Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane

Each of the places Macfarlane visits was chosen deliberately: they are test cases, living labs, of the rights of nature movement — of the recognising of the natural world, and rivers in particular, as legal rights-bearers; reflections of the harm that centuries of legally instituted separation between us and them has caused. Los Cedros, and the Río Los Cedros, protected from mining and resource exploitation by the constitutionally guaranteed right for the natural world to flourish; Chennai chosen for the three heavily polluted rivers — the Adyar, Kosathalaiyar, and Cooum — it sits atop of and is thereby deeply interrelated with (and perhaps inspired by similar yet less successful efforts to grant personhood to the Rivers Ganges and Yamuna); and Nitassinan, the home of the indigenous Innu people, for their efforts to grant the Mutehekau Shipu legal personhood amid continued threats of its extensive damming by the utility firm Hydro-Québec.

A number of themes — key to answering itself — inhabit this book. Death, for one, is central. The alive properties of rivers are contrasted with stories of grief experienced by Macfarlane’s co-journeyers. The death of Giuliana’s father, having taken place weeks before their trip to Los Cedros, is counteracted by the life-giving and hope-inspiring quality of the forest and its waterways. The abusive childhood that Yuvan contended with, as well as the premature death of his younger sister, were similarly allayed by his connection with and love for the non-human. And Wayne Chambliss, a friend of Macfarlane’s who accompanied him on their descent of the Mutehekau Shipu, reckoned with the death of his close friend, Paul; healed through the purging renewal of that very descent.

The life-giving force and corresponding aliveness of rivers is thereby — whether intentionally or not — presented as self-evident. This links to another of the book’s themes: a sense of relationality, of feeling — of being ‘constitutionally in the midst’ (p. 107). Rather than justifying the aliveness of rivers through comprehensive legal, political, and ecological theory, the book instead dwells on individual self-realisation — on the importance of lived experience and the judgements we derive therefrom. The stories of indigenous peoples and their ontologies feature front-and-centre, particularly those of the Kichwa-speaking communities in Ecuador and the Innu in Canada. As do the guttural reasonings of César Rodríguez-Garavito in his musings on the Los Cedros and rights of nature more broadly; and the plain-speaking matter-of-factness of river guides Raphaël St-Onge and Danny Peled.

This self-realisational approach — Is a River Alive? feeling like a record of the affirmations of Macfarlane’s own prior self-realisations — has its strengths. It brings one emotionally on-side. Yet this is equally one of the book’s primary weaknesses. Its initial equating of the aliveness of rivers with the rights of nature is imprecise. Aliveness ≠ rights, and the rights of rivers ≠ the rights of nature. Macfarlane’s discussion of Christopher Stone’s work (whose seminal Should Trees Have Standing? substantially influenced the movement), the legal scholarship of Jacinta Ruru and the Māori-Kiwi recognition of the Whanganui River’s legal personhood, and the various legal recognitions that indigenous North American communities have granted their non-human counterparts does not develop into a broader — nor deeper — analysis of the rights of nature; the approach’s strengths, shortfalls, and peculiarities. A missed opportunity on the nature of power and its interrelation with the law is a case in point. Is a River Alive? dwells on the influence of malign actors: rapacious mining prospectors in Ecuador; the map-based disappearance of the Ennore Creek wetland in Chennai by industrially aligned civil servants in 1996 to bypass development-preventing environmental designations; and the literal thirst for and exercising of power that Québécois hydropower developers exhibit in their beaver-like compulsive dam-building tendencies. Macfarlane could have further examined the use of law as a vehicle of power by these and other actors, whether to guarantee rivers’ legal protection through personhood or to advance their development-induced destruction. This is particularly relevant given the recent referendum-rejected attempt by Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa to strip the Constitution of its rights of nature provisions.

This is not to say that Macfarlane discusses the rights of nature uncritically. Through the creative use of co-journeyers’ dialogue, he explores the framework’s weaknesses in places. In conversation with César, for example, he grapples with the idea of guardianship and representation through Stanisław Lem’s ‘Solaris Problem’ — the idea that a living entity cannot be mechanistically reduced, understood, and thereby have their wishes represented by another (human) actor (p. 83). In later conversation with Wayne, this representational problem is further discussed: instead of ‘who speaks for the river?’ — ‘what does the river say?’ And the difficulties of ‘construct[ing] a politics or law’ out of the realisation of aliveness is equally acknowledged. Satisfying answers, though, are not forthcoming (p. 290-292).

Macfarlane could have additionally improved his historical diagnosis of the despoliation of rivers and waterways. He credits a decline in animacy, which in the UK was purged by Henry VIII’s imposed forcible departure from idolatry. The spiritual strength of springs and the rivers they formed turned, in the words of Isaac Newton, into ‘inanimate brute matter’ (p. 19), and later into Martin Heidegger’s Bestand — ‘a calculable coherence’ bound by the strict ‘logics of objectification and extraction’ (p. 19-21). With that decline in animacy and idolatry came a corresponding decline in grammatical animacy, with Macfarlane drawing from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s framing of this concept. His personification of rivers is a natural extension thereof, and he cites an example of the Idu Mishmi’s linguistic derivation from waterbodies in northern India: ‘dár’, for example, means ‘to give birth’. It also means ‘to increase as a river does after rain’ (p. 174-175). A planned dam on the nearby Dibang River, then, would kill their language. In Macfarlane’s own words, ‘words make worlds’ (p. 22). And the rights of nature — and the rights of rivers — movements to him equate at their ‘best to be a kind of legal grammar of animacy’ (p. 30).

This history is an abridged version of reality. Despiritualisation and the end of relationality doubtless played a role in the human disregard for the natural world — yet the related link made to the present British predicament vis-à-vis sewage is inaccurate, revealing a primary argument against the rights of nature and rights of rivers in the first place. Rather than ecological decline being symptomatic of a lack of relationality or legal personhood, some argue that it can be seen as a simple regulatory failure: one of insufficient regulatory volume and enforcement. Macfarlane’s historical retellings also fail to refer to the numerous human communities, indigenous and otherwise, whose animism did not prevent their exploitation of non-human counterparts. With a book as prospectively influential as Is a River Alive?, one would hope that its nuance would reflect its potential impact on rhetoric. Macfarlane’s bibliography definitely displays this nuance, so it is a shame that it wasn’t carried over into the main text.

Yet this is a work of literature, not of legal scholarship, nor of history. Its strengths lie elsewhere. Macfarlane’s call for an ontological revolution does not need a roadmap, because that is not the purpose of this book. He instead justifies the need for that revolution in the first place, and that need is clear. What Is a River Alive? does best is inspire hope. In the words of Raju, one of Yuvan’s fellow activists: ‘To change a landscape for the better you must first have the ability to dream — to dream a good dream’ (p. 169). The strictures that prevent us from dreaming, in the paraphrased later words of Wayne, can be best cut down by enlivened rivers. A river ‘can cut a f*****g mountain in half, a mountain made of the oldest hardest rocks on the planet. Are you telling me that it can’t also damage [and erode the] ideological structures’ that hold us back today? (p. 293) At a time of coming climatic and ecological instability, that instability — to echo Wayne’s sentiment — may well induce, or force, that very damage and erosion.

If you’re in need of a little hope — and a vicarious retelling of the hydro-ecological journeys of the as-ever enveloping Macfarlane — pick up a copy of Is a River Alive? I’m glad I did.

View this book on the NHBS website

Reviewed by Ted Theisinger

Ted is an independent writer and researcher with a background in environmental history. His specialism lies in the intersections between rewilding, land governance, and landownership in Scotland and the UK, with his research focussing on future-centric systems change. Ted is a keen hillwalker, train-travelling enthusiast, and allotmenteer.