Robert Macfarlane presents his perspective-shifting new book, which asks the question: is a river alive?

“Books like rivers have watersheds. They don’t begin in one place but in countless places, and then they declare themselves visible.” As we sit in his book-lined room at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he is professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities, Robert Macfarlane is coining a fluid metaphor for the genesis of his captivating new non-fiction work: Is a River Alive?

Boldly and persuasively recasting rivers as living beings, this three-part exploration of their multitudinous lives courses from mountain-top to sea. It takes us from the source of the Río Los Cedros (River of the Cedars) in the Amazonian Cloud Forest in Ecuador, down to the river estuaries of Chennai in India, and to the Mutehekau Shipu, a river of Nitassinan in Eastern Canada, which flows into the Gulf of St Lawrence. In each location, Macfarlane encounters remarkable river creatures and heroic human river defenders. And, between his intrepid global dispatches from these diverse places, the narrative loops back to the clear-watered stream who (note that “who”) flows unnamed from a spring that rises in a wood, a mile from Macfarlane’s Cambridge home.

Hamish Hamilton describes Is a River Alive? as Macfarlane’s most personal and poetic book yet, and I ask if this description chimes with him. “My most poetic yes, in terms of what happens to language over the course of the book, which becomes increasingly liquid. And yes, my most personal. Because compared to the partial immersions of earlier books, this one has absolutely immersed me in ways that have been total.”

Macfarlane asserts that he has always been a river person: “Because I’ve always been a mountain person, and rivers and mountains make each other. I grew up in Nottinghamshire, but my grandparents lived in the Cairngorms and the Strathspey River Avon ran past the bottom of their field. I have such clear memories, aged about 10, of floating face-down in that river with a mask on, and seeing the dark shadows of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. And having a sense of this extraordinary river life moving beneath me. Now the salmon are mostly gone, and although Scotland is faring better than England & Wales, its rivers have in many cases been grievously wounded.”

Compared to the partial immersions of earlier books, this one has absolutely and totally immersed me

After the poetic and the personal, this brings us to the third adjectival “P” that hallmarks Is a River Alive?: political. Says Macfarlane: “I began work on the book in 2020, but will be publishing it into a completely changed landscape, in which rivers have become a subject of huge concern. Not a single river in England and Wales is in good ecological health. Our water has become undrinkable, unswimmable and untouchable. I saw a Southern Water company sign lashed to railings by a river, saying: ‘Please do not come into contact with this water. If you or your dog do, be sure to wash your hands very thoroughly afterwards.’”

And, thousands of miles from the ravages of Southern Water, Macfarlane’s three far-flung rivers are starkly representative of others globally which are perishing or under terrible threat: the Río Los Cedros from mining, the waters of Chennai from pollution, and the Mutehekau Shipu from damming. This is a book which floats not only the title question, but one that follows from it: “Does a river have rights?”

Macfarlane explains: “That idea might seem alien and problematic for some. But non-human entities like business corporations have legal standing and a suite of rights from the moment they are registered. Whereas a river that has flowed since the retreat of the glaciers, continuously nourishing and shaping life around itself, has no rights at all.”

Happily, that state of affairs is beginning to change. Earlier this year, Lewes District Council paved the way by recognising the rights of the River Ouse in Sussex, the first river in England to have its legal rights recognised by a local authority. And in 2021, a declaration by the indigenous Innu people of Nitassinan made the Mutehekau Shipu the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood and rights. Set to visit the US for the book’s North American publication in late May, Macfarlane tells me he intends to speak out against President Trump’s environmentally damaging policies, including the recent order to dramatically expand logging across millions of hectares of public forests. “I feel very fired up to add my voice to the push against this drive for absolute subordination of the living world.”

While he is most often characterised as a nature writer, Is a River Alive?, like so much of Macfarlane’s work, lies at the confluence of many tributaries: memoir, myth, poetry, geography, deep-dive natural history, as well as a pounding sense of urgency about environmental crisis. And it’s also a book alive with people: “I love writing about people,” Macfarlane tells me. Among those we meet are musician Cosmo Sheldrake (brother of Merlin) and renowned mycologist Giuliana Furci, Macfarlane’s travelling companions in Ecuador, and the heroic and delightful Yuvan Aves, river angel of Chennai.

And in Canada there is Innu nation activist and poet Rita Mestokosho. Before Macfarlane embarks on the perilous 100-mile trip by kayak and foot down the Mutehekau Shipu described in the third section of the book, Mestokosho, who is also a healer, knots a red band of cloth around his wrist, telling him: “Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it.” (Two years later he still wears it.) She also instructs him to put his notebooks away and not to think too much with his head: “On the river, be a river.” And indeed, his progress down the river turns into a kind of unworldly transit, by which Macfarlane feels himself becoming one with its waters. “Over the eight consecutive days we were continuously in it, and on it, and by it, I experienced a sort of erosion of the normal boundaries of self and perception,” he marvels.

This perhaps is what impresses most about Is a River Alive? – its meld of real-world urgency and an enchanting sort of magical realism. When I mention this, Macfarlane is pleased. “I wanted to hold all of that together in a sort of vibrating matrix. The book took on an animate power that just kept surprising me. In the end I simply wanted to find a way to reactivate the question of the title. One that is incredibly ancient but that it has taken us the last 200 years to forget the answer to.”