Book Review - Is a River Alive, by Robert Macfarlane
Is a River Alive? is a nature book by Robert Macfarlane, but I didn’t really know that when I picked it up. Being an animist, it’s no surprise that the book’s title caught my attention immediately when I saw it in the library. I picked it up of course to see if it was really about what the title suggested. The jacket copy was interesting, though less spiritual than my first initial hopes. It explained that the book took a look at the Rights of Nature movement through a lens of the author’s own experiences with three endangered rivers throughout the world. Reading more, I realized another book of Macfarlane’s had been recommended very highly by another author I follow, so I checked out the book with hopes to at least read something different and interesting, experience some good writing, and maybe learn a bit about a topic in environmental politics that I don’t know much about.
As soon as I started reading it, I realized that the marketing had undersold the spirituality and philosophy that Macfarlane brings to the writing. The book opens with a prologue, a millennia-long exploration of the life of a spring near the author’s house, from its youth before humans even heard of it, through the mixed relationship it’s had with humanity, to the present day when drought and neglect nearly strangle it. It feels as if the question posed by the title is answered before even the book’s introduction, but there are much deeper explorations in store.
One person’s experience of a part of nature being alive barely matters if others reject it, and that explains the book’s interest in the Rights of Nature movement, where activists seek to have those parts of nature recognized as legal persons, with representatives to help ensure that their needs are balanced with those of human persons. It’s a new movement, largely spearheaded by indigenous cultures across the world, and had one of its first successes with the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Rather than cover a river that is already recognized as a person, however, Macfarlane visits ones still needing that protection; a river in the cloud forests of Ecuador, threatened by logging, the polluted river that runs through the Indian city of Chennai, and a river in Quebec under consideration for damming. In each case, Macfarlane explores it with other human people, each with their own struggles and complex lives, whose relationship with the river has changed and transformed them, and who seek to help others understand the potential in such relationships.
My curiousity if the book would face the question of animism head-on was answered early when the author specifically cited the idea of a “grammar of animacy” as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. In a sense, this book acts as a lovely companion to that one, broadening out those ideas of listening to nature and living in connection with it to new locales and challenges.
The third chapter, about the river in Quebec, was in some ways the most challenging for me. Deforestation and pollution are easy to understand as negatives, but hydropower? While I know that dams cause a lot of changes to the environment, I went in thinking “Isn’t renewable energy also important? What alternatives are there?” Reading the chapter though, I soon understood how this is far too simplistic. The river, as a being, forms complicated and nuanced relationships both with those who’ve lived along it for generations, and those who experience it anew, a potential like that in any person that deserves consideration and honor. To the author’s credit though, he also doesn’t present Rights of Nature as a panacea to all environmental questions. It raises questions as it answers others, not least among them “How do we know what a river wants?” The answer, the book seems to suggest, is by forming that relationship with us, that the entire point of considering nature’s rights could be to ask us to take that stance, understanding others as subjects to be in community with, rather than objects to exploit.
Through it all, the book’s prose was beautiful, evoking the joy, wonder, and sometimes terror of nature in ways that were both lyrical and accessible. On one page I might be giggling at a pop-culture reference, while on the next, a turn of phrase would take my breath away at how it connected to my own ineffable experiences of connecting with the other-than-human world. More than once I was shocked by how connected the book seemed to my whole spirituality, as when someone says they “see the river like a person in-between, who makes connections in time and place”, or the multiple places where the rivers seem to connect the author to the past and ancestry, just like walking the Path of Roots in my journeywork. I am overjoyed I read this book, it feels like it’s both opened up new ways of thinking and given me grounding for ones that I already cherish, and I’ll surely be seeking out more books by the same author. Even if they may not have the same connection to my spirituality, I have confidence that they’ll still be transportive and inspiring.