Is a River Alive? is a fervent call to action and a praise song sung to our world’s rivers, upon whose flow, vigour and aliveness we all depend.
In his latest literary adventure, Robert Macfarlane takes us into the beating heart of the Earth’s terraqueous circulatory system – from the dense cloud forests of Ecuador, the humid valleys of Chennai, India, to the gunmetal-grey waterways of Nitassinan, Quebec – for a fluvial foray whirled on by the currents of change.
What, Macfarlane asks, is at stake for our rivers, and also for us – our fates irrevocably confluent? What happens when we relate with these meandering geo-architects from both the position of the law and our hearts? Beyond the courtroom, a sentient world teems with vitality, expressiveness, and agency. Yet the future of rivers large and small, from humble English chalk streams to Canadian waterbodies the size of nation-states, remains uneasy; their aliveness obscured beneath a stifling culture of extractivism.
Ever-ongoing and on-flowing, a river is a river until it is a lake, a sea, an ocean; a ‘leaping’ whorl of energy in our embodied imaginations – this, Macfarlane makes clear; while a river moves across the Cartesian lattice of cartography, it also moves beyond it, into the tangible and the tactile with the ‘silky chill of stone’. A river, Macfarlane deftly illustrates, is a liquescent being with whom we are all in touch.
With the company of mycologists, musicians, land defenders, lawyers, kayakers and other motley crew, Macfarlane invites readers to shift from ‘kingdom’ to ‘kindom’, from ‘ventriloquizing a river’ to listening to it, sensing it, sensing them, moving beyond a ‘cos-play animism’ towards a full-bodied conversation with the rest of life.
‘We were swimmers before we were walkers,’ he writes, bending an ear to our aquatic past. For me, this book is a longing – towards what I’m not entirely sure – perhaps to that past, but also a longing towards the river’s ever-unfurling horizon, the future which flows ahead of us, forever surging on beyond our grasp as ‘radiant sky rivers’ twine in currents overhead and ‘ghost rivers’ snake beneath the city streets we tread.
“Rain-fed, the spring’s stream surges seawards: gravity at work, or something like longing.”
The question Is a River Alive? is an urgent one. It may seem like a trick question to some, or a trivial question to others, but Macfarlane’s answer is a big, fat YES – to life, and to the ongoing kinship of our shimmering riverine companions.
