Robert Macfarlane’s New Book Asks, ‘Is a River Alive?’

Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. In Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming book ‘Is a River Alive?’ he offers 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 an ancient, urgent concept. ‘Is a River Alive?’ is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. In celebration of its upcoming release, we share an excerpt with permission from Random House Canada. To order it, visit their website.

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There are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Over the past 20 years, energized by ecological emergency, the young Rights of Nature movement has repeatedly inspired new forms of future dreaming, and unsettled long-held orthodoxies by appealing to imagination as much as to law.

Case after case has been brought worldwide to test the anthropocentric foundations of existing legislation — and the drive to recognize the lives, rights and voices of rivers, mountains and forests has lit up activists, lawmakers, politicians, artists and campaigners. Much of the trailblazing has been done by what the Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva called “those from below”: “grassroots groups... which transform the world in the here and now,” chiefly local people and Indigenous communities, mobilized by shared experiences of threat and loss to their landscapes. Much of it has also been driven by women, who have time and again stepped forward as leaders in the field.

Rivers, above all, have become the focus for this movement. “River rights” have become the commonest form of novel legal subjectivity in dozens of countries around the world, from Australia to Colombia, Canada to Bolivia. In Bangladesh the judiciary has enforced the closure of 231 unauthorized factories which were judged to be violating the rights of the Buriganga River. In England a local council in Sussex has acknowledged the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse. A Universal Declaration of River Rights has been drawn up which recognizes rivers as living entities with fundamental rights, including the “Right to Flow” and the “Right to Be Free from Pollution.”

The centrality of rivers to this profound reimagining process is unsurprising. Muscular, wilful, worshipped and mistreated, rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology. They give us metaphors to live by, and they decline our attempts to parse them. Unruly, fluid and utterly other, rivers are — I have found — potent presences with which to imagine water differently. We will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them.

I take the Rights of Nature movement at its best to be a kind of legal “grammar of animacy”: that is to say, an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows. “The law,” as the Nyikina Warrwa scholar-activist Anne Poelina puts it, “is being used creatively to train human beings to listen, pay attention to, and learn from, rivers.” Recognizing nature’s rights is one means of trying to tell a different story about the living world: a very old story, given new expression. A story in which the world is “not a machine after all,” as D.H. Lawrence put it, but “alive and kicking.”

On Midsummer Eve in that drought-struck summer of 2022, I joined about a hundred people on the banks of the Cam — the river who flows through my home city and who is fed by the springs that rise near my home. The light that hot afternoon was syrupy and golden, the grass tawny from weeks of hard heat. The air was kiln-dry, and it was obvious to us all that the river was sick. Sweat crawled down us and the river crawled by us, its water low and greasy. Weed trailed lankly along its surface like hanks of hair.

Together, we read aloud a Declaration of the Rights of the River Cam — as if just saying might make it so: We declare that the River Cam and its tributaries have the right to flow and be free from over-abstraction, the right to be free from pollution... Partway through, I had to stop speaking. I was overwhelmed by hope and futility. It was a mixture of a potency I’d never experienced before — and it silenced me. Our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.

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I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty. I knew the question to which I wanted a response — the question of this book’s title — to be a formidably hard one.

How we answer this strange, confronting question matters deeply. Even the asking of it is a first step. How we answer it now is of great importance to our ability to know, love and live on this Earth in ways that will help us do it justice and abide with it. The years I have spent seeking answers to this question have been bewildering as well as revelatory. In the end, of course, it was a river who gave me the truest and most complex response.

In the course of my travels, I met stolen, drowned and vanished rivers, and saw the ruthlessly executed power of companies, criminals and governments. I met many river defenders who are trying to redefine our sense of what “life” is, sometimes at grave risk to themselves; people for whom despair is a luxury. I watched a woman of unaccountable powers healed by water, and witnessed two discoveries, one of which shifted slightly the whole story of life on Earth. As to what occurred at the Gorge, 10 days down a wild river in the far northeast of Canada — the point and place to which, it turned out, everything had been flowing? Well, I am still very far from being able to take that in, let alone comprehend it. I think perhaps I will always be coming to terms with it.

My first journey was to a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador. It is a living forest, certainly, through which living rivers run like veins. It is a place where a version of the world’s oldest written story is being retold — though this time with a different ending.

It’s night, a few miles from the equator, high in that cloud-forest, many miles from any road.

Cool air, damp ground. The chatter and click of night creatures. A young river sings on ceaselessly in a gorge below.

In a little clearing, a fire burns — a small light in a vast dark. Shadow and flame tiger the leaves that fringe the clearing. Beyond and in all directions spreads the immense forest, seamed by streams and seething with sound.

The eyes of the forest are watching.

The ears of the rivers are listening.

The eyes of the forest can see a handful of people huddled close round the fire.

The ears of the rivers can hear one of them crying.

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Excerpt from ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane. Copyright © 2025 Robert Macfarlane. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

To order, visit Random House Canada’s website.