Book review: Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane
- Mar 16
- 4 min read
Review: Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane
Genre: Non-fiction - nature, adventure, travel
Is a River Alive? Is an exhilarating exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.
MacFarlane’s most personal and most political book to date…
This is the first work by Robert MacFarlane I’ve read, and I’m keen to read more. MacFarlane’s creative style blends beautiful storytelling with travel writing, nature writing, environmental and science issues, and personal experience with nature and self.
The book flows with the author as he explores not only the nature of the river but human interaction, reliance, and abuse. Throughout, river journeys from its source to its endpoint, from a thing to be used for human consumption, transport and waste, to a state of being. In MacFarlane’s words, “from a noun to a verb.”
It may seem hard to get your head around the concept: is a river a living being? How can it be? Does it think, communicate, or feel like a human? Well, no. We need to step outside the human way of containing and labelling things and what we mean by “life”.
The river is stuff. It’s matter. It holds life but there are other ways of imagining life…
Life as lived in relation… A river is alive because it enlivens. It is a lifegiver…
Robert explores one stream and three major river systems, their status, sources, their relation to people and communities.
The Little Chalk Spring is MacFarlane’s local body of water. His observations on its condition across seasons, from sickly to healthy and from drought to wet braid through his exploration of Ecuador’s Rio Los Cedros and the fascinating Cloud Forest, Chennai’s “wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries” in India, and Mutehekau Shipa in Canada. These rivers (and springs) are all surviving by a thread; some seem dead already, others are fighting back through a global guardianship movement.
What I liked:
• Wonderfully descriptive writing
• Profound personal experience with each of the rivers and the landscape and people around them
• Sharing the understanding that a river (or a mountain or other force of nature) is a living being with rights.
With river rights, some already have legal rights. Law recognises them as having the right to exist, to flourish and to persist; to flow and provide life to the natural world without being impeded by human industry (including damming).
Once you understand the purpose and flow of a river, it makes logical sense. Once you “join” Robert MacFarlane on his adventures, meet the almost larger-than-life characters on the frontline working to save rivers, experience the eddies and depths of the rivers, it makes heart-sense.
The book is a love letter to rivers. It’s actually a love letter to hope and it’s definitely a love letter to these extraordinary people. ~Robert MacFarlane
The people MacFarlane journeys with in each of the countries are indeed extraordinary, wonderful characters, each easily worth their own book, each so passionate about their work and nature that they don’t seem real. I had to go back and make sure I was reading a non-fiction book rather than a novel. That’s how full of life and passion these people are.
I highly recommend everyone read this and open themselves to rivers. If you do, you just may transmute your concept of what life is. You might even move outside the human worldview of nature as a separate entity to a direct living, relational experience.
Further learning (because there is so much to learn here):
More than Human Life MOTH is an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to the advancement of rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all.
Giuliana Furci Giuliana is a mycologist and Founding Director of the Fungi Foundation. She is one of the amazing people who joins MacFarlane on his expedition in the Cloud Forest of Equador. Her knowledge, understanding, and experience of fungi is astonishing.
Yuvan Aves and Palluyir Palluyir is a Nature Education and Research centre in Chennai, India.
Robert MacFarlane discusses the Rights of Nature movement in Ecuador particularly and its growth around the world as local communities start to stand up for the rights of the Earth to exist as it is meant to.
In writing this Review: Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane, I learned so much more and I could go on and on.
I was inspired to take lots of notes. I’m inspired to read more of Robert MacFarlane’s work (I've since bought two more of his books), and to learn as much as I can about the Rights of Nature Movement.
Most of all I’m inspired by the length and breadth and depth and flow of rivers.
