For any who feel a kinship with the natural world, Robert Macfarlane’s newest book, Is A River Alive?, is a lyrical and powerful exploration of landscape and the recent movement to recognize natural features as living beings deserving of legal status as persons, and therefore protection. The author of classic works of cultural and natural history such as Landmarks and The Old Ways, Macfarlane brings landscape to life in prose as few other writers can, writing with a rare blend of science, history, and a nearly mythopoetic appreciation of the landscape we inhabit.
Those who know Macfarlane’s writing will be unsurprised at the book’s luminous beauty: a spring rising from the ground in England “from a crack in the chalk” flows for centuries, “watched by midsummer day-moon and a berry-red winter sun,” “a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with its whispers and mutters.” His riverine evocations are endlessly beguiling, but the power of this book comes most from the people who inhabit it and the Rights of Nature movement they are working in support of in dozens of countries. This movement to legally recognize the “lives, rights and voices of rivers, mountains and forests has lit up activists, lawmakers, politicians, artists, and campaigners” around the world. Most often these initiatives come from local people and Indigenous communities, “mobilized by shared experiences of threat and loss to their landscapes,” and especially women, “who have time and again stepped forward as leaders in the field.”
The groundbreaking Te Awa Tupua Act, which passed in New Zealand in 2017, granted the Whanganui River, ‘from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements,’ not only life as an ‘indivisible and living whole,’ a ‘spiritual and physical entity’ with a ‘lifeforce,’ but also the legal status of a person that can represent itself in court and has legal rights – the right to flow to the sea, to be unpolluted.
In exploration of these ideas, Macfarlane goes on three river journeys – through the cloud forests of Ecuador, coastal Tamil Nadu in India, and in remote Quebec – exploring waterways that have been granted legal status, or which people are working to preserve by this means. On each he brings guides and companions – wilderness guides, naturalists, legal scholars – who constitute a motley assortment of deeply eccentric people, brilliantly evoked. In Ecuador there’s a mushroom expert prone to launching herself unerringly into the forest and throwing herself on the ground to examine mushrooms she somehow knew would be there; a Colombian lawyer who grew up during Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror and has spent his life fighting for the rights of Indigenous people as well as forests and rivers; and a multitalented instrumentalist and audio engineer who has recorded the pulse of sap through the oldest tree in the world.
He travels along the remote Mutethaku Shipu, the first river in Canada “to be recognized as a living, rights-bearing being,” with Wayne, a geographer prone to burying himself to feel vibrations in the earth: “demons circle Wayne in holding patterns, though he rarely allows them the opportunity to land.” Before leaving, they meet with Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho, who when they first encounter her is “shaping the air around [a sick] woman’s skull and body with her hands. Her head is tilted at a quizzical angle, like that of a robin.” She delivers an extensive series of terse observations and directives regarding them, their journey, and the river to Macfarlane and Wayne, all of which the author registers as “eerily right.”
Through these three journeys he maps the rivers, the people living with them and working to protect them, and the movement to grant them the status of personhood long given to corporations. A fervent plea to regard and treat the earth and the living systems that make it up as subjects rather than objects, Is A River Alive? offers a powerful tour of the movement to grant them that legal status. “Muscular, wilful, worshipped and mistreated, rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology.” And while we may never be able to think like them, Macfarlane writes, “perhaps we can think with them.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.