Would rivers be better treated by man if they are given legal or spiritual “rights”?
This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
“Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places,” Robert Macfarlane explains. The anthropocentric relationship between humans and water is a repeated refrain in Is a River Alive?, the eleventh book by one of Britain’s foremost writers on nature, people and place.
It took over three years to complete, and the scale and beauty of the resulting work fully justifies the time taken: you can’t knock out a book like this in a month or two spent locked in a chi-chi shepherd’s hut on the banks of some babbling brook.
Is A River Alive? is a book-length prose poem, something you must remind yourself of at intervals. If this had been penned by a lesser writer than Macfarlane, the profusion of metaphor and simile would feel uncomfortable — authorial self-indulgence. Yet if you approach the book as I believe the author intended his work to be read, it swiftly envelops you (once the annoying first chapter is navigated) with line after lyrical line of hymns to nature.
Yes, I ground my teeth at the joyous clarion of a wren being dismissed as a “needle call” or pronouns being given to rocks, trees and watercourses. But such complaints are doubtless a product of my own “small-c”-conservatism. To truly get Macfarlane you must train yourself to think like Macfarlane. That process takes time.
He rails initially at how the English language calls “rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals ‘it’”. The author would rather we “speak of rivers ‘who’ flow and forests ‘who’ grow”. To help us shift this ingrained Anglo-Saxon aversion to anthropomorphism, we are taken on three lengthy journeys through three lengthy chapters. The purpose of each is to argue that a river is a living entity with rights akin to, or even greater than, those enjoyed by us humans.
First, the author takes us to the river Los Cedros in the cloud forests of Ecuador. We are introduced to a small army of “water defenders”, campaigners seeking to protect this unspoiled habitat from the ravages of man, in this case mining companies.
One is Josef DeCoux, a pugnacious hermit, “who looks and sounds like a bare-knuckle boxer” and lives in a jungle shack with a semi-rabid Chihuahua. We also meet Giuliana Furci, an expert on fungi. She, like DeCoux, appears in a perpetual state of disgruntlement, in her case at anyone “who” isn’t a mushroom. Macfarlane accompanies them, and a pair of puffing politicians, along the route of the River of the Cedars to its source.
The word pictures he paints help you glean just how slender the thread is by which this pristine place hangs, threatened with eradication by corporates. So intricate is the prose that I found myself sweating along with them through forests that appear like a real-life planet Pandora. Yet the descriptions of, and the quoted narrative from, his travelling companions wore me down. I struggled to find empathy.
Because of them I floundered to find a kindred spirit with this river and the forest that they purport to protect. Macfarlane believes these folk helped him recognise the “personhood” of a river. All I recognised were archetypal activists, much as we have in the UK: campaigners whose combative attitudes alienate the majority from environmental causes that should by right be universally supported.
The next long-haul flight Macfarlane takes is to India and the marshland mouth of the Adyar River in Chennai. Here a young educator and naturalist called Yuvan Aves provides a much-needed palate cleanse after Ecuador. Chennai’s wetlands, we learn, have been poisoned to the point of sterility by industrialisation. “Can you murder a river?” we are asked. It seems so.
Forty-nine fish species were present there in 1949; by 2000 there were zero. As the river and its flora and fauna died, so too did the livelihoods and health of the fisherfolk who worked these waters. Is a River Alive? is refreshing in that it acknowledges how humans are very much a part of nature, not merely destroyers of it.
Yuvan is a highly accomplished yet gentle polymath. He pets wasps and deduces, after lengthy observation, that a local butterfly species smells using its knees. Macfarlane has discovered an inspirational campaigner who educates local youngsters, who will in turn educate the polluters of the damage their practices inflict upon all lives in the delta.
This chapter makes a stronger case for rivers being accorded “rights”, yet I still struggled with the notion. The rivers Ganges and Yamuna are Hinduism’s most sacred waterways and given the attendant rights of “living entities”. Such protections do not apply to all Indian rivers, such as those in Chennai.
Throughout the book, the author advocates that giving rivers the rights of a living being will protect them from the ravages of man. This may be understood in a spiritual sense, certainly outside the Abrahamic faiths. Yet even the Ganges, now armoured with the same rights to life as a human, remains so polluted that its water is considered unsafe for agricultural use, let alone drinking or bathing.
It is impossible not to share the author’s, Yuvan’s and local residents’ despair at the river’s destruction by pollution, greed and government decree. Yet, I question whether rivers will be better treated by man even if they are bestowed with legal or spiritual “rights”. Why are river rights any different to human rights? The latter were declared universal in 1948 and yet war, genocide and destruction of human life remain a global norm.
So on the narrative flows to Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu Basin. Here we see Macfarlane the adventurer, kayaking the Magpie River. The book is now in full spate, becoming a wondrous waterfall of observation, sensation and immersion. He seeks a blessing from a native Innu poet and activist called Rita, before embarking on a trip worthy of John Buchan’s Sick Heart River. The spiritual connection between people and place is laid bare.
His companions on this exploration are tough and complex characters. They stick in the memory; I want to meet them. I want to encounter the Magpie, too. This water system is tempestuous, deadly, achingly beautiful and threatened with being irretrievably tamed via damming for hydroelectric energy.
You share Macfarlane’s fears, you feel the spume off the spray deck, you glean that we humans are minnows swimming through ancient waters that carve through primeval rock. So engrossing is this chapter that the author near as damn it persuades me of his premise, only failing thanks to my inbuilt yokel bias. Yet I was left convinced that a river “is alive, but not in the way we might speak it”. This is a perception-shifting book, run through with contemplative pools and urgent rapids. “Is a River Alive?” is a remarkable question posed by a remarkable book.
