Book of the Month is Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Is a River Alive?’, published by Hamish Hamilton earlier this week. Michael Malay reviews, finding a book that thinks with rivers as much as it thinks about them.
High up in the Intag Valley, in a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, two rivers run off a cliff. One cascade flows with bright clear water, while the other river, damaged by illegal mining, carries a toxic slew of arsenic and lead. ‘Death-extractivism’, says the local activist Monse Vásquez, describing the forces that have hurt this second river. Her fellow activist, José Cueva, is equally direct. ‘No life’, he says, describing the world the miners leave behind: ‘Nothing.’
This parable-like story of two rivers – one flowing with life, the other dying or dead – is recounted in Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane’s extraordinary account of the rights of nature movement and the animacy of the earth. And it is a story he encounters in many forms, although always with a common theme. When rivers are devitalised in our imaginations, they become objects of exploitation and neglect; conversely, when they are seen as complex, vibrant and alive, they become subjects of attention and care. In one scenario, rivers are source and sump: ‘that which supplies and that which disposes’. In the other, they are ‘vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share’, and whose voices make up our ‘polyphonic world’. Among other things, Macfarlane’s book is an attempt to revitalise this wilder and deeper sense of rivers, a task which engages him in a sustained project of listening, both to rivers themselves and those who know them best (including water defenders such as Cueva and Vásquez).
Four landscapes animate this book: Macfarlane’s local woodland in Cambridgeshire, a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, the megacity of Chennai, southern India, and the ancestral lands of the Innu Nation in north-eastern Canada. In each place, Macfarlane meets a shifting cast of ‘river-people’, walking with them, listening to their stories, and learning about the waters they love and live alongside, from a mighty river in northern Quebec, Mutehekau Shipu, to the complex system of lagoons, creeks and rivers who flow through Chennai. During these encounters, the book also explores the implications of the rights of nature movement, which seeks to secure legal protection for entities such as rivers, forests and mountains, by granting them the rights associated with personhood.
Macfarlane is keenly aware of the problems posed by the movement. Do we risk distorting rivers by folding them into our ideas of personhood? If a river had to be represented in court, who would speak for that river and how would that be decided? And aren’t there deep incompatibilities between indigenous conceptions of the earth’s aliveness (from which the movement draws much of its inspiration) and Western definitions of legal persons – differences which, if elided, risk replicating colonial patterns of erasure? These are hard questions, philosophically demanding as they are ethically complex, and at times they provoke radical doubt in Macfarlane. Early in the book, he fears what he calls a ‘kind of cos-play animism’, in which the effort to ‘bend the law round so that it recognises’ rivers and forests ends up ‘ventriloquizing’ the natural world. While drawing attention to these risks, however, he also celebrates what is most transformative about rights for nature. At its best, the movement is ‘one means of trying to tell a different story about the living world’, ‘a very old story’ in which the earth is understood as more alive, peculiar, and vibrant than modern law has allowed for. It’s an attempt to stretch open the legal imagination, so that it recognises the presence of other beings, agencies and persons (only some of whom are human).
For readers unfamiliar with the rights of nature movement, Is a River Alive? will provide a compelling introduction. It is a deeply wise book, careful in its interrogations, vast in its scope, and exemplary in its method of total immersion: by always exploring legal and philosophical questions in relation to particular waterscapes – their distinctive histories, meanings and voices – the book gives living shape to otherwise abstract ideas. Indeed, many of its most moving insights take place alongside – and because of – the presence of flowing water, and the book might be said to think with rivers as much as it thinks about them. While travelling down Mutehekau Shipu, Macfarlane reminds himself to ‘find the current, follow the flow’ – useful advice for kayakers as well as a neat summary of the book’s poetic and ethical procedures. For the question at the heart of the book – are rivers really alive? – is also ‘the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world’. To understand the rights of nature movement, acquaintance with legal ideas may be necessary. But first of all you have to sit alongside a river and see things from there.
Towards the start of Is a River Alive?, I waited for a moment when, perhaps with reference to the natural sciences, the book offered a systematic response to the question of its title. That moment never came. Instead, I found myself pulled into the flow of the prose and immersed in a world of astonishing particulars: a piece of wood shimmering like ‘radiant water’ (the effect of bioluminescent mushrooms glowing at night), an entire mudflat appearing to ‘flicker like a wave’ (the sudden movement of thousands of crabs), and the falling sun setting ‘spools of golden light’ spinning across a lake. And as more of these details danced and shimmered before the eye, the more the overwhelming question, ‘is a river alive?’, drifted free from the realm of argument and proof, and the more I began to perceive what I felt to be the book’s methodology, which was to proceed, not by tract or thesis, but by a ‘life-on-life-on-life’ intensity. In Chennai, accompanying volunteers on a ‘Turtle Patrol’, Macfarlane describes the ‘jolt of wonder’ that pulses through his arm when touching a clutch of turtle eggs. In Ecuador, two hummingbirds fly towards his face, ‘split at my nose – one going left and the other right – and then reseal into position afterwards.’ And in Quebec, standing alongside a powerful stretch of Mutehekau Shipu, he thrills at the river’s ‘immense and exhilarating’ song. Here, the book seems to murmur, again and again. Here is the world we inhabit, here are its marvels, here is all this vibrant and confounding life.
In each of the book’s landscapes, however, the marvellous is continually at risk of loss, and as I read on, a strange list began to form in my notes. It consisted of two columns, simply titled ‘aliveness’ and ‘deadness’, and under each column went key phrases from Macfarlane’s book. Thus ‘resource’, ‘service provider’ and ‘that’ appeared under one column, while ‘autonomous’, ‘living’ and ‘who’ (the book’s preferred pronoun for rivers) appeared under the other. Slowly the ledger grew, until it spread across three pages, and it was only later, when I looked over the list, that I realised what had happened: two rivers had sprung up from my notes – one flowing with vibrancy and health, the other with lifelessness and loss – in an uncanny echo of those two waterfalls in northern Ecuador. And so ‘jolt of wonder’ ran parallel to ‘death-extractivism’, while ‘mystery’ stood across from ‘service provider’: futility looking across at hope, devastation at wonder. Here is the animate world, the list seemed to say, and here is how quickly it can be subdued – and part of the book’s power is how it makes you feel (and not just see) the difference between those things.
Well, are rivers alive? The book does not answer that question, at least in any propositional form. Rather, it turns that question into a world, and in that world we know aliveness not by defining it but by being inside it, and not by appealing to some biological, philosophical or legal understanding of aliveness (important as these might be for the rights of nature movement), but by touching the world and being touched by it. Finally, we know life by being acquainted with death, and by the grief we feel at those deaths, in which the intensity of our connectedness to others manifests itself as pain. Three deaths haunt the figures of this book – one companion grieves a father, another a sister, another a friend. And in each case, rather than being incidental to how grief is experienced, the presence of water becomes central; and this can only be so, we gradually understand, because rivers are alive, and because they have the capacity to irrigate the deepest part of ourselves – or at least as deep a part of ourselves as we might allow them to reach. ‘The water is working on me’, Macfarlane thinks, as he and his companions kayak across Lac Magpie towards the outflow of Mutehekau Shipu. And later: ‘The river has us now’.
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‘Is a River Alive?’ is out now and available here, published by Hamish Hamilton.
Michael Malay is a teacher and writer based in Bristol, and is the author of ‘Late Light’, a previous Caught by the River Book of the Month.