Is a River Alive?

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, published in 2025, represents the acclaimed nature writer’s most ambitious exploration of environmental activism and Indigenous rights to date. Macfarlane, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and author of multiple award-winning works including The Old Ways and Underland, brings his expertise in landscape writing and environmental humanities to this urgent examination of water rights and river consciousness. The book emerged during a critical period of global environmental litigation, as communities worldwide increasingly turn to “Rights of Nature” legislation to protect threatened ecosystems from industrial exploitation. Macfarlane’s narrative combines personal adventure with political analysis as he chronicles his journeys to significant rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada. Along the way, Macfarlane explores how encounters with more-than-human entities might reshape environmental law, Indigenous sovereignty, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

This guide is based on the 2025 Function Press e-book edition.

Summary

Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? investigates the fundamental question of whether rivers possess life and consciousness, challenging the Western rationalist view that reduces waterways to, in the words of Isaac Newton, “inanimate, brute matter” (19). Through journeys to three distinct landscapes—Ecuador’s cloud forests, India’s polluted urban waterways, and Canada’s threatened wilderness rivers—Macfarlane explores how different cultures understand the relationship between humans and water systems. The book argues against what philosopher Martin Heidegger called “standing reserve” (19)—the reduction of natural systems to purely utilitarian resources. Instead, Macfarlane advocates for recognizing rivers as living entities with agency, drawing on Indigenous worldviews and emerging legal frameworks that grant personhood rights to natural features.

Macfarlane’s investigation begins with a 12,000-year history of springs near Cambridge, England, tracing how successive civilizations—from Neolithic peoples to Romans to medieval communities—consistently recognized these water sources as sacred. The devastating 2022 drought, when he witnessed the nearly lifeless springs with his nine-year-old son Will, frames the urgent environmental questions that drive the book’s broader exploration. This personal encounter with potential ecological collapse illustrates the phenomenon of “shifting baseline syndrome”—how each generation normalizes environmental degradation by measuring loss against already diminished standards. Macfarlane proposes reversing this through “lifting baseline syndrome,” citing examples like Washington State’s Elwha River, which recovered dramatically after dam removal.

A crucial element of Macfarlane’s argument involves how language shapes perception of natural entities. He critiques English grammar’s tendency to objectify rivers through impersonal pronouns, contrasting this with Indigenous languages that recognize waterways as subjects. Drawing on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s concept of a “grammar of animacy,” he argues that English has lost its “love-language for rivers” (21).

The book traces the revolutionary legal developments in river rights, beginning with USC professor Christopher Stone’s 1971 question about nature having legal standing. This evolved into New Zealand’s groundbreaking Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017, which recognized the Whanganui River as both a living ancestor and legal person with rights. The legislation reflects 180 years of conflict between the Crown’s utilitarian perspectives and the Māori’s understanding of the river as an indivisible living entity.

Macfarlane’s journey to Los Cedros cloud forest in northern Ecuador demonstrates how Rights of Nature can function in practice. Traveling with lawyer César Rodriguez-Garavito, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and mycologist Giuliana Furci, he explored a threatened ecosystem that became the center of a groundbreaking legal case.

Ecuador became the first country to enshrine Rights of Nature in its constitution in 2008, influenced by Indigenous concepts like the Quechua notion of “sumak kawsay” (good living). When mining companies threatened Los Cedros with open-pit extraction that would have destroyed both forest and rivers, constitutional law was successfully deployed for protection. In 2021, Constitutional Court judges ruled that mining would violate the forest’s constitutional rights to exist, regenerate, and maintain natural cycles.

In Chennai, India, Macfarlane investigated urban development’s impact on river systems through the lens of “ghosts, monsters, and angels”—”dead” rivers, their destructive floods, and the activists working for restoration (124). His guide, Yuvan Aves, had undergone a transformation from a young survivor of abuse to a powerful environmental advocate, paralleling the potential restoration of damaged ecosystems.

Chennai’s three main rivers—the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar—represent some of the world’s most polluted waterways. The city’s population explosion from 500,000 in 1901 to 6.5 million today created a brutal cycle of flood and drought. Fish species in the Cooum River declined from 49 in 1949 to zero by 2000, while the sophisticated traditional eri water management system was systematically destroyed under colonial rule and subsequent development. The narrative includes pioneering legal efforts to recognize rivers as living entities, including Chennai High Court judgments recognizing nature’s rights across Tamil Nadu. However, the contrast between healthy and degraded systems becomes stark in places like Ennore Creek, which was literally erased from official maps in 1997 to allow unrestricted industrial development.

The book’s climax occurs during Macfarlane’s transformative journey down the Mutehekau Shipu River in eastern Canada, traveling with friend Wayne Chambliss and expert guides. This waterway became the center of an unprecedented legal battle for river rights, led by Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho. In 2021, both the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and local municipal council passed resolutions recognizing the Mutehekau Shipu as a legal person with fundamental rights. This declaration employed “Two-Eyed Seeing”—integrating Indigenous and Western legal frameworks to protect the river from Hydro-Quebec’s damming plans.

Macfarlane details the systematic destruction of Quebec’s river systems, where 14 of 16 major rivers have been dammed. The physical demands of navigating major rapids forced him to confront his limitations while experiencing profound merging with the river’s consciousness—what he describes as being “rivered” (295). The journey’s climax occurs at a thunderous gorge where Macfarlane experienced stepping across an invisible border into a realm where normal perception breaks down. In this liminal space, he perceived the gorge as communicating through presence rather than words, leading to an epiphany about the fundamental nature of life itself.

Throughout these three journeys, Macfarlane demonstrates how Indigenous worldviews that recognize rivers as living, conscious beings challenge Western mechanistic approaches to nature. The success stories—from Los Cedros’s legal protection to the Mutehekau Shipu’s recognized personhood—represent counter-narratives to what biologist E. O. Wilson termed the “Eremocene,” an age of loneliness in which humans exist isolated on a planet stripped of other life forms.

The book argues that developing sustainable relationships with Earth’s waterways requires fundamental shifts in legal, political, and imaginative frameworks. Moving beyond anthropocentric thinking, Macfarlane contends, is essential for addressing the global water crisis. Macfarlane’s investigation concludes that human fate remains inextricably linked with that of rivers, and that learning to hear what rivers themselves might be saying—rather than simply speaking for them—represents a crucial step toward ecological survival and renewal.