Robert Macfarlane: Is A River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane: Is A River Alive?
In conversation with Patrick Barkham
From the celebrated writer and walker Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective- shifting new book –– which answers a resounding ‘yes’ to the question of its title.
At the heart of IS A RIVER ALIVE? is 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 this ancient, urgent concept.
Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognise the lives and rights of rivers –– and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. IS A RIVER ALIVE? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to Ecuador where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining.
The second is to the wounded rivers and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate struggle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river––the Mutehekau, or Magpie––is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader, Rita Mestokosho. Braiding these journeys together is the life-story of the fragile chalk-stream who rises a mile from Macfarlane’s house, and flows through his own years and days.
The book also travels across time, tracing the rise and fall of ideas of the aliveness of rivers, forests and mountains: from the 4400-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, through the early modern rise of rationalism –– and on into our precarious Anthropocene future. Throughout, it is illuminated by the presence of other minds and voices, and other ways of being in and seeing the world.
Passionate, original and revelatory, IS A RIVER ALIVE? is at once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date. It teems with fascinating ideas, unforgettable characters and stories. Weaving cultural and natural history, reportage, travel- and nature-writing together with a glittering prose-poetry, in this new book Macfarlane continues to push at what ‘non-fiction’ is and can do.
IS A RIVER ALIVE? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. It invites its readers radically to re-imagine not only rivers but also life itself. At the centre of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers –– and always has.
Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as the book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells.
As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Julie Fowlis and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Patrick Barkham
Patrick Barkham is natural history writer for the Guardian, the author of eight books and president of Norfolk Wildlife Trust.
