Robert Macfarlane’s writing has ascended mountain peaks and followed ancient trackways, and his previous book, Underland, delved into the “deep-down dark” of caves, mines, catacombs, and the Onkalo nuclear disposal facility. His latest book, Is a River Alive?, straddles the surface and the subterranean, focusing on three main water bodies: the Rio Cedro, flowing through the ‘cloud forest’ of Los Cedros in Ecuador; the creeks, lagoons, and estuaries of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, India; and the Muteshekau-Shipu, or Magpie River, on the ancestral territory of the Innu Nation, Canada. There is also a chalk river who flows near to Macfarlane’s home in Cambridgeshire, and he brackets the book’s sections with visits to the swelling and subsiding springs. (Note the ‘who’ used throughout the book to move away from the objectifying ‘which’, ‘that’ and ‘it’ ordinarily used for non-human beings).
At the heart of the book is the titular question, which Macfarlane asks both of himself and the activists, ecologists, and adventurers he meets along the way. He assures the reader that it is not meant rhetorically; though its answer is complex, it is meant seriously with real-world application and consequences. It is also not supposed to be novel – Macfarlane describes it as an “old-growth question”. But it is thoroughly timely. The book comes in the wake of a number of landmark cases of the international ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, in which rivers, forests, and national parks have been granted legal rights and ‘legal personhood’. The Rights of Nature movement is in recognition of the triple planetary crisis we face of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, and the urgent need for “radical protection and restoration of watersheds, forests, wetlands and biodiversity”, in the words of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN). The movement also acknowledges the relationship of Indigenous peoples to more-than-human entities, often viewed as part of an interconnected web rather than as resources to control and exploit.
So, can a river be considered a living entity – “life-giving and rights-bearing” – and what would this mean for law, culture, and politics?
“If you find it hard to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying river or a dead river.”
In 2024, storm overflows in England discharged untreated sewage for a record total of 3,614,427 hours, according to The Rivers Trust. No river in England or Northern Ireland is in ‘good overall health’. The River Lym near where I live was declared “ecologically dead” in 2023 due to intense sewage releases, with the local water company making vague promises of change by 2027. The dire predicament of our rivers has become the norm in recent years. Writing of this rapidly shifting baseline, Macfarlane writes that rivers have become “rivers you cannot drink from without falling ill, which have in turn become rivers you cannot swim in without falling ill”.
The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales has, unsurprisingly, proved shockingly bad for the ecosystems treated merely as an endlessly extractable resource. All over the world, commons laws and practices of sustainable use have been broken to allow authorities and companies to use rivers for monetary gain. Of the rivers Macfarlane spends time with, the waters of Chennai are the sickest: litter, sewage, and heavy-metal pollution have poisoned the rivers almost beyond repair. Yet activists, like the young Yuvan who guides Macfarlane in this section, attempt tirelessly to heal and protect the wounded ecosystems. The cloud forest of Los Cedros, meanwhile, was saved in 2021 by a ruling made in 2008 by Ecuador's Constitutional Assembly, granting nature the right to exist, regenerate, be restored, and be respected. When, nearly 20 years later, a Canadian firm came prospecting the forest for mining, the law protected the forest and river by ruling that mining would be a violation of Ecuador’s constitutional Rights of Nature.
Perhaps the most famous Rights of Nature ruling is the Whanganui Te Awa Tupua Act in Aotearoa New Zealand. This river was granted ‘legal personhood’ in 2017, with a groundbreaking ruling stating that the Whanganui River is a living being, from the mountains to the sea – an indivisible and living whole. The ancestral relationship of the Whanganui tribe (iwi) to the river is now recognised at the highest legislative level, with a council of River Guardians appointed to “speak with and for the river”, their primary goal being “to promote and protect its life force”.
The ruling was passed after around 180 years of the Whanganui iwi fighting against the grave damage inflicted upon the river by the Crown since the nineteenth century, when the country was colonised by the British in 1840. From splitting the sacred headwaters to damming channels and pumping in endless effluent, the whole of the Whanganui River – now the Te Awa Tupua – has been “managed and exploited as the state has seen fit, [...] anatomized into its notional separable, commodifiable elements”, writes Macfarlane.
He quotes Māori legal scholar Jacinta Ruru, whose 2010 paper, ‘Giving Voice to Rivers’, suggested that the “‘legal personality’ concept aligns with the Māori legal concept of a personified natural world”, encouraging an understanding of a river as “a holistic being, rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, river-bed and river-bank”. Through the Te Awa Tupua Act, in the words of Whanganui iwi leader Gerrard Albert, “We have fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that, from our perspective, treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead […] of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management”.
While not a perfect solution, the growing Rights of Nature movement shifts the focus away from objectification and private property rights, and towards a more balanced relationship between the rights and responsibilities of human actants. Macfarlane introduces the term etuaptmumk – the Mi’kmaw word for ‘two-eye seeing’: “Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, focusing together”. For the Mutekehau Shipu, the final river Macfarlane travels to, the ‘rights of nature’ ruling simply formalises an age-old role that Indigenous people have “performed with and for the river over millennia”.
Other similar rulings have been granted around the world, from Florida and New York to Australia and India, and even the River Ouse in Sussex, with protections such as the right to flow and the right to be free from pollution becoming enshrined in law. What these rulings mean in a practical, legal sense are, to an extent, yet to be fully tested. But even in the short time since the manuscript was complete, the Los Cedros cloud forest has had to battle renewed threats. As Macfarlane explains in the afterword, “Multiple significant Rights of Nature cases have been fought and won in a matter of months”. Alongside a wide network of anti-mining activists, and with support from the MOTH (More Than Human Life) Rights initiative of which Macfarlane is a part, the "juridical system [is] giving evolving form and force to the rights of nature in the country”.
The context in the UK is somewhat different, with belief in the animacy of the natural world currently being far less prevalent. But as the anthropologist Veronica Strang shows in Water Beings (2023), stories of aquatic deities and animated, enchanted landscapes have played an important role in Britain’s past and can play an important role in the reimagining of legal and ethical relationships between human and non-human actants in the future.
The importance of non-transactional interactions with water has been noted in recent years with the rising public outcry against the crisis of UK waters. Swimmers, kayakers, and others enjoying the rivers, lakes, and seas have been particularly vocal as they have witnessed and experienced their significant decline. Campaigning organisations like Surfers Against Sewage, River Action, and local groups like the Friends of the River Wye have all played a crucial role in making water pollution a widespread public issue, and have encouraged people to get involved not just in lobbying government but also in education and ‘citizen science’, surveying and testing rivers for pollution. More recently, the environmental barrister Paul Powseland’s guerrilla activism on London’s River Roding, alongside his founding of Lawyers for Nature (CIC), has helped this largely grassroots, community-led approach of river guardianship to bloom, rooted in an ethos of ecocentric lawmaking.
If any inherent ‘beingness’ of a river could be easily identified, it would be its constant inconstancy – forever moving, a decentred force with an ever-shifting focus. Of this “ceaseless migrancy”, Macfarlane writes that: “To recognise this is to recognise that we live in a fundamentally decentralised world, engaged always in multiple forms of relation”. To recognise this, moreover, is to understand the river, or a forest or mountain, as ‘life in flux’.
While for some the aliveness of a river may be an instinctual feeling, for others, reading the book and engaging with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the “grammar of animacy” will be a challenge, or at least a significant reconceptualisation of ingrained rational ideas. As the book tumbles into its cascading final pages, there is no doubt where Macfarlane stands on the question. Macfarlane describes his writing process as “daylighting”: bringing long-buried ghosts of ideas back to the surface. He borrows the phrase from urban planning, where it can describe the process of freeing “imprisoned watercourses” flowing unseen beneath cities – London alone counts more than twenty of these ‘ghost rivers’, including the Moselle, the Quaggy, and the Effra – their meandering watercourses reenlivening cities. Bringing the “inanimate brute matter” (in Isaac Newton’s phrase) ‘back to life’ may plunge us into unknown legislative and imaginative territory. But it feels like an essential reconceptualisation, to resurrect our rivers through old and new ideas, bubbling up through the cracks.
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Grace Crabtree works with Stir to Action, and is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Recent articles for STIR include a look at Virginia Woolf's involvement with the Women's Cooperative Guild, the emergence and legacy of the Fabian Society, and the Victorian polymath John Ruskin's early intimations of anthropogenic climate change.
