From the celebrated writer and walker Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective- shifting new book –– which answers a resounding ‘yes’ to the question of its title.
At the heart of IS A RIVER ALIVE? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings –– who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of this ancient, urgent concept.
Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognise the lives and rights of rivers –– and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. IS A RIVER ALIVE? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to Ecuador where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining.
The second is to the wounded rivers and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate struggle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river––the Mutehekau, or Magpie––is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader, Rita Mestokosho. Braiding these journeys together is the life-story of the fragile chalk-stream who rises a mile from Macfarlane’s house, and flows through his own years and days.
The book also travels across time, tracing the rise and fall of ideas of the aliveness of rivers, forests and mountains: from the 4400-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, through the early modern rise of rationalism –– and on into our precarious Anthropocene future. Throughout, it is illuminated by the presence of other minds and voices, and other ways of being in and seeing the world.
