What people should learn from rivers

(Highlighting is mine)

What people should learn from rivers

What people should learn from rivers

Robert Macfarlane and James Scott seek to understand the ways of water

May 1st 2025

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99. Hamish Hamilton; £25

In Praise of Floods. By James Scott. Yale University Press; 248 pages; $28 and £20

There is an adage among journalists, known as Betteridge’s law, which holds that “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘No’.” It is gloriously broken by Robert Macfarlane’s new book, “Is a River Alive?” Yes, the book answers. Yes it is: here are stories and observations and apprehensions that show how the lives of rivers and people interact with each other. Yes, for here that life is evoked in prose so forceful, thoughtful and beautiful that it can only be speaking the truth.

Dr Macfarlane, a professor of literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge University, has a pragmatic agenda embedded in his powerful prose. To recognise rivers as living beings, as indigenous cultures so often have, is a useful step towards providing them with personhood and rights. Those rights can be used in campaigns that protect both rivers and the life they contain and sustain, be it of humans, other fauna, flora or fungi.

Not many rivers currently enjoy such respect; most are treated in purely utilitarian ways. In “In Praise of Floods”, a posthumous book by James Scott, an anthropologist and social theorist who died in 2024, Scott recalls a conversation with a Filipino hydrologist about the fact that the Colorado river no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez. Scott suggests that it is “sad, given all our poems about rivers running down to the sea, that the Colorado was prevented from achieving its destiny”. The hydrologist has no time for such fancy. “No, no, no! It is not a sad thing at all! It is wonderful; it means that all the water in the Colorado is used for important human purposes and not a drop is wasted!” All over the world people treat rivers as a resource for the taking—of hydroelectric power or of sustenance—or for the taking-away of often noxious effluent. When they are not taking, Scott points out, they are taming. States seek to control the rivers whose past floods produced rich alluvial soils, lest future floods should flow free again.

Streams of consciousness

The first of the three explorations that make up Dr Macfarlane’s book is to a place where the rights-based approach has won a signal victory. He hikes up to the Ecuadorian source of the Río Los Cedros, a river which the country’s constitutional court has recognised as having “the greatest possible legal protection that a constitution can grant: the recognition of rights inherent to a subject”. He subsequently visits the moribund reaches of the Cooum, the Adyar and the Kosasthalaiyar as they pass through the city of Chennai before heading to Canada, where he paddles down the white waters of Mutehekau Shipu, one of only two large rivers in Quebec which remains almost completely undammed. Its right to remain so is being fought for.

Through a mixture of storytelling, argument and rhetoric, supplemented with a touch of derring-do, Dr Macfarlane makes an environmental, ethical and aesthetic case for rivers being living subjects that must be endowed with rights. The book’s true strength, though, comes from his knowledge that it is not enough. In one of his rare moments of cynicism he lays bare the bathos inherent in lawyers competing for the right to ventriloquise a river’s needs “in a kind of cosplay animism”. The life of rivers is not something to be granted to them; it is something to be learned from them. To gain such understanding means opening lines of communication. Dr Macfarlane wants this book to be just such a seemingly impossible conduit.

Rivers cannot read books. But Dr Macfarlane believes they can write them. It is by explicitly treating them as his co-authors that he makes the book theirs as well as his; they become participants in the writing of its and their and his stories. The humans he travels with—an unassuming judge, a grieving mycologist, a wounded activist and a profoundly unusual man called Wayne, among others—provide him with ways of understanding the rivers. The rivers, in turn, provide the reader with ways of understanding the humans. The sense of what life is expands.

This approach governs not just what the book says, but the wonderfully fashioned ways in which it says it. Assuredly deployed assonance and an ear for metre make the flow of individual sentences a joy; the occasional deployment of neologism and esoteric but apt vocabulary, along with a taste for anthimeria, punctuate that flow with ripples and reverses. Scales shift to sublime effect: some passages reveal the book as a whole in microcosm; others echo out to encompass vast reaches of time and space. Dr Macfarlane deploys his long-recognised formidable talent with consummate skill and also, crucially, sincerity. His mastery of technique never feels merely technical; it feels head-in-white-water-breathtakingly heartfelt. His sense of duty to his co-authors demands nothing less.

Other books provide critiques of the way that humans, through their states and corporations, use, abuse and mismanage rivers: Scott’s does so with scholarship and vigour. Dr Macfarlane’s goes further. Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book. It is a masterpiece. ■