Ask a child this question, and the swift answer is affirmative. But ask a politician or a bureaucrat, and depending on where you are in the world, the answer could vary.
Macfarlane, one of the world’s greatest wordsmiths, defies any reader to answer in the negative after he puts his case for recognising rivers as living beings.
Starting with tales of springs near his UK home, the book flows around the world, with Macfarlane undertaking three explorations of rivers in northern Ecuador, southern India and Canada. His breathtaking descriptions of a cloud-forest and its rivers in Ecuador is countered by the knowledge that the area is under threat of destruction by gold mining.
Macfarlane, who has written about nature, people and places, is a Cambridge professor.
By accident or design, he is joined on his expeditions by idiosyncratic, brilliant characters whose ideas give depth to his own notes.
From Ecuador’s cloud-forest, Macfarlane moves to the rivers and lagoons of Chennai in southern India, all hideously polluted amid a seething population. And in Canada’s north-eastern Quebec, he kayaks the mighty Mutehekau Shipu River which a river-rights campaign is fighting to stop being dammed.
The Rights of Nature movement around the world is not just an idea. New Zealand has led the way, in 2017 passing an Act concerning the Whanganui River on the North Island, recognising it as alive, and having the right to flow unpolluted and undammed to the sea.
Is a River Alive? took three years to write this book. That care and attention to detail shows in the words and phrases that soar and swoop, eddy and rush, echoing the flow of a healthy river.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness.
His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells.
As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction.
He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
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