Robert Macfarlane’s newest book, Is A River Alive? (W.W. Norton & Co., 2025) starts challenging the reader on the cover as blue and green ribbons of water rush over the question. An epigraph from Natalie Diaz’s poem, “The First Water is the Body” greets the reader before page one: “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.” Macfarlane follows up his powerful question with the dilemma: If a river is indeed alive, what now? How do we protect its rights? Its voice? His examination is as expansive and hopeful as it is satisfying. In this age of development and human proliferation, how do we exercise protection for our most treasured natural resources?
Robert Macfarlane is not a stranger to these questions. Landmarks examines the disappearance of language describing our natural landscape, and the “culling of words concerning nature” in our dictionaries. A father and nature lover, Macfarlane brings the natural world to the page with beauty and responsibility for his subjects and his readers. “I’ve always sought to find ways of making the reader present in a given instant, whether that’s up in the high peaks, like Mountains of the Mind, or deep in a limestone cave system, entered through the rift in a trunk of an old ash tree, like Underland.” His writing style—half-poet, half-science-nerd—combines the necessary tenderness needed for awareness with an analytical lens for thorough examination. Is a River Alive? delivers three stories of seemingly doomed rivers and focuses on their multifaceted lives. Instead of despair, the reader is given hope, direction, and a game plan for preservation.
Macfarlane and I connected over a series of emails, where I asked him how he chose the three rivers, how his friendships influenced his vision, and why immersing ourselves, when writing about the natural world, is so important.
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The Rumpus: Your son’s questions and observations are prevalent throughout this book. How much was this project for him? For our posterity?
Robert Macfarlane: At the book’s heart is the idea that rivers have lives, deaths, and even rights. I wanted to find a form and a language that allowed readers to imagine rivers in these terms and to see what consequences flow from that reimagining. I wanted to take readers on a journey into the histories, places, possibilities, and futures of this ancient, urgent idea. Will, my younger son, helped me find my way into both the simplicity and the complexity of the question which gives the book its title. He was eight years old when I began work on it and will be twelve years old when it is published. His life has flowed on in the time I have been writing, and in unexpected ways he, as well as the little gin-clear chalk-stream that runs through its pages, became one of the central currents, or running threads, of the book. Aldo Leopold famously asked what it would mean to “think like a mountain.” To think like a river is necessarily to dream downstream. We might say [it is] to imagine time’s flow as it unfurls beyond the limits of one’s individual lifetime. Children ask this of us too.
Rumpus: This book unfolds across three landscapes: Río Los Cedros in Ecuador—the three rivers—especially the Adyar River, in Chennai, South-East India, and Mutehekau Shipu, or the Magpie River, in Canada. Was it difficult to choose specific locations?
Macfarlane: I wanted to give the book the form of water at the level of the sentence and to watch language slowly liquefy over the book’s course as words themselves become “rivered.” I also wanted to give it the structure of the water cycle. So, it begins and ends at the little chalk-stream springs near my home in south Cambridge. Between those bookends, it moves from the mountains of the high Ecuadorian cloud forest, down through the marshes, lagoons, and cities of south-eastern India, before finally reaching the sea in northeastern Canada, in Nitassinan, the unceded homeland of the Innu people.
In each place, rivers have become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called “the natural contract.” Each [location] is a place where rivers are understood, in some fundamental way, to be alive. In each place, too, the rivers’ survival is under severe threat: in Ecuador from mining, in India from pollution, and in Nitassinan from damming.
In terms of choosing them, it truly felt as if they chose me! I know that sounds cute, but it’s true. I remember, vividly, the gong-strike moment when I realized that Los Cedros, the cloud forest through which the Río Los Cedros flows, had the same name as the Cedar Forest that stands at the center of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first written narrative poem in world literature—a text which records the first human act of ecocide in the form of the god-king Gilgamesh cutting down the sacred cedars right to the banks of the River Euphrates.
Rumpus: I couldn’t help but love Giuliana Furci, themycologist who seeks the elusive, rare mushroom which might save Río Los Cedros in Ecuador. How did her quest for this fungi preserve the river?
Macfarlane: Ah! The miraculous Giuliana. I’m very glad she resonated with you, Janet. At the center of each of the three main sections of the book is an extraordinary character, or characters, who become my companions on and near the rivers: Giuliana, in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, Yuvan Aves in Chennai, Rita Mestokosho and Wayne Chambliss in Quebec. Their life stories begin to mingle with the life stories of the rivers in question. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places.
Giuliana’s father had died suddenly, under difficult circumstances, shortly before she came to the cloud forest with me. She was, as she says in the book, “cracked and broken” when she arrived, but the sheer, teeming, tumbling life of the cloud forest and its rivers helped revive her. They also restored her astonishing, frankly supernatural powers of fungi detection. Giuliana is a hardcore mycologist who has written the definitive field guides to Chilean fungi, but she is also able to “hear” fungi before she can see them, somehow sensing their presence in ways that drastically exceed conventional empiricism. I witnessed this twice in the cloud forest. She made two collections of new fungi species in the cloud forest while we were together, discoveries which are now helping to fortify the protection of the forest and its rivers.
Rumpus: Her friendship, like so many others you formed in this book, was an important part of your journey. Were you able to stay in contact?
Macfarlane: Giuliana and I remain very close, more than two-and-a-half years after that expedition. Among other collaborations, Giuliana and I both now sit, along with Ecuadorian colleagues, on the board of an organization dedicated to the long-term protection of Los Cedros and its rivers.
I’ve remained in close friendships with all four of the main characters in the book, as I detail in an appendix, called “Aftermaths.”
Rumpus: In Río Los Cedros, you immerse yourself in a pool under a waterfall, stripping down to your shorts and wading in over slippery boulders. How do these details help immerse the reader into the quest to protect these rivers?
Macfarlane: Immersion is, even more than usual, important in a book that is a love letter to rivers, water, and the enlivenment they bring. Philosophers of the mind speak of “qualia,” [which refers to] the glittering experience of sense-perception. I tried to set the first-person sections of Is A River Alive? in the present tense, perhaps the simplest of grammatical immersions, shimmering with qualia. I also keep in mind Virginia Woolf’s celebrated 1925 account: “The mind receives a myriad impressions––trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. . . .” Yes! And nonfiction prose can record this incessant shower of atoms, as surely as any novel.
Rumpus: Your description of Chennai is heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time: “. . . a city of three rivers. Moving from north to south along the coast . . . all flow roughly west to east to west. . . . A 2023 report by Tamil Nadu’s Pollution Control Body found that across forty-one sample sites on the Adyar and the Cooum, the water was ‘unfit for any kind of life form as there is no dissolved oxygen.’” This description refers to how the rivers have been systematically poisoned. Can this happen to any river, anywhere?
Macfarlane: Dissolved oxygen (DO) is a hydrologist’s term of art, referring to the quantity of free oxygen (as opposed to that bound into the H2O compound) which is present in water. Free oxygen is derived from the atmosphere and from aquatic plants. It is vital to life in a river or lake. When DO drops below certain thresholds, you get fish kills, gas stink, and raised toxin levels. So, zero percent of dissolved oxygen is very bad news, indeed, for a river. Stretches of those rivers in Chennai were certainly as close to death as any waterways I’ve seen. But that section of the book is called “Ghosts, Monsters and Angels” [because] the ghosts are the dying rivers of the region, the monsters are the forms those rivers re-inhabit during severe cyclones—when they rise up and overwhelm the city that has been built atop them—and the angels are the extraordinary water-activists I met and travelled with in Chennai. They are trying, against desperate odds, to imagine rivers otherwise in the region, and restore something like “multi-species justice” to the lives of water there.
Rumpus: Your relationships, especially your relationship with Yuvan, are vital to exploring the rivers in Chennai. Why is this so important for the reader to see this?
Macfarlane: Narratively, as I mentioned, I wanted to find ways of showing how tightly bound our own lives are with those of rivers. Yuvan Aves is a young writer, teacher, and activist from Chennai, bilingual in Tamil and English, with whom I have been friends for several years now. He is also hands-down the best field naturalist I’ve ever walked with. Growing up, Yuvan was, for years, the victim of severe physical abuse by his stepfather. Eventually, at the age of sixteen, he fled his home. He washed up at an unconventional residential school called Pathashalla, where he slowly recovered, in both body and mind. Yuvan was able to metabolize the harm he had suffered, break the cycle of violence, and, as it were, crystalizehimself to become one of the most open-hearted and generous people I’ve ever met. It is miraculous. Water, in many of its allotropes—river, marsh, lagoon, creek, ocean—is central to Yuvan’s vision of the world. He drew me into both his landscapes and his inclusive, intricate water-literacy.
Rumpus: The story of Chennai dovetails into the Mississippi River with the invention of LiDAR, which measures land, sea, and riverbed elevations with accuracy. LiDAR shows how changes in landscapes affect the life of our rivers, which are flowing into our oceans, creating devastating effects on turtle and whale habitats. Is there hope for restoring these natural landscapes?
Macfarlane: Despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline. I watched Yuvan and his friends struggling to drive change for the better, despite the threats and power leveled against them. In the face of such courage and moral clarity, what right would I have to sit back and say that I despair? As my indefatigable friend Rebecca Solnit puts it: “You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
Hope is a discipline because it requires vigilance, concentration, and lucidity to imagine better possible futures—and then to push onwards, in search of their realization. Throughout the book, there is a running dialectic between joy and despair, hope and futility. The final pages of the Chennai section take place right on the brink in several senses: Yuvan and I walk the Chennai shoreline over the course of an entire night, helping to excavate the fresh nests of Olive Ridley sea turtles, then rehouse the thousands of eggs we gathered in a safe sand hatchery on the beach. The shore that night was littered with the eyeless carcasses of mother turtles who had been struck by trawlers only a few miles out from the beach. But when dawn came, we saw the first turtle hatchlings of the season struggle free from the sand and then, driven by ancient instinct, make avidly for the surf of the Indian Ocean. Hope and horror, love and grief, mingled together right there in the flow.
Rumpus: The last river we explore in the book is the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, in Nitassinan/Québec. The proposed dam, Hydro-Québec’s project, threatens the natural landscape. How are dams built without the consent of the Indigenous people? Isn’t First Nation consent a Canadian value?
Macfarlane: In eastern Canada, they jokingly call it “The Beaver Complex”: the compulsion to build more dams. Over the last century, almost all of Quebéc, a province eight times the size of England, has been converted into a giant machine for the generation and storage of electrical power. It’s an extraordinary infrastructural feat, and it produces very large quantities of renewable energy. There is a formal process of consultation and consent, which Hydro-Québec will say it follows to the letter, during the phase of acquiring the so-called “social license” for dam-building projects. Of course, both the principle and the practice of dam building in the region is inextricably entangled with the legacies of settler-colonialism in Canada in respect of land rights and the role of the Crown. To many in the Innu communities of Nitassinan (the Innu-aimun word meaning “Homeland”), the free-running rivers of that region have been their highways, pharmacies, larders, and companions for thousands of years of continuous occupation. To dam them is, at a fundamental level, to put a hard-stop on the flow of relations. As Lydia Mestokosho, one of the people I came to know in the region, said: “It seems crazy that we give a corporation that’s ten years old rights, but we won’t give rights to a ten-thousand-year-old river. Water is life.”
One of the details that struck me most powerfully in terms of injustice was that, despite its location in a landscape fabulously wealthy in terms of freshwater, despite Hydro-Québec’s extraction of enormous amounts of clean energy from the river-systems in the region, the Innu township of Ekuanitshit still has a “boil-water” advisory for its domestic water supply. If it’s possible to build one of the biggest multi-dam systems in the history of Canada on the Romaine River to the east of Ekuanitshit, why is it not possible to supply a community of six hundred people with clean, safe drinking water?
Rumpus: One of the indigenous Innu, the poet Rita Mestokosho, has a cadence in her storytelling that sounds like the flow of a river. Why are her stories so important to the river, and vice versa?
Macfarlane: Rita is a true force: poet, activist, community leader, singer, healer. All of these things exist in her as a continuous terrain I cannot recommend her poetry highly enough. It starts with Atiku utei, Le cœur du caribou, a collection of poems without a single full stop in it, in which verse runs like a river, in Innu-aimun and French. Rita and I are currently planning to collaborate on the translation of some of her poems into English. Her clarity of vision and intensity of purpose remain inspirational to me. I spent time with her before descending the Mutehekau Shipu—over twelve days, and then more time after I emerged, rivered, from that wild and life-changing journey. Rita gave me and Wayne a series of tasks to fulfil on the river, and a series of instructions: always pitch our tents facing east, always give a pinch of tobacco to the land and a pinch to the water each day, fast once, gather water from specific places, gather Labrador tea from others. She also told me that I would be able to ask one question of the river but that I wouldn’t know what the question was until the answer came. A day short of the sea––after a week-and-a-half of the most physically exacting and metaphysically turbulent journey of my life––her words came, unforgettably, true.
Rumpus: I am always hypnotized by your prose. What is your writing process like?
Macfarlane: One of the aspects of craft that most preoccupies me is rhythm and sound pattern in prose. There’s a tendency to forget that prose, especially non-fiction prose, might sing, or keep time, or embed echoes and rhymes within itself. We usually associate such formal properties with poetry. For me, these supra-propositional characteristics of prose are absolutely vital to reach the backward and abysm of the mind—to set strange and powerful currents flowing and swirling in the reader. For these reasons, I spend a lot of time reading my sentences out loud to myself. The very last pass of any book, before it goes into proof, involves speaking the entire text aloud. This usually takes well over a day. I have found that this is time well spent. The tongue trips on what the eye glides across, the ear hears things that escape the usual systems of vigilance.
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Author photograph by Bryan Appleyard
