Is a River Alive?

 

Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2025)

A review by Nancy Corson Carter

Serendipity! On June 3, our Earth News team met and decided to focus on water for this edition. Four days earlier, I’d read a most enticing editorial in The New York Times, “Does a River Have Legal Rights?” by Robert Macfarlane. A bolded insert read, “Viewing rivers only as sources and drains ignores their life-giving power.” After I’d read the piece, I re-read Macfarlane’s brief biography and found he was a poet, a nonfiction writer, and the author of Is A River Alive?, published this year. I immediately ordered it, read it as soon as it arrived, and began writing.

Is a River Alive? opens with an imagined life story of a small spring some 12,000 years ago, moving from pre-history into major events we recognize in Western history, up to the summer of 2022, the hottest on global record—“the summer when all the rivers nearly die. ” At this moment, the author visits the “almost perished” springs near the Thames he’s been chronicling. His nine-year-old son understands there is something very wrong and asks, “Has the water died?”

Macfarlane responds, “No, of course not,” but it is clear that the question deeply troubles him.

In the Introduction, “Anima,” Macfarland offers “an idea that changes the world—the idea [basic to the work] that a river is alive.” He asks what that recognition might mean “for perception, law, and politics?” As a poet, he laments that, “We have largely lost a love-language for rivers.”

However, he reminds us of positive developments that keep our hopes alive. For example, “Rivers are easily wounded. But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.” He notes that the Lower Elwha Dam in Washington State was removed in 2011. It “revived breathtakingly fast.”

The book unfolds over three main landscapes: Part I, “The River of the Cedars (Ecuador),” Part II, “Ghosts, Monsters and Angels (India),” and Part III, “The Living River (Nitassinan/Canada). He writes: “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.”

               The question he asks everyone he meets is, “What is the river saying?” He declares that the answers were “beautiful, cryptic, troubling, and illuminating. What all share is a recognition that we live in a polyphonic world, but also one in which the majority of Earth’s inhabitants—human and other-than-human—are denied voice.” He asserts that this book was written “with the rivers who run through its pages,” listing the ones in the three landscapes he’s focused on plus the “unnamed spring that rises at Nine Wells Wood, a mile from my house, and who keeps time across the pages that follow. They are my co-authors.”

Part I: “I travelled to the mountains of northern Ecuador to seek a river, meet a forest and find two fungi—and because in 2008 this small country with a vast moral imagination changed the world.” It produced a global first: the “Rights of Nature”—to exist, to regenerate, to be restored, and to be respected —were written into the Ecuadorian Constitution, with human beings as “an inseparable part of Nature” rather than separate and superior. He contrasts this with the hopefulness of the over 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, which he has brought as a gift: the story of how two friends, a god-king and a wild man, turn a living river-forest into a poisoned wasteland.

Macfarlane says the most disturbing name given to the Earth epoch we are currently shaping is biologist E. O. Wilson’s coined term, “Eremocene,” the Age of Loneliness, a warning that we may be the one species left as a result of its actions, alone on the Earth. “It is the silence of a mute planet on which the speech, song, and stories of other beings have become inaudible because extinguished.” Climbing into the high forest via “the Path of the Bears,” in Ecuador, he experiences magical moments like the instance in which he is softly covered by hundreds of species of moths of wondrous colors and shapes, knowing these creatures “to be just a fraction of the unknowable sum of mother-being which flourishes in the cloud forest.” He is filled with wonder: “I am in a dream. I have foliage, not skin, shifting and alive.” It’s one of many experiences that prove to him that “Everything is connected to everything else, … relation is life.”

He remembers the funeral held for Iceland’s Okojoküll Glacier in the summer of 2019, after it ceased to move, its memorial plaque placed on a rock with a “Letter to the Future,” a barely hopeful warning. Such rites he finds around the world as people “are fumbling for forms of ceremony and language with which to express the speed and severity of loss.”

In the remarkable presence of the Río Los Cedros, he feels a flash of optimism. With devoted fellow travelers, he writes, “this place, saved both by law and by imagination, is part of a geography of hope. Maybe there’s still a way out of this mess.” Further, he writes, “I’ve never more strongly than here—in the seethe and ooze of the forest, in the flow of the river—perceived the error of understanding life as contained within a skin-sealed singleton. Life, here, stands clear as process, not possession. Life is as much undergone as done. We are constitutionally in the midst.… River stacked on river. The running earth below, the running sky above.”

Coming home to England, he rejoices at the election of President Lula in Brazil, who says, “Brazil and the planet need a living Amazon! A river of clear water is more than gold extracted at the expense of mercury that kills fauna and risks human life.”

Part II, “Ghosts, Monsters and Angels (India)” is prefaced by Yuvan Aves’s 2023 quote: The river had to be killed for the city to live.” In India, the ghosts are of sacrificed rivers; monsters are river ghosts resurrected by cyclones or monsoons, and angels are the caregivers who seek to revive the dying rivers in Chennai, in the southeast, and beyond.

What to do about Chennai’s poisoned rivers? Human-made water tanks, known in Tamil as eris, dot the landscape; meant to catch monsoon water for use during the drought months of spring and summer, they worked only before rivers began to be tapped for drinking water in the 1800s. Now Chennai is “locked into a brutal cycle of flood and drought.” In their time together, Yuvan, one of the angels, and Macfarlane, collaborating for nearly five years, intend to trace Chennai’s rivers and waterbodies “following the rivers’ songlines” as they run from inland to the southeast coast, from higher reaches down through floodplain and marshes, lagoon, and estuary out into the vast Indian Ocean. Yuvan, abused in boyhood by his father, was fortunately enabled to go to a good residential school; he became a teacher and had the kind wisdom to banish and forgive the power of his father over his mother as well as himself. In 2021, he founded a trust, Palluyir (a word in Tamil that may be translated as “all of life”).           

Yuvan takes Macfarlane along with his pupils from the Abacus Montessori School, ages ten to twelve, to see Vedanthangal, the oldest waterbird sanctuary in India, an ecological haven “where it’s good to begin … where the relations of water and humans are reciprocal and life-making.” The sanctuary’s an “avian Venice,” and the children love it.

In March 2017, two judges in the Uttarakhand High Court decreed that the Ganges and the Yamuna, two of Hinduism’s most sacred rivers, should be recognized as “living entities with attendant rights.” They are sourced in Himalayan glaciers—until the Yamuna reaches Delhi, it brings life; once there, however, it quickly becomes one of the most polluted waterways in the world.

A stark example of the destruction of a river is illustrated in the story of Ennore Creek in relation to Chennai. Some of the state’s heaviest industries, known as “Red Category Industries,” aided by a 1997 Coastal Zone Management Plan map, crossed the creek off the map; for a quarter century, the disappeared creek became a sump for all Red Category industries’ waste.

Macfarlane meets young activists who want to reimagine and transform a significant stretch of river from a sacrifice zone to a complex wetland ecology. They know that it needs plants like mangroves and creatures like fiddler crabs, and are working to help people recover a dream of a clean environment for themselves and all life. On one outing, Macfarlane joins the Turtle Patrol to help save Olive Ridley sea turtles from predators; they collect 1,000 eggs from ten nests by carefully transporting them to the hatchery.

Yuvan tells Rob: “My own spiritual observation has been that a small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering, that a love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities and whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious thing . . . .”

Part III, “ The Living River” opens as Macfarlane travels to eastern Canada to meet a “living, threatened river who flows south from deep in the roadless boreal forest up near the Quebec-Labrador border, down to the sea at the Gulf of St Lawrence.” To the Innu people who live close to its mouth, the river’s name is Mutehekau Shipu translated either as “the river who flows between square, rocky cliffs” or “the river of sharp rocks and steep bands”. In English, it’s known as the Magpie.

Here he joins an old friend (and later three others, seasoned kayakers, whose expertise with such challenging waters makes the journey possible) to follow the river in kayaks and on foot for about 100 miles through the forest to its mouth at the sea. It’s “a hard journey of ten to fourteen days if all goes well.”

In May 2011, Hydro-Québec and the provincial government announced the multi-billion-dollar “Plan Nord’ or Northern Plan: a twenty-five-year scheme to “industrialize the remote region north of the Forty-Ninth Parallel,” one of the largest intact ecosystems in the world. However, the entire territory under consideration was unceded, belonging primarily to the Innu, the Cree, and the Inuit, representing some 8,000 years of indigenous presence. The rivers have been routes of travel, frozen in long winters and flowing with water the rest of the year; they served as a larder, pharmacy, and “school without limits” for these peoples since the early Holocene.

Fourteen of the sixteen Quebec rivers listed officially as “large” were dammed by 2012. By 2020, the unceded territory of the Innu people—called “Nitassinan” in Innu-aimu, meaning “our land”—contained fifteen hydro-complexes of varying size. The multi-damming project proposed would repeat what already happened to the immense and wild Romaine River—"now the Mutehekau Shipu’s ghost sister.” “Labor camps with gyms and supermarkets were built deep in the boreal forests to house, feed, and entertain the thousands of workers involved in the construction.” Sustained protests were ignored or suppressed. As Macfarlane notes: “The proposed multi-dam complex would triple-kill the Mutehekau Shipu. It would flay its banks, drown it, and entomb it—and would radiate its grey pall of damage outwards into the forest and mountains that surround the lower river. Though employment levels rose significantly in the region during the construction of the Romaine Project, so did crime, divorce, social inequality, homelessness, and sexually transmitted infection rates.”

“Over the years, a resolve has begun to build among both Innu and settler communities to resist Hydro-Québec’s damming plans for the Mutehekau Shipu (hereafter noted as M-S). They were determined to save the river’s life. In 2018, the defense of M-S began in earnest, led by the small Innu community at Ekuanitshit.”

Three key principles emerged for Innu Council: 1: the river is a living being and relative, both ancestor and descendant and therefore sacred; 2: each generation has a responsibility to protect the river for those yet unborn and those they will never meet; 3: a continuity exists between the human and non-human lives of the river, and that large -scale damming therefore threatens the whole riverine community including people.

Before the journey, the two friends, who began the journey (Macfarlane and Wayne), met Rita Mestokosho. She is an activist in river work and a poet and shaman who tells them directly how they must behave if they are to survive. She tells them who they are, what they need, and how to navigate the river from a spiritual/holistic point of view. They (luckily, we learn) honor her directions.

 Toward the end of their incredibly testing journey, Macfarlane steps to the very brink of the Gorge, a few inches from destruction “looking into a mouth, an immense river-maw that pours between the jaws of the Gorge, and I see that this mouth has a tongue, a vast green-white tongue which tapers and glides to its tip right at my feet.” At this moment it is clear as never before to him that the question Rita wanted him to ask of the river “which is not a question at all but a world, is—find the current, follow the flow….

 He describes trying to write on paper with ink that is blotting in river-mist, knowing that in those few seconds the river tells him that “after miles and months and years on the flow and in it, I am rivered [sic].” This is the mystical epiphany that closes Part III.

The book concludes with a brief epilogue, in which he envisions seeing his three grown children after his death. They remember him as they walk to the local springs he knew so well, where a river is born. His benediction: “Death and love and life, all mingled in the flow.”

Nancy Corson Carter, professor emerita of humanities at Eckerd College, has published THREE poetry books, Dragon Poems The Sourdough Dream Kit, and A Green Bough: Poems for Renewal (most recent) and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems, drawings, and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and Jesus: Weaving Action and Contemplation in Daily Life, and in her memoir, The Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories. Website: nancycorsoncarter.com