It is characteristic of Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book, Is a River Alive?, that its setting never settles.[1] Where his earlier landscapes were firmly engraved in British soil, on legendary paths he hiked himself, from Mountains of the Mind in 2003, The Wild Places in 2008, The Old Ways in 2013, and then to his most famous study of how his native land and its language have shaped one another, Landmarks in 2016. That book impelled one London reviewer to write, justly I think, “Surely no one since the young Ted Hughes has written about British landscape and wildlife with such fierce enthusiasm.”
But Is a River Alive? settles for no such geographic limit and takes journeys to some of the remotest rivers in the world—to the extraordinary water source in an Ecuadoran cloud forest (Part One), to the polluted lagoons and estuaries of all the streams in Channai, India (Part Two), and climactically to a wild life-threatening attempt to navigate a river gorge in remotest Québec (Part Three). Each of these places is threatened—whether throttled to near-death in India or isolated by impenetrable jungle in Ecuador or vastly alien and uncontrollable in Québec—that too, alas, is threatened by human obliteration. “Each of these places,” Macfarlane writes in his Introduction,
has become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called “the natural contract.” Each is a place where rivers are understood in some fundamental way to be alive—and in each place, too, the survival of rivers is under severe threat: in Ecuador from mining, in India from pollution, and in Nitassinan [Québec] from dams.
The question posed in Macfarlane’s title—the crux of his book, in fact—is whether we can imagine nature and natural phenomena as alive, just as alive as we are, with their own agency and independent rights. Because if we cannot, then the tree or the water or the animal becomes a mere commodity, something to be used, bought and sold, wasted, polluted or otherwise indifferently destroyed. And the question behind that one, as Macfarlane is quick to point out, is what can be done about it? Unlike most defenders of wildlife, he makes innumerable practical suggestions. He actually lists in his “Select Bibliography,” for example, multiple “key resources for UK readers [and others] wishing to know in considerable and practical detail how [we] might best take action on behalf of rivers . . .” (italics mine).
Where then to begin? Since the “pollen” of new ideas can come from almost anywhere, Macfarlane chooses to begin with a classroom anecdote, a genre to which I confess I am already favorably disposed. In October of 1971, a young law school professor at the University of Southern California named Christopher Stone jolted his bored students awake by asking a question he didn’t know he was going to ask, surprising even himself:
“So . . . [he was groping] what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like? A consciousness in which . . . Nature had rights. Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals. How would such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?”
It sent the class into an uproar, Stone reported later when he wrote it up in an essay, “Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” published in the Southern California Law Review in 1972. The timing, so far as ecological awareness in America is concerned, was perfect. After Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 came the banning of DDT, the Clean Air Act in 1963, the Wilderness Act in 1964, and a spate of books like John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) and Coming into the Country (1977), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island (1974), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men (1978), Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991).[2]
But none of these writers had thought of actually drafting laws to defend nature or considered how such laws could (as Christopher Stone suggested) transform “a community’s view of itself,” by surrendering its unquestioned presumption of ownership. That would take moral imagination, not just laws.
Then, out of the blue, in a radically different setting, came a very different speaker: a Māori legal scholar in New Zealand, Jacinta Ruru, who read Stone’s essay. She saw a connection between his idea of “legal personhood” for rivers and the ancient Māori belief in “rivers as living, sacred ancestors.” Along with her student James Morris, she drafted an essay in 2010, “Giving Voice to Rivers,” arguing that the Māori, like many indigenous peoples throughout the world, personified nature in their laws. Māori, their very name, and identity, derive from em>mana (authority) and mauri (life force). Just seven years later on March 20, 2017, an “extraordinary piece of legislation” was passed in Parliament House, Wellington. It was called the Te Awa Tupua Act, and it guaranteed the protection and nurture of a major river, the Whanganui, which is one hundred and eighty miles long. The amazement and elation in Macfarlane’s voice as he reports the miracle of this legislation—in remotest New Zealand!—is infectious. This is a book about hope, not despair.
Like many another zealous defender of nature, driven to write books about both the wide implications and the deeper issues of his theme, Macfarlane uses no less than eight epigraphs in Is a River Alive? Again, I confess to my inordinate and uncritical pleasure in this habit of ecological genres. They are normally brief and introductory (epi- means before in Greek), but Macfarlane’s epigraphs are more teasingly cryptic than most and scattered throughout his book. He rules out anything not recent, i.e., written before 2017—clearly a violation of standard epigraphic practice, which, as in say Moby-Dick, tends to begin with Classical Greek or Sanskrit or even cuneiform. And at least half of Macfarlane’s selections—another violation—are by writers you have probably never heard of, whose words might become famous but are too new for that. The first one is decipherable enough, since it answers the title’s question, how can a river be “alive”?:
How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?
Natalie Diaz (2022)
One may wonder who is Natalie Diaz, and why is she singled out? Perhaps because she’s a much-praised Pulitzer Prize-winning Mojave-American poet, a former MacArthur Fellow now at Arizona State University, who contributed to the protest against Hydro-Québec’s dam building at the Romaine River in Canada. One of her poems is mentioned but not quoted in Macfarlane’s text.
The most rueful epigraph—and the only serio-comic one—comes from the author’s late friend, an equally famous American counterpart of his, quoted from his posthumous book, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World:
We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.
Barry Lopez (2022)
When Arctic Dreams appeared, Macfarlane described Lopez as “the most important living writer about wilderness.” Quoting him now adds a layer of elegy to the wry humor.
Another famous contributor, best known for her fiction, may have been selected because she seems to have read Macfarlane’s mind so well:
One way to stop seeing trees and rivers and hills only as “natural resources” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I am trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin (2017)
That final metaphor, “a great reach outward of the mind and imagination,” is uncannily apt. But I think the most poignant epigraph of all, which continues to haunt me long after I close the covers of this book, comes from a complete unknown:
Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination.
Bhavani Raman (2017)
In a footnote about Raman, Macfarlane will only say he is grateful for a single conversation they had about “language, archive, memory and hydro-politics in Chennai.” Perhaps the least said, the more powerful the utterance.
What might be inferred from all eight of the epigraph writers is that Macfarlane sees them as counterparts to himself, their voices displacing his own. This happens frequently in Is a River Alive?, sometimes quite unobtrusively. To illustrate the point that rivers are easily wounded but when given a chance recover rapidly, Macfarlane writes:
When the Lower Elwha Dam in Washington State was removed in September 2011, a century after it was constructed, the Elwha revived breathtakingly fast. Millions of cubic yards of sediment which had accumulated behind the dam were flushed to the estuary, where the river’s new flow quickly built shingle banks and sandbars, protecting the shore from storms and creating complex new habitats. In the reservoir’s drained bed, a young forest and understorey soon sprang up: saplings of maple, fir and cedar; vast purple swathes of lupin; cottonwood and willow bushes. Black bears and mountain lions crisscrossed the scrub and padded through the river. . . . Below the surface, other miracles occurred. As the water cleared, migrating salmon—their route no longer blocked by dams—returned first in their hundreds then their thousands each year, driven by ancient compulsion to reach the upper river, spawn in its shallows and then perish, in the great, wild fatality of the salmon run—an annual drama as alien and thrilling as any Greek tragedy.
Two more paragraphs follow, replete with stories of further rapid consequences of the revived Elwha—the restoration of insects, birds, animals, plants, fungi, visitors, settlers—human and non-human communities of all sorts. Macfarlane’s closing line, playfully revising Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem, is epigraphic: Hope is the thing with rivers. As if he had not put his whole soul into the ecstatic writing of the previous three paragraphs!
But there is a catch. It emerges in an endnote you might not even notice:
I draw for the details of these paragraphs [writes Macfarlane] on Jessica Plumb’s beautiful essay on the restoration of the Elwha, “A River Reawakened: Ten Years of Rewilding the Elwha Watershed,” Orion Magazine (2021); and her superb documentary film, Return of the River (2014).
Should Macfarlane have acknowledged Jessica Plumb’s essay and film directly in his text, having used them extensively? Perhaps so. But I think the lesson is not to quibble about whose inspiration is whose, but to share the impulse of speaking for rivers in a “beautiful essay”—or making the “great reach outward” from one’s individual “subjectivity” that Le Guin speaks of—and imagining what value flows from that. Clearly, the work of it is nowhere near as arduous or slow as it may seem. Still, a further lesson must be that Macfarlane’s auctorial voice is always—to some extent at least—polyphonic, made up of other voices—and he wants it to be.
Another choice about using his own voice comes out directly when Macfarlane turns to full-scale narration. His reports of traveling to Ecuador in 2011, India in 2017, and Québec in . . . when? Macfarlane refuses to specify the year. But each report is dramatized with spoken exchanges, multiple characters, changing points of view, and sometimes even a free play of subjectivity not his own—such as we might find in a novel. Most of Is a River Alive? depends on these techniques—it used to be called the New Journalism. Macfarlane explains up front, on the copyright page,
Is a River Alive? is a work of nonfiction. Certain names and potentially identifying characteristics have been changed, and some dialogue has been recreated.
Certain names, but which ones? Some dialogue, but how much? There is a lot of room here for fiction. And have the spoken words been remembered precisely or only approximately—or were they simply “made up,” or “improved,” as remembered speech tends to be? Only the author knows, so the question for us becomes, does the character sound authentic? Macfarlane’s model here is very likely John McPhee, whose awesomely convincing character studies are said to have influenced Macfarlane. (Think of David Brower, the “Archdruid” of the Sierra Club, made mythic by McPhee’s portrayal of him in Encounters with the Archdruid, or Henri Villancourt, the hero of McPhee’s The Survival of the Bark Canoe [1975], with whom McPhee took a 150-mile canoe trip through the Maine woods, just to learn more about his subject.)
But for Macfarlane it’s a strain. He tries to place at least one prodigious figure, man or woman—hopefully unforgettable if not mythic—in each of his three journeys. The first one is Giuliana Furci, a world-renowned field mycologist who leads the journey into the Ecuadoran cloud forest:
Furci is many things: a quadrilingual Chilean-Italian-British biologist-campaigner-filmmaker, daughter of a marriage between one of Pinochet’s political prisoners and a handsome-as-hell Italian boy from a poor farming background. Above all, [she] is a mycologist: a hardcore scientist who has written two monumental field-guide volumes to the fungi of Chile—books born of hundreds of days on expedition in some of the wettest, coldest, and windiest places on Earth.
Undoubtedly a paragon more than a person. I looked her up, and she fully deserves her very high reputation. Clearly too Macfarlane met her many years before their trip to Ecuador, so you trust his facts. Yet he still tries to make her seem larger-than-life. The others introduced in Ecuador tend to be treated similarly: César Rodríguez-Garavito is a Colombian lawyer who has learned “liberation theology” in a progressive Jesuit school in Bogotá and now fights “with a flinty resolve” for social justice among the indigenous peoples of “the trans-Amazonian” world. Again, the validation seems over-the-top. Then there is Cosmo Sheldrake, a field recordist who is “nine stone tall and six feet long,” a “cosmic-comic Puck” and “brilliant musician,” who when he really listens “becomes another person: wholly concentrated and dispersed into the sound-world.” Note how the hyperbole keeps spilling over.
At the Scientific Station of the cloud-forest, a primitive cabin almost overwhelmed by jungle, a “huge” bear-like man “shambles” out from his “den”—Josef DeCoux—who “seems to have stepped straight from the pages of a late Graham Greene novel.” Really? He’s also said to be an elderly American gangster-hermit of some sort, in his seventies, his hair “wild and white,” “snarling and snapping” at everyone—just like his dog. The extravagance here has become cartoonish if not grotesque, as if Macfarlane were suddenly trying to entertain. One wonders why, since when these hyperbolically different people converse later in the episode (and with one another), they sound very much alike. Was the author not really listening to them?
Fortunately, in the India episode, called “Ghosts, Monsters and Angels,” this problem gradually disappears. The prodigious figure here is 27-year-old Yuvan Aves, once literally a child prodigy, who left home to escape a tyrannical stepfather. He renamed himself (Aves means avian) and acquired an excellent education while still an adolescent—albeit a very brainy one. What could be more mythic? That may be what makes him more attractive. Returning home, he drives out his cruel stepfather with a single sentence. When this boy-man and Macfarlane first meet, they embrace as old friends do and speak as intellectual equals; that too seems more mythic than real—but interesting. The fact is, they think alike about the ongoing death of Chennai’s poisoned rivers—that the city’s determined efforts to rebuild itself guarantee the death of its life-giving waters. Yuvan writes what the author thinks—or is it the opposite?—in the episode’s epigraph: “The river had to be killed for the city to live.” Yuvan “speaks” to Macfarlane in his journals just as often as in person, as if they had already shared their thoughts. At times it’s impossible to know which of them is speaking, not a flaw this time but proof that Macfarlane can use fiction artfully. They share a special love of birds, but Yuvan’s ornithological knowledge is wider and finer than the author’s, and his mind—especially his moral and spiritual imagination—takes flight more freely. It is Yuvan who, impatient with all binaries like body vs. soul or life vs. death, leads Macfarlane to his deepest recognitions. Yet the voice telling us that is still Macfarlane’s:
I have learned a new kind of water literacy from Yuvan: a terraqueous one in which the opposition between river and land is undone, replaced with a metamorphic vision of “river” as a shape-shifting being, never only itself—now ghost, now monster, now vanished, now resurrected—and always in conversation and interanimation with both earth and human body . . .
This is Macfarlane at the height of his powers, seeing connections everywhere, thinking at the brink of intelligibility. He continues,
What would its grammar of animacy look like? Metaphor would be at its core, surely the trope which transforms, joins like to unlike . . . a grammar of the ecotone and the interzone, rich with transitives and reciprocities, trembling always on the brink; one in which flowing and knowing are indissoluble—a mode that gives on and gives back, rhymes and echoes, moves in arcs and crescents . . . a liquid language, restless and deliquescent.
This “grammar of animacy” becomes increasingly important in the book’s third and most successful narrative, “The Living River.” Appropriately, the prodigy-figure here is brilliantly—and aggressively—verbal. No explanation is given of why “Wayne Chambliss,” about 50, an “old friend” of Macfarlane, goes with him to Québec.[3] But he’s clearly disturbed and unhappy (his name suggests “sham-bliss”), and he emerges as Macfarlane’s most disturbing alter ego, with a darker, more convoluted mind than the author’s. At first Wayne seems just another paragon, like his predecessors: “I do know that his mind is one of the two or three most unusual I’ve encountered; that he is always turning perspectives inside-out.” More hyperbole follows: “Wayne has a steel-trap intellect and a frankly supernatural memory.” When the two of them disagree, the author admits, Wayne is always right. After two long paragraphs of response to Macfarlane’s unserious question, “Do whales tell jokes?”—I think Wayne goes on excessively—but the author does not: “Talking with him is a wild ride,” he says, and proceeds to a rhetorical analysis of Wayne’s speech—“A slow build-up of thought-speed . . . a gathering of momentum, accelerating into a careening, connection-making riff.” It’s not hard to see Macfarlane talking about himself here, just as much as about Wayne, and about being in a turbulent river. A wild ride is what both of these wordy intellectuals are in for—literally.
“It feels,” I say to Wayne, “as if we’re on the brink of a great and long-overdue unlearning of supposed human superiority in terms of language. That we’re close now to opening our ears to the countless idioms and dialects, the vast broth of other species’ speeches, within which we’ve unwittingly lived and moved since the beginning.”
So much for the theory, a symbolic act of unlearning and an immersion in the vast broth of others’ voices. What about the actual river in Québec, especially the last fifty miles of it that wind through a precipitous gorge (ominously called the Gorge), far too steep for portaging—an ultimate challenge even for the most experienced watermen? Canadians call it a fjord where the Gorge finally issues into the deep waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (and where beluga whales, among others, are commonly found).[4] Both Wayne and the author are experienced canoe paddlers, but shooting the rapids in modern kayaks and surviving some of the largest and most dangerous rapids in the world is entirely new to them.
Naturally they have help—three more larger-than-life figures, local kayakers made mythic by their nicknames (the Bear, the Boss, and the Salmon), are there to teach and rescue. But their expertise is no real help to Wayne. We are told, again hyperbolically, that Wayne may seem “mean—but only to himself. He scours himself for weakness. . . . He is rasputined with injuries,” and “demons circle [him] in holding patterns” (my italics). Thus Wayne seems made to suffer more than anyone else. When blackflies invade the campsite, Wayne is severely bitten, his face swells up, and for days he is blinded. Then too we learn that a close friend of Wayne has just died, and he is “still grieving, curled around a ganglion of sadness.” Why Macfarlane thinks Wayne is so strong, firm as granite in his loyalties, and the perfect companion for his downriver adventure is mystifying—and never really explained. I fully expected Wayne would not survive.
But I was wrong: Wayne almost dies. I will not spoil the story, which is wonderfully suspenseful, full of frightening omens and impasses, with disturbing new questions as well as life-changing insights. What puts the finest edge on everything is how the river transforms Macfarlane’s language—both what it attempts and where it fails, sometimes collapsing into what seems an ultimate inadequacy—a realm where language simply cannot go. There are at least two brilliant Passages of Immersion, let’s call them, and two more where he stops at the brink of the chasm and just watches. In the first immersion, after deciding it would be madness to run it, he decides to do so anyway, even if it feels like he’s choosing his own execution. It begins, “Then we slip into the water and flow on, and within seconds the first wide green slope has me . . .” and continues for more than a full page, mostly short declarative sentences linked by Hemingway-style ands (parataxis), each phrase a flash of close-up perception, creating an eerie slow-motion effect, because of course there is too much of it, and it will not stop. Hemingway’s ands are usually elegant and “smooth,” a proof of control, but Macfarlane’s are the opposite—jagged, abrupt, and violent—attesting to Its control:
. . . and I feel the slide and lift of the back of my boat up and over the vertical and I am staring straight down into the hole at the wave’s foot and then I’m airborne and slammed into the hole head-first and upside down, I am exploded out of the boat . . . and river is punching fingers up my nostrils and river is ramming fists into my mouth and down my throat . . .
I waive discussion of the several other equally sublime Passages of Immersion in “The Living River” to focus on Macfarlane’s concluding summation. It consists of a joint meditation between Wayne’s voice and the author’s—the former still not persuaded—“I remain sceptical of the notion of giving voice to or for a river. It strikes me as both insufficient and fraught with the risk of ventriloquizing.” But when the two of them walk back to the precipice, their voices drowned out by the immense roar of water in the Gorge, Macfarlane reaches his fullest awareness, a joyous climactic peroration I can only quote in a fragment near its end, but it’s the right conclusion for the whole book:
and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here and the river’s tongue now is the tongue of tongues, and the river’s song is the song of songs, slipshifting and shapesliding and veering, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing, and the voice sings what I cannot understand . . .
[1] IS A RIVER ALIVE? by Robert Macfarlane. W. W. Norton & Company. $31.99.
[2] See the “Chronology” in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, ed. by Bill McKibben (New York, 2007). Macfarlane continues and greatly extends McKibben’s coverage of the recent history of environmental policy and politics by including world-wide events, many of them too recent to be recognized as parts of a Natural Rights Movement.
[3] I use quotation marks here to indicate the name “Wayne” is probably pseudonymous, but I drop that convention once he begins to function as a character.
[4] Macfarlane describes the belugas of Saguenay Fjord, where they are year-round residents, easily seen from shore in summer months. They like to glide smoothly just below the surface in pods of 4 to 7 adults with their young clinging close. Famous for their pure white color and sociability, their chirpy vocalizations have led some observers to call them “sea canaries.”
