Book review: “Is a River Alive?” by Robert Macfarlane

By Rachel Lowe and Seneca Wilson

Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, W. W. Norton & Company, May 2025, 384pp. 

In his latest offering, renowned English nature writer Robert Macfarlane takes readers on a winding journey along three rivers in widely distant parts of the world. He does so in an effort to answer the question posed by the book’s title: Is a river alive? His young son offers the intuitive response: “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!” But as Macfarlane shows across this lovely book’s length, the answer is far from simple.

Macfarlane’s most recent offering joins his others including Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit, The Wild Places, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and Underland. The New York Times described Macfarlane as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence…with the breathless ease of a master angler.” His writing invites readers to simultaneously feel the stillness of Nature and the urgency of the environmental crisis.  

Woven throughout Macfarlane’s river journeys is an exploration into the Rights of Nature movement, which advocates for granting legal rights to rivers and other natural entities, often drawing inspiration from Indigenous worldviews and legal systems. Given Macfarlane’s literary pedigree and broad readership, Is a River Alive? thus marks a milestone in bringing the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement to a broader audience. In an interview with the Guardian, Macfarlane explains, “I wanted to immerse myself in the sheer tumbling vigour of the young rights-of-nature movement, which is one of the running currents in the book.” And immerse himself he does, exploring the intricacies, challenges, and implications of the RoN movement, especially for river ecosystems and the many species, including humans, who depend on them. 

The book is set against the backdrop of three distinct river systems: the River of the Cedars in an Ecuadorian cloud forest; the severely polluted waterways of Chennai, India, on the brink of ecological collapse; and the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, located about 600 miles northeast of Montreal. Each river faces a different form of existential threat: mining, pollution, and hydroelectric development, respectively. 

Threaded through these global journeys is Macfarlane’s return to a drought-stricken river near his home in Cambridge, where he often walks with his son. During one such walk, the boy wonders aloud whether their local river has died. This moment echoes the book’s larger focus on the relationship between children and the natural world, and what kind of world those children will inherit. “Children are born as animists and then they lose that power . . . or rather it is taken from them,” Macfarlane writes. 

Author Robert Macfarlane. Photo credit: Bryan Appleyard.

A significant proportion of the initiatives, ordinances, and court decisions stemming from the RoN movement have involved rivers, and for good reason. Human civilizations have long formed along riverbanks, relying on these life-giving beings who nourish, cleanse, and support life. “You kill the river — and all life leaves,” Macfarlane writes. His choice to refer to the river as who rather than which or that is deliberate. The language we use reflects how we relate to the natural world. Naming rivers as subjects, not objects of human use or domination, aligns with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “grammar of animacy,” or a way of speaking that honors the aliveness of the more-than-human world.

The first of Macfarlane’s riverine journeys takes readers to an Ecuadorian cloud forest, Los Cedros. Accompanying him are mycologist Giuliana Furci, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and attorney and professor César Rodríguez-Garavito. The cloud forest is under threat from oil and mining companies following concessions granted by the Ecuadorian government, often without adequate consultation or consent from affected communities. These mining concessions mark the beginning of what Macfarlane calls an “anti-trophic cascade”: “You raze the forest, you lose the cloud and the rain. You lose the rain and cloud, you kill the river.” As extractive activities in the Amazon have intensified, the resistance movement known as Kawsak Sacha, meaning “living forest” in Kichwa, has spread. This movement is rooted in the belief that every part of the rainforest, no matter how small, is alive and possesses its own consciousness.

Macfarlane returns throughout the book to the parallel between the anatomy of a river and that of the human body, each carrying its own internal waterways. “We are all bodies of water, receiving, circulating, giving onwards; all participants in the hydrosphere, with the flow of the wet world running through us,” he writes. Our arteries transport oxygen and nutrients just as rivers nourish surrounding landscapes, and our capillaries mirror streams and tributaries feeding a larger whole.

“When we sit, we are ponds; when we walk or run, we are rivers,” remarked Macfarlane at a book launch event at NYU School of Law, perhaps as an attempt to demonstrate our connectectness—even embeddedness—within the natural world. He writes that rivers are everywhere—beneath our feet, within our bodies, and even above us in what he calls the “sky river,” or the atmospheric system moving water from the sea to the tops of mountains and back down again as rain. 

“Has the water died?” Macfarlane’s nine year old son wonders when exploring the chalk creek near their home in England. This question is central to the second section of the book, “Ghosts, Monsters, and Angels,” in which Macfarlane explores dead or nearly dead rivers in Chennai. He also poses more troubling questions, such as: What does it mean for a river to be murdered, displaced, or disappeared? He works with a close friend, Yuvan, an environmental activist and scientist, as they visit rivers that have been severely polluted since the fifteenth century. Macfarlane finds that rivers can, in fact, be murdered, disappeared, or displaced, strengthening the argument for recognizing them as living beings. Writing about these Indian rivers, he also further emphasizes the necessity of recognizing rivers’ inherent rights, discussing legal precedents in the country.

The story of Briij Khandelwal, an Indian environmental journalist, highlights one such legal precedent. Khandelwal reported the murder of a river, in March of 2017, shortly after a ruling by the Uttarakhand High Court, in Salim v. State of Uttarakhand, on illegal construction along the Ganges river. The court ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers should be recognized as “living entities,” thereby affirming their inherent rights. This ruling, however, was overturned by the Indian Supreme Court in July of 2017. Khandelwal thought that if the rivers have rights, then their continuous pollution and degradation should be reported as crimes, and he was empowered to do so—albeit briefly.

While many rivers in the Chennai area are now considered biologically dead, others have simply disappeared from the map even while their waters still run. For example, Macfarlane explores Ennore Creek, a 400-meter long, 2.6 kilometer-wide backwater located just north of Chennai. Despite its continued physical presence, it was erased from a 1997 government map. Located in an industrial zone, Ennore Creek has long been used to dump wastewater used for cooling for power plants. However, new zoning laws introduced in the late twentieth century prohibited industrial processes within a certain distance of the water. To circumvent this law, government officials created a map that completely disappeared all of the surrounding waterways. Through this act of bureaucratic manipulation, there was no legal obligation to move the power plants from the area, and the creek remained a dumping zone. 

The Ennore Creek story highlights the interconnection between human rights and Nature’s rights. Macfarlane writes that “the poorest of Chennai have been systematically shunted” as oil spills, gas leaks, and “other forms of industrial violence” disproportionately occur in the ecosystems they inhabit. Had the zoning laws been enforced, local communities and the ecosystem could both have been protected. But since the laws were ignored, “their children now play in pools of toxic fly ash.” Macfarlane recounts a conversation in which community members discussed their hopes for the future of the ecosystem. One responds bitterly that it would be nice to just get asthma rather than cancer. The exchange demonstrates the difficulty in maintaining hope in some of the most ecologically precarious regions of the world, while also highlighting the central truth that human rights are inseparable from the Rights of Nature.   

While these anecdotes exemplify the challenges of implementing legal frameworks that uphold RoN, the work of Yuvan and many other local activists remains a cause for hope and reflects a paradigm shift that is underway in many countries. 

The third and final section of the book, set in Eastern Canada and entitled “The Living River,” follows the course of the Mutehekau Shipu (or Magpie River), which was granted legal personhood in a 2021 declaration. This section raises challenging questions: What does a river want? Who are we to determine its needs, and how might we even begin to do so? As Macfarlane draws the book to a close through these large philosophical questions, he becomes more introspective and poetic than in the preceding sections. 

He and four other men paddle about 100 miles down the Mutehekau Shipu, from Magpie Lake to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, immersing themselves in the aliveness of the river. The river is scheduled to get two more dams put in, which would make a riverine journey such as Macfarlane undertook impossible. 

Having begun exploring the strength and power of rivers in the second section, Macfarlane dives more deeply into the topic in this third section. The Mutehekau Shipu flows through the oldest and hardest exposed rock in the world, slowly degrading it to create its path. He writes, “What is stronger than Mountain?/ Me, obviously, says River./ Who is older than death?/ Me of course says River.” Macfarlane has a profound moment at a part of the river called “the Gorge,” the location where one of the dams is scheduled to be built. There, he witnesses the river’s undeniable power, perceiving its mouth, tongue, and voice, and feeling its aliveness. 

Central to this section is a revisiting of the Rights of Nature, including asking what success in the movement would mean for a river like the Mutehekau Shipu. Macfarlane and his friend Wayne discuss what the river itself might actually want. Macfarlane makes an essential distinction that acknowledging the fundamental rights of the river does not mean that the river must be a living and decision-making entity identical to a human. Rather, it means allowing the river to do what it has done for a very long time: flowing in its own way. “A god. For now I want to call the river a god,” he writes. “And why should a god make choices we would recognize as choices?”

Personifying the river helps humans to understand and grant it rights, but an entity need not have anthropogenic traits to be recognized. Rivers deserve rights simply because they are rivers. As Thomas Berry would say, rivers should have river rights, which can be distinctly different from human rights or animal rights, yet are no less important, and are intertwined with them all.

Through his riverine journeys, Macfarlane finds that the answer to his question, “Is a river alive?”, is a resounding “yes.” Rivers are born and die, and they can be disappeared, displaced, and even murdered. Each river that he explores reveals this truth in a distinct and powerful way. In Los Cedros, he finds a river protected, at least for now. In Chennai, he finds rivers polluted, displaced, and even murdered—and hope in their surrounding communities all but dried up along with them. The Mutehekau Shipu in Canada exists in between, not yet harmed to the point of death, but still vulnerable and without robust legal protections. While each river exists in a different state of being, each is undoubtedly alive. Recognizing that aliveness is a crucial step humans can take to better listen to rivers, defend them from harm, and learn to live in greater harmony with Nature.