IS A RIVER ALIVE?

Is a River Alive? takes a form familiar to earlier Macfarlane books. He identifies a field of inquiry, a question about some aspect the more-than-human world – the meaning of mountains, that nature of old pathways, the qualities of underland – and journeys to them and into them with his notebooks, finding local guides to help him experience and reflect on these places. The journeys are often strenuous and challenging, and he describes them in sensuous detail, taking the reader with him; and along the way he reflects on how to understand the places and people he meets. Is a River Alive? is ‘a journey into an idea that changes the world – the idea that a river is alive.’

In pursuit of this question, Macfarlane ventures to the cloud forests of Rio los Cedros in Ecuador; to the highly polluted Adyar, Cooum, and Kostasthalaiyar Rivers that flow through Chennai; and to the untamed Mutehekau Shipu, a wild river in Quebec. As he takes the reader on his travels, he invites us to reflect on significant themes. In Ecuador he reflects on the world-wide movement to establish rivers as legal persons, which was in many ways started when the new Constitution of Ecuador established the living rights of nature. In Chennai his focus is on pollution, the ‘poisoning’ of the rivers, the consequent loss of other-than-human life forms, and the brave people doing their best to protect them. ‘Can you murder a river? he asks. In Quebec he meets Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, who has ‘always known the river is alive’. He takes instruction from her as to how to comport himself with a living River; before descending in a kayak with friends and guides, shooting major rapids, portaging around waterfalls. Between these adventures he visits a chalk spring near his home in Cambridge. Macfarlane knows his craft and take us to these places and his experience of them vividly.

I see Is a River Alive as informed by three perspectives: the movement for legal Rights of Nature; the ‘death/killing’ of Rivers and their ecosystems through pollution; and the indigenous or animist understanding of River as a living being. I think Macfarlane addressed the first two well – not in the sense of an academic review, but as an accessible narrative for the lay reader.

His approach to the third pillar is much more uncertain. It is as if he is teetering around, not really sure whether to take the plunge into a radical alternative view. Rowan Hooper in the New Scientist is upset because they think Macfarlane is advocating animism. I would be happier if this were so, but as reviewer much more concerned about the ambiguity of his position. Does he really know what he means by his question, ‘is a river alive?’ There are hints through the book of an animist sympathy. He tells of Indigenous shamans purifying the assembly chamber and calling in the spirit of Pachamama, Mother Earth, before the vote on the Rights of Nature was to be held. In the cloud forest he tells with some wonder how his companion, mycologist Guiliana Furchi, can intuit the presence of rare fungi as if they are calling to her. He refers to los Cedros as ‘anima’, as ‘aboundingly relational being’. Before travelling down the Mutehekau Shipu, Macfarlane and his companion are instructed by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, how to comport themselves ceremonially in relation to River. As instructed, he offers tobacco to the water and to the land each day. And at the dramatic gorge where Hydro-Quebéc is seeking to build a dam, Macfarlane finds a tiny spruce tree growing in the rock, ancient but no more than eight inches high, which he identifies at the World Tree, a point of resistance. As Rita instructed, he takes the red thread she tied around his wrist and wraps it around the sacred tree. Experiences such as this are described – with acknowledgment of the challenges they pose to his rational upbringing – but to what extent does he take them in? Do they shake the foundations of his world? Are they truly honoured, or do they largely remain as largely curiosities?

Toward the end of his journey down Mutehekau Shipu he muses ‘… we need to find new kinds of imagining, new ways of being that would leave us less alone in the world’. This is not a new thought: in 1972 polymath Gregory Bateson wrote ‘The most important task today is… to learn to think in the new way’. Regrettably, we have collectively changed very little, and the dominant ways of imagining and being continue to wreak havoc on the ecology of Earth. But how far does Macfarlane stretch his own imagination? Later he remarks to a companion, that the crux of the matter is not ‘Who speaks for the river’ but ‘What does River say?’ and reflects that ‘while it is relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.’ But he makes no attempt to even begin to address this task. There is a significant body of literature on contemporary animism that sees ‘a world of persons, only some of whom are human’; there is substantial writing by Indigenous scholars and Elders for whom their world is kin; there is within contemporary Western philosophy a resurgence of interest in panpsychism, which argues that some kind of innerness – mind, sentience, subjectivity, the will to self-realization – is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind; there is the imaginative storytelling of novelists such as Richard Powers whose The Overstory reflects deeply on the sentience of trees.

Maybe to ask, ‘Is a river alive?’ is to ask the wrong question. Rivers a key parts of living ecologies; and as James Lovelock’s Gaia theory shows, the great rivers of the world are also alive in the sense that they contribute to the stability of atmosphere and climate of our living planet. So maybe the truly radical question – one that would draw us to ‘find new kinds of imagining, new ways of being’ – is not Is a River Alive? but rather ‘Is River sentient?’ Does River have voice, carry any kind of inner presence, of being-for-itself in the world, as my colleague Andreas Weber argues? This question is touched on and sidestepped throughout the book. It may well be a question too far for a mainstream nature writer like Macfarlane. But it is certainly a question that would stir our human imaginations, a question that must be at the heart of any way of being in balance and harmony with our living world. As Amitav Ghosh puts it so clearly in The Nutmeg’s Curse:

It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.

An extended version of this review appeared in Shiny New Books