Imagining rivers as having lives, and rights

Widely recognised as the pre-eminent writer about ‘nature and place’ of our times, Robert Macfarlane wears many hats. From being a Professorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s English Department, to twice donning the role of the Man Booker Prize judge, to acting as a creative collaborator with some of the finest artistes of the age, Macfarlane’s vision and output has stunned the world right since his first book, ‘Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination’, written in his early 20s. Just 48, this highly decorated author has written over 10 books and hundreds of essays, articles, and scripts, at the heart of which lies a subtle and complex exploration of the myriad relationships between landscape and the human heart. His most recent magnum opus, ‘Is a River Alive?’, releases worldwide this month. It’s a book spread across four countries, including India, where he undertakes life-altering journeys to and along some extraordinary water-bodies. We speak about these travels and learnings…

Siddharth Pandey: Your previous books have straddled terrains right from the top to the bottom: mountains, plains and the subterranean worlds of caves and catacombs. By choosing ‘rivers’ as the key sites of navigation and interrogation for your newest book, you have worked out a wonderful common denominator that links all these landscapes. You even call the rivers your ‘co-authors’. How do rivers translate into literary metaphors, and, as you say, in writers themselves?

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers absolutely co-authored this book with me. I could not have written it, could not have thought it, without their presence and force. The ideas which run through the pages of ‘Is A River Alive?’ have their sources in people, places –– and in flowing freshwater. You are right that rivers connect and recur in my earlier books, and indeed in the music and songs I’ve been writing over recent years: ‘Lost in The Cedar Wood’ and ‘The Moon Also Rises,’ the two albums I wrote with Johnny Flynn, brim with river-songs. And, of course, growing up as a mountaineer, I have long been aware of the ancient dialectic which exists between rivers and mountains; each shaping the other’s forms.

I might also say that rivers run through people as well as through places: the book argues that modernity has instrumentalised, rationalised and homogenised rivers into ‘one-dimensional water’, present purely as ‘service providers’. Recognising that we are all ourselves water-bodies, flowed through and flowing on; remembering that rivers are life-forces as well as resources; telling new-old stories about how our fate runs with that of rivers, and always has –– these are part of the book’s work.

SP: I was struck by the geographical arrangement of your travels that take you from Cambridge in England to Ecuador in South America, Chennai in India and Quebec in Canada. How did you decide on choosing these extremely variegated terrains?

RM: Each of these places has become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called “the natural contract”. Each is a place where rivers and water 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 Quebec/Nitassinan from damming. And as for Cambridge/England, I am lucky to live within a mile or so of where a little spring rises from the bedrock in a wood called Nine Wells Wood. That spring and the network of chalk-streams and rivers it feeds have flowed through my life for the last 20 years –– as memory-keeper, language-maker, lifeline. And they flow through the pages of the book also.

SP: From the title to the text, the two questions you repeatedly ask yourself (and others around you as well) are whether an animacy governs the natural world, and why nature must be recognised as having rights of its own. Are the queries interrelated, and what might be the challenges of appreciating nature having its own being?

RM: If I may, I would challenge your phrasing here. It is not that an animacy ‘governs’ the natural world; rather that the world itself is animate –– and animating. At its heart, the book asks readers to imagine (or, we could perhaps better say, recognise) rivers as having lives, deaths and, yes, even rights. And to recognise a river as alive, one must of course first redefine the nature of life itself –– moving it away from the mechanistic vision of world-as-machine, of all that is not human as a version of what Isaac Newton called “inanimate brute matter”; and moving it towards an understanding of life as, fundamentally, relational.

We can confidently call a river alive because it enlivens us, because we live in relation with it. To quote John Muir: “Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fibre in our bodies, making them sing and glide!”

As for the question of nature having rights; as you know, the ‘Rights of Nature’ movement is a dynamic and exciting global current of thought, which seeks to recognise (for example) the inalienable rights of a river to exist, to flourish and to persist. Ecuador has four ‘Rights of Nature’ articles in its Constitution, no less; and the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (New Zealand) was recognised by a parliamentary Act in 2017 as a ‘living entity’ with attendant rights. Indian lawmakers were quickly inspired by the Whanganui legislation, and 2017 saw both the Ganges and the Yamuna recognised as rights-bearing beings –– though both judgments were subsequently struck down, and of course the Ganges and the Yamuna continue to be, in places, desperately stricken by pollution and in shocking overall ecological and chemical health.

SP: I have been deeply moved by the number of friendships that undergird your travels. Like most writers concentrating on nature and place, you of course delight in solitary journeys, but you equally enjoy the company of others and learning from others. How did this spirit of camaraderie and kinship especially impact the making of ‘Is a River Alive’?

RM: Thank you! I love conviviality and company, yes. I love learning from others: seeing through other’s eyes and hearing through other’s ears. In fact, there is barely a solitary moment in this book –– which marks quite a shift in tone and mode from, say, ‘The Wild Places’ (2007). I was fortunate to be companioned by some extraordinary people in ‘Is A River Alive?’; among them a Chilean mycologist of uncanny powers, Giuliana Furci, an Innu poet and activist called Rita Mestokosho, and of course the astonishing young Chennai-based naturalist, writer and campaigner, Yuvan Aves, who I am fortunate to call a friend.

SP: This is the first time you have visited India for your research, that has resulted in a beautiful, large chapter right in the middle of the book. From extensively ambling across the British Isles for your previous books to now reaching the peripheries of the subcontinent – what forged the attraction towards South Asia?

RM: Yes, almost a third of the book takes place in and around Chennai, a city born of water and marsh, and a region with an immense history of water-literacy –– but a city which has in many ways forgotten the centrality of water to its existence. Simply put, Yuvan Aves is the reason I travelled to and wrote about India. We had been friends for several years but had never met in person until I arrived in Chennai in early 2023. Yuvan, with characteristic generosity and perceptiveness, became my guide on the complexities of Chennai’s wateriness. The chapter is entitled ‘Ghosts, Monsters and Angels’: the ghosts are those of the rivers that had to be killed for Chennai to live. The monsters are the terrible forms those river ghosts take every few years, when they are resurrected by cyclone or monsoon. And the angels are those who watch over the lives of the rivers where they survive, and who seek to revive those who are dying.

Yuvan is one of these water-activists trying to imagine a more just future for water in the region, such that all of life (or ‘palluyir’, in the Tamil term Yuvan likes to use) might flourish.

I will add that coming to India also allowed me a better understanding of the terrific recent surge in what might loosely be called ‘Indian nature writing’, in which voices at once political and poetic are being raised in defence of and reflection upon the living world in India. I think here of the work of Yuvan himself, in his dazzlingly fine and prize-winning work ‘Intertidal’; of Neha Sinha (‘Wild and Wilful’); of your own work, especially ‘Fossil’ and the forthcoming book on Shimla; of Arati Kumar Rao (‘Marginlands’); and numerous others. It feels like an exciting time for the literature of nature and place in India.

SP: At one point in the Chennai section, you and Yuvan read aloud a ghazal you co-wrote in praise of the Olive Ridley sea-turtles, that have been in the news for quite some time for their tragic trawler-induced deaths. As a writer and professor of English, in what ways do you think literature can save the natural world, in both everyday and radical ways?

RM: Yes, Yuvan and I co-wrote a praise-poem for these extraordinary creatures, who haul themselves ashore on the Chennai coast in their thousands each January/February to dig sand-nests and lay their eggs. As you rightly note, hundreds of these beautiful turtles are killed each year by trawler strike or by becoming entangled in fishing nets. It took the grotesque massacre of more than 1,000 turtles this year to finally force the Tamil Nadu government to act, in terms of enforcing the trawler exclusion zone, but there is much more to be done in terms of tightening the protection for and of the Olive Ridleys.

Meanwhile, the disastrous Great Nicobar project will, if it goes ahead as planned, include a commercial port at Galathea Bay, the last and largest nesting ground for Leatherback Turtles. This must be abandoned as a plan. We cannot call this ‘development’, when it destroys something that has been developing for more than 60 million years. A postscript: our ghazal, incidentally, was subsequently set to music by composer-singer Lydia Samuel and then performed, spectacularly, by the nine-voice choir HOWL. Those interested can hear the song on the usual streaming services by searching for ‘Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle)’ and HOWL.

SP: A unique sort of physicality characterises your prose that seeks to illuminate your actual encounters in a highly vivid fashion. How do you steer the craft of your writing with the spontaneity or ‘aliveness’ of nature you describe?

RM: Such a good question; such a hard answer! I suppose the best response is the book itself –– a 300-page exploration of how language itself might animate, might vivify; and of how one might create a “grammar of animacy”, in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated phrase, for flowing freshwater. I will add that, of course, language possesses extraordinary Lazarus-like powers. We have all, I think, fallen in love with or grieved for characters from fiction who never existed beyond ink and page. I realised early on that if I wished to help readers re-imagine rivers as living beings, I had to make language itself fundamental to that process of resurrection.

SP: For a book that is so deeply interested in nature’s aliveness, I was rather moved – and even partly haunted – by the way death figures in here, in virtually all the sections. As a final question, then, I would like you to meditate on this age-old link between life and death, and the ways in which that dialectic evolved during the course of your own journeys.

RM: Life and death wove closely together over the years of writing this book, in ways I could not have foreseen. They ghosted one another. In each of the three main sections of the book –– Ecuador, India, Canada –– I travelled closely with someone who had lost someone very close to them (a father; a sister; a friend), and whose recovery from that grief was in some vital way enabled by rivers and by water. In the end, in a very brief epilogue that wholly surprised me, and that seems to be surprising those readers who reach it, my own future death declared itself to me, right out of the bright flow of life.

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