American Scientist

IS A RIVER ALIVE? Robert Macfarlane. 384 pp. W. W. Norton & Co, 2025. $31.99.

Is A River Alive? tells the story of author Robert Macfarlane’s journey to understand the idea of a river as a living being—and therefore entitled to legal rights. It’s a journey that is both figurative and literal, taking Macfarlane around the world from his home in England to the high Andes of Ecuador, to the contaminated rivers of Chennai, India, and to the wild but threatened Mutehekau Shipu River of Quebec. It is also, as we discover, a philosophical and spiritual journey as well.

If you’re not familiar with Macfarlane, the first thing you need to know is this: He is a beautiful writer. Along with being a talented storyteller and clear communicator, he is a poet with an uncanny knack for surprising—yet surprisingly apt—metaphors. For example, he writes, “A sparrowhawk drifts over on blunt wings, towing a scarf of alarm-calls as small birds scatter.” Later, he writes, “The loon calls and calls. The world turns to other metals. The calls are liquid mercury, wobbling over the steel water. The forested slopes and ridgelines of the eastern shore are islands of bronze, footless in shadows of ink.”

His turns of phrase never feel distracting, but rather illuminating, inviting the reader to view both nature and ideas from new perspectives. Early in the book he observes that “we have largely lost a love-language for rivers,” but the rest of the volume does an admirable job of rediscovering those missing words.

In the introduction, Macfarlane provides an accessible primer on the origin of the "rights of nature" movement, which is a modern Western rediscovery of the old idea that forests, rivers, and other ecosystems are living entities that deserve respect and have rights. The concept that a river could have legal standing in a court of law has been regarded by some judges and politicians as absurd—and indeed it raises many thorny practical issues—but as Macfarlane and others have pointed out, it is not any weirder than assigning legal personhood to a corporation. And in recent decades, the concept of the rights of nature has gained traction around the globe and has become the basis for legal decisions and for legal battles over mines, dams, and wastewater discharges.

Macfarlane sets out to explore the rivers at the heart of these controversies. He travels to the high Andes of Ecuador to visit the Los Cedros Cloud Forest, an area protected from mining by a decision from the country’s Constitutional Court, which found that the proposed exploitation would violate the rights of the forest and its rivers. He then visits Chennai, India, where activists are working to find ways to reconnect people to nature and to undo some of the damage that urban development and industrial contamination has done to rivers, wetlands, and much of the human population. Indian court decisions have nominally given rights to rivers, but so far this has yielded few practical protections. Finally, Macfarlane paddles down the Mutehekau Shipu River in Quebec—a wild river that is threatened with hydropower dams, and whose protectors hope to invoke the river’s rights in its legal defense.

Although this is a book about rivers, it is also a book about people. In each stage of his journey Macfarlane introduces us to a cast of remarkable characters, some of whom are old friends of his and some of whom are new acquaintances. In Ecuador we meet Giuliana Furci, who really, really, really likes fungi, and who has a supernatural ability to sense them from a distance (she says she hears them, which seems implausible, but I wonder if maybe she smells them?). A leading expert on South American fungi, she accompanies Macfarlane on his journey to visit Los Cedros in order to find specimens of two recently discovered species that are known only from that location. In Chennai we meet Yuvan, who survived a childhood of abuse to become a master naturalist, an educator, and an activist who is fighting for “multi-species justice.” His goal is to begin to heal rivers and wetlands that have been drained, degraded, and contaminated to the point that they are deadly to humans and wildlife alike. It seems like a near-impossible task, but Yuvan—like many of the characters we meet on Macfarlane’s journey—carries with him a sense of connectedness to the natural world that imparts in him both purpose and optimism, despite the long odds in front of him.

Connectedness, particularly the connection between people and rivers, is a theme that winds its way though the entirety of Macfarlane’s book. Early on he notes that “To the forty thousand recognized waterbodies in England, Wales and Scotland should be added another 65 million or so—for every human is, of course, a waterbody. Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water, our skin is two-thirds water; even our bones are watery.”

Of course, the fact that humans share a watery constitution with rivers hasn’t stopped us from abusing, degrading, and destroying them around the globe, and Macfarlane notes that many people now lack any firsthand experience with a healthy river, making it hard for them to experience or even imagine that connection. And yet, in places where once-buried urban rivers have been daylighted, or unobstructed, the connection can come roaring back, and the results can be “socially transformative.” Speaking of the restoration of the River Isar in Munich, Macfarlane writes “It is not that the city has bestowed life upon the river; rather that the river has enlivened the city.” The future of people and their rivers are intertwined, for better or worse, and in Is a River Alive? Macfarlane helps us to envision a path towards the better.