In 2017, the Whanganui river, which flows through the North Island of New Zealand, was accorded a legal identity: “personhood”, with appointed guardians to defend its rights. The Whanganui has long been bound up with Maori culture: it is regarded as taonga, a treasured possession; and its new legal status was achieved during the period of a conservative government in New Zealand, and passed into law with the backing of that government, though only after years of battle and argument. Legal personhood cannot be regarded as the end of the matter: far from it – the river and its catchment continue to suffer from pollution, and from the effects of upstream water diversions; the Whanganui is by no means a pristine ecosystem. But the attainment of legal personhood may be seen as a necessary first step: an essential moment in an inevitably long and tortuous process that defends the rights of nature – and of the future – against destruction in the name of economic progress.
In the course of Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane argues compellingly the case for regarding rivers – and by implication, all other elements of the natural world – as living beings, with all that flows from this in terms of fundamental rights and protections. The decision to frame the book’s title as a question indicates, one must assume, a nod to the niceties of diplomacy and persuasion, although the briefest glance at this issue – indeed, the briefest glance at the poisoned environments within which we all now live – demonstrates that the answer must be a resounding yes: that rivers, landscapes and ecosystems must now be imagined and engaged with in new ways. It is a potentially transformative vision – and one that makes fundamental sense, both intellectually and emotionally.
Indeed, the book itself immediately sweeps away what is a redundant question mark: Macfarlane describes his book as “a journey into an idea that changes the world” – and his remarkable and devastating prologue condenses time with a description of a single chalk stream through the ages, rising in and running through the south of England. He describes the origins of the stream in the deep past, its wells and springs laid down by Ice Age glaciers, its waters flowing before and through human history, witnessed by serfs, monarchs and poets, coming under increasing strain from an exploding and thirsty population that taps the aquifer feeding the stream and pollutes its diminishing waters – until in the boiling summer of 2022, the chalk stream chokes, runs dry, dies.
Although Macfarlane has written feelingly of many specific places, the landscapes of southern England and the chalk rivers that course through them – among the rarest ecosystems in the world – are his home ground, his own place; little wonder, then, that he writes with such passion and persuasion of their desecration in the name of economic growth. But his prose moves almost at once farther afield: on from the desiccating springs of the Thames in England to the dying Po in Italy, to the shrinking Rhine in Germany, where drought stones have emerged from the waters:
Wenn du mich siest, danne weine.
If you see me, weep.
This, then, is no localised book. Just as our own lives and futures are in danger, Macfarlane makes clear, so are the futures of everyone – and Is a River Alive? weaves an interconnected global web in which human threats loom large. The narrative flows on, from the cloud forests of Ecuador, at risk from mining, to the lagoons of India, sickening from environmental pollution, to the river courses of Quebec, threatened by dams. In each case the perils are elemental and immediate; in each case the landscapes that are imperilled are bound up with the lives and identities of local human cultures – and in each case, it is these same human cultures that are resisting the essentially anonymised threat posed by extractive global capitalism.
Macfarlane returns repeatedly to the image of running water, relating it to our own identity and being. He quotes the Maori expression “Ko wai koe?” (Who are your waters? – meaning, “Where are you from? Where did you begin?”) It is a question that goes to the heart of each of our identities, expressing the power latent in the image of a river running free. As Macfarlane observes, “everyone lives in a watershed”, and the world’s waters run in our veins too. And while there is on the face of it little enough hope that environmental disaster can now be staved off, Macfarlane does find grounds for optimism, flowing from the essential nature of water itself as revivifying, replenishing, restorative – as healing, given half a chance. “Hope,” he writes, “is the things with rivers.” But hope must be accompanied by transformative action – before it is too late.
