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
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