets another, sweeping Macfarlane, his companions and now his readers along on that tide of thought. Rivers do not resemble life forms as we're used to them, though the language of rivers suggests they could. As bodies of water, rivers already have headwaters, mouths and arms. Seen from above, meandering rivers resemble vascular systems or neural networks. So why not assume they have thoughts, feelings and needs too? 'For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work,' the author writes, though it seems early into the book that he has already made his leap from rationalism to animism, at least for the rivers he sees. 'Words make worlds,' he reflects. 'In English, we 'it' rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds, and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff.' Part of his quest, then, is to shift his thinking: If rivers — and the rest — are no longer an it, can they be a who? If so, then the river closest to my home, the Los Angeles River (Paayme Paxaayt as named by the Tongva), is no longer a river that flows but a river who flows. Does that change the river for me? That I have to keep fighting my computer's grammar settings to ignore the 'error' of 'river who flows' suggests how far we have to go. The thingness of nature is deeply set in Western thought; recalibration will be complex. Macfarlane's title question takes him to three countries, each home to threatened rivers: Los Cedros in Ecuador, Adyar River in India and Mutehekau Shipu (also known as Magpie River) in Canada. At each visit, he considers what the rivers give to us and what we give to them — an exchange of nurturing for poison, usually. Human-led danger circles each in various forms: logging, pollution, dams. One of the rivers is already considered dead, the other two are still vibrantly alive. In each country, Macfarlane is accompanied by the river's allies, people who already see each water body as living and often live nearby as neighbors. These stories are peppered with rights of nature discussions exploring how Ecuador and New Zealand have extended to certain rivers legal rights to flow uninterrupted and established guardianship councils that attempt to speak for the rivers. He and allies consider how activists in India and Canada are trying to do the same without risking reducing these legal protections to performative nonsense. While those discussions could be weighed down by politics, Macfarlane's touch is deft, giving us exactly enough to consider the question while also showing us how this is not just about rivers but about us. Sick rivers don't end at their banks, but spread into communities. It's no coincidence that my neighborhood, Frogtown, is no longer home to any frogs despite easy access to the river. (Once, before the river was attacked, communities of toads hopped through yards and sang choruses in the night.) As I read this book, I went on long, ambling walks along the L.A. River, trying to see it as Macfarlane might. Perhaps he would describe it as sick with pollution, or jailed by concrete channeling. Would he see Paayme Paxaayt as hopeful? Defiant? Or doomed? Macfarlane's writing is as beautiful as the rivers and the hope he's describing. Everywhere he looks is art — a 'sunset has slaughter in it,' a 'cloud-forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green,' a sun rises 'red as a Coke can over the ocean' and 'faced with a river, as with a god, apprehension splinters into apophasis.' His paragraphs flow like the water he admires: sometimes tranquil and easy, other times a tumbling, mixing, effervescent torrent directed by commas, never promising a full stop. But don't let his elegiac prose divert you — there is a dedicated scholar at work here. There's the obvious proof: a detailed glossary, and a notes and bibliography section that runs over 30 pages. Then there's the more subtle proof: The whole book is a weighty question whose answer impacts disciplines like law, business, history and philosophy. Macfarlane takes us through each like creeks feeding into a stream. The philosophical underpinning sees the most impressive transformation. He does his own unlearning of anthropocentrism on the page through his intense experiences with these three rivers, concluding only when the rivers are done with him: 'I am rivered.' He is showing us the way to do our own unlearning, too. How we view our relationship to nature is a vital question that people around the world are reconsidering. Climate change has disrupted many natural patterns, and we're waking up to the reality that solutions will involve more than reusable water bottles and biodegradable straws. Here in L.A., our year kicked off with devastating fires that we are still recovering from. The aftermath begs us to really consider the questions Macfarlane is asking. Are our rivers alive? What about our forests? If so, how are we going to treat them? Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of 'Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You've (Probably) Never Heard Of.'
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The river that can fight for its own future in court
Is A River Alice? by Robert MacFarlane (Hamish Hamilton £25, 384pp) The 21st century has been a bleak time for our planet's rivers. According to environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey, 'every river in England is dying'. In China, the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River has diverted so much water that it has actually slowed the rotation of the Earth. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane and his young son Will were gazing at a dried-up river bed during the searing drought of summer 2022 when the boy asked: 'Has the water died?' Although Macfarlane reassured him it hadn't, he secretly wondered if the planet's rivers were in fact dying, and whether it was too late to stop this catastrophe. Travelling to the Indian city of Chennai, he sees a river choking to death on all the effluents and sewage which pour into it. In 1949 there were 49 species of fish in the Cooum River; by 2000 there were none. One consequence of the river's degradation is that, at times of heavy rain, water cascades through the city rather than flowing through the river, leaving Chennai 'locked into a brutal cycle of flood and drought.' Macfarlane writes that the water is 'so chemically polluted that it blisters skin'. In eastern Canada, a hydroelectric scheme threatens to turn the Magpie River into a series of 'chained reservoirs'. A young Innu woman, whose ancestors lived as nomads on this peninsula, tells Macfarlane: 'It seems crazy that we give a corporation that's ten years old rights, but we won't give rights to a ten-thousand-year-old river.' Macfarlane believes the idea of giving waterways rights could revolutionise the way we treat our rivers. In Ecuador, he walks through an area of cloud forest in the north-western Andes, home to amazing species like the spiny pocket mouse, the strangler fig and the spectacled bear. This fragment of land was saved from destruction when Ecuador's Constitutional Court ruled that the river, the forest and its creatures had a legal right to exist, forcing the mining companies to leave. Similarly, in Bangladesh, hundreds of factories were closed because their pollution was 'violating the rights' of the Buriganga River. In 2017, New Zealand's parliament recognised that the Whanganui River has a legal identity, with rights and the capacity to represent itself in court via a River Guardian. And earlier this year, Lewes District Council in Sussex recognised the River Ouse as a living entity – though this isn't yet legally binding. This heartfelt, lyrical book makes for rather depressing reading, yet it suggests rivers can be revived if the will to do so is there. Some enlightened places such as Seoul, Singapore, Munich and Seattle are liberating waterways previously concreted over or turned into narrow canals, which has revitalised the city centres and cooled the surrounding areas. Rivers are not only a vital amenity but an integral part of our history. As Macfarlane says: 'Our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.'
