Are rivers living things? Yes, says Robert Macfarlane

Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane

Hamish Hamilton, £25, pp384

Two or three times a week, I run down from the hill on which I live in the Sussex Weald to swim in the River Rother. In winter it is a dark, cold, solitary pursuit. In summer, I swim past kayaks and picnickers, the riverscape bright with the voices of children, insects and warblers. Occasionally, particularly after rain, I encounter the assorted effluence of my friends and neighbours: wet wipes, nappies, sewage disgorged from a treatment station upriver. Several times I have been sick, once for days. Yet still I run and swim, drawn by something magnetic in the ever-flowing water.

Every river in England is polluted beyond legal limits. In 2024 water companies set a new record, pumping sewage into our rivers for a total of 3.614m hours. The sordid collaboration between politicians and corporations finds its pungent embodiment in the claggy brown islands of human waste drifting through our waters, killing fish, poisoning birds, destroying places of beauty and recreation.

Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? is therefore particularly timely for a British audience.

The brilliant work of campaigners such as Feargal Sharkey, the Rivers Trust and Surfers Against Sewage has drawn national attention to the degradation of our rivers, exposing the prioritisation of shareholder interests over the lives intertwined with and within our waterways, both human and, especially, non-human. This broader idea – that we must expand and reimagine what constitutes life and the rights that life may confer – animates this book.

The sorry state of Britain’s rivers is symptomatic of a wider riverine crisis. The world’s rivers are dying: of pollution, mainly, but also as a result of the climate crisis and, more complicatedly, our wish to harness their power to produce renewable energy. “Rivers are easily wounded,” writes Macfarlane. “But, given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.”

Macfarlane is a travel writer, but his readers always undertake several simultaneous journeys in his books. Underland, his glorious exhumation of the earth, was about the caverns and catacombs beneath us, but also about ideas of hiddenness, deep time and geological consciousness. Similarly, Landmarks and The Old Ways were journeys through the British landscape, but they were also voyages into language, showing the interdependence of land and literature, binding us closer to the countryside by giving us words with which to describe it. This latter idea, of course, was also behind Macfarlane’s wildly successful book for children, The Lost Words.

Is a River Alive? focuses on four river systems. Three are distant: the rivers of the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador; the polluted waterways threading through and beneath Chennai; and the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River) flowing into the Gulf of St Lawrence in Quebec. The fourth is a small, unnamed chalk spring rising on a Cambridgeshire hillside close to Macfarlane’s home. The narrative begins at this spring and returns to it seasonally before and after each far-flung journey.

A deeper current runs through the book, aligning Macfarlane’s work with a wider literary-environmental shift. As we discover the profound interconnectedness of flora, fauna and other forms of “life”, our language and conceptual frameworks expand dramatically.

Try looking at a beech wood forest after reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, or a toadstool after Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, or a rock pool after Adam Nicolson’s Life Between the Tides. An ontological revolution is underway, questioning traditional ideas of selfhood, feeling and relationship, granting subjectivity to entities we once regarded merely as resources.

Is a River Alive? also charts how this expanded view of selfhood is reshaping ecological jurisprudence. In recent years, courts and legislatures around the globe have granted legal personhood or explicit rights to rivers, largely driven by environmental activism and Indigenous movements demanding rivers be protected as entities with inherent rights. Prominent examples include New Zealand’s Whanganui River, India’s Ganges and Yamuna, and Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu, a river once destined for exploitation through what an activist in the book aptly calls “the Beaver complex” – the Quebec ois ers’ compulsion to dam.

Every river Macfarlane visits is mediated through remarkable companions who embody a transformative relationship with water. In Cambridgeshire, his younger son, Will, finds the titular question almost absurdly self-evident: “The answer is yes!” In Los Cedros, the mycologist Giuliana Furci mourns her recently deceased father while identifying rare fungi that she perceives via a “fuzz in the matrix”. In Chennai, Macfarlane meets the luminous Yuvan Aves, whose presence radiates a near-angelic grace. In Quebec’s icy north, the extraordinary Wayne Chambliss – a “geomancer” – is fixated on immersing himself naked in the ground during earthquakes.

There are, as ever with Macfarlane, passages of sublime writing. He notes, for instance, that sperm whales sleep vertically in the water: “I try to imagine the wonder and surprise of drifting in those vividly coloured wooden boats among those barnacled grey stones, that hanging sea-henge.” Or another section late in the book where he stands on the edge of a gorge in Quebec, the water all white and rushing before him, and his words become the stream, pouring forth without interruption or full stop or line break, a moment in which form and subject beautifully merge. Then there’s the final chapter, in which Macfarlane returns to his beloved, unnamed Cambridgeshire chalk stream in the company of his family, and the prose and the sentiment is so moving that you would have to be made of bedrock not to cry a river.

This book, like Macfarlane’s rivers, is profoundly alive. Is a River Alive? is a powerful synthesis of literature, activism and ethics, reshaping the way we perceive the natural world. Macfarlane insists that we must learn to see rivers as complex beings worthy of moral consideration and legal protection. This transformation calls us back to a fundamental truth long neglected: that humans and nature are inseparable, our destinies entwined, our survival (or otherwise) mutually assured.

Swimming through my own familiar, compromised river, I now sense that what draws me is not merely magnetic water, but the hidden, undeniable presence of a living companion, deserving recognition, rights and care.

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Photograph: Stephanie Foden