Is a River Alive?

Is a River Alive?, Robert McFarlane. W.W. Norton & Co. (ISBN: 9781324130734) 2025.

Summary: A nature writer weighs the question of rivers as living entities with rights as he explores three river systems.

Is a river an “it” or a “who”? When human activity endangers their flourishing, do we defend rivers as living beings with rights? These are the questions in the back of Robert McFarlane’s mind as he embarks on an exploration of three river systems. A dead giveaway is that for McFarlane, rivers are “whos.” Yet when he discusses the question with his son early in the book, it seems still to be an open question. For the son of a naturalist, the answer is “Duh, of course!” But it’s not so easy. How can something represented by people be alive?

He begins with the Rio de los Cedros in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian constitution recognizes and protects it as a legal person. His journey is one of discovering what, or who, is this protected river? He describes a wondrous landscape of a river rising in the midst of a cloud forest. One in the expedition studies mushrooms and finds several rare ones. He realizes there are several rivers, one underground in the channels of roots and fungi, the river that runs before them, and an atmospheric river above.

The second journey is to a river system of several rivers running through industrial Chennai, one that begins full of life but dies as it reaches the coast. One area is even erased from the maps, its existence no longer acknowledged. Erasure does not only happen to peoples. The account closes at the coast, and has McFarlane joining a group rescuing sea turtle eggs.

Finally, he journeys 600 miles northeast of Montreal, to explore Mutehekau Shipu, as the indigenous peoples call it. The river descends through a series of rapids to eventually empty into the St. Lawrence. As part of Canada’s hydroelectric boom, planners want to dam parts of it, a move indigenous groups are resisting. Before departing, a wise woman, Rita says, “To you, Robert, I would say this: don’t think too much with your head. Forget your notebooks on the river; leave them behind.” She encourages him to think like the river, to be a river. And over the course of the journey, this happens, even as he is nearly smashed to bits negotiating a set of rapids. Alive? This river throbs with a force all its own.

The trips are punctuated by visits in different seasons to a spring near his home, during a drought when it is nearly dried up, and later, when it has been replenished. The delight in reading McFarlane is how observant both of the familiar and the new and his ability to capture it in words.

Coming back to the question of the book I find myself cautious about the incipient animism of the book. Yet rivers do represent life even in Judeo-Christian scripture. The descriptions in this book portray each of the places as living, dynamic systems, not merely “natural resources.” However, we do not need to confer personhood on rivers to protect and seek their flourishing, which ultimately is our own. I grew up near the juncture of Mill Creek and the Mahoning River in Youngstown. A visionary lawyer protected the former. Our steel industries turned the latter into a dying industrial river. At one time it was the most polluted in the country. This book similarly juxtaposes flourishing and dying rivers and how all are endangered by human enterprise. So which will we choose?