- Literary and Activist Art:The book is seen as a powerful synthesis of literary craftsmanship and a rallying cry for environmental activism, intended to ignite debates and spark change. Critics consistently laud Macfarlane's writing style, describing it as "brilliant prose-poetry" and "masterful".
- The book elicits strong emotions, with readers experiencing wonder, inspiration, and even tears as they connect with the stories of these rivers and their defenders. Is a River Alive? is considered a catalyst for change, urging readers to "re-imagine not only rivers but life itself" and to re-center rivers in our stories, laws, and politics. With Macfarlane's literary reputation, the book is expected to bring the vital "rights of nature" movement to a wider audienc
- Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review – streams of consciousness, Guardian Blake Morrison Mon 28 Apr 2025 An impassioned plea to save our rivers combines poetry and adventure racking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?” He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for the existence of all living beings”. T
- This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a “spiritual and physical entity”. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as “living entities”. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a “legal person [and] living entity”. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse.
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Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.” The river flows through him, a process mirrored in the prose, which rushes in long, ecstatic paragraphs that allow themselves commas but resist full stops
Many Indigenous communities believe that rivers are conscious, with souls, intelligence, even memory. Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He’s also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. To the question “Is a river alive?” he wants to answer as simply and resoundingly as his nine-year-old son did: yes! And he wills himself to believe it by granting rivers human pronouns: instead of which or that, “I prefer to speak of rivers who flow”. But it’s a long journey, with many challenges along the way. Macfarlane, at least, is among allies. He meets eco-centric lawyers as well as a shambling, bearded castaway, Josef DeCoux, who has fought to protect the river and cloud forest for decades. He’s awed by their tireless resistance to corporate profiteering and feels companioned by the forest: “Lushness beyond imagination. Greenness beyond measure.”
His prose aspires to poetry throughout. Fireflies “score the dark like slow tracer bullets”. Flamingos “stand in their own reflections, doubled like playing-card queens, blushing the water pink”. Glow-worms “put tapers on their yellow lantern”. Shooting stars are “scratches on the world’s tin”. A half moon is a “clipped coin”. He so rarely falters in his “love-language” for the natural world that when he describes the sun, near Chennai, “rising red as a Coke can over the ocean” it feels bathetic. But bathos is the point: along with plastic bottles, turds and effluents, the Coke can is emblematic of a polluted coastline.......(ed) BEAUTIFUL!..... and buy the book!.......read on https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2025/apr/28/is-a-river- alive-by-robert-macfarlane- review-streams-of- consciousness