Running with Rivers

Renowned British nature writer Robert Macfarlane, the author of Is a River Alive?, seems to resolve the book’s central question at the outset. “I wish to say plainly and early that this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages,” he writes in the introduction, stressing the point that the correct pronoun is “who,” not “which” or “that.” “Words make worlds. In English we ‘it’ rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons.”

But this kinetic exploration of far-flung fronts in the rights-of-nature movement is no dry treatise on grammar. Macfarlane takes readers on three immersive, sometimes suspenseful journeys along rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada. Though the ecosystems he visits are very much of this Earth, Macfarlane’s descriptions of them are transcendent.

“To be inside a cloud-forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized,” he writes as his crew in Ecuador — among them a mycologist and a musician/field recordist — ascends into a forest that may be as old as 1.5 million years, seeking mushrooms and the beginnings of the Rio Los Cedros, the River of the Cedars. While Macfarlane conjures a landscape of tree-sized ferns, hummingbirds, and an army of leaf-cutter ants, with howler monkeys echoing in the background, he also narrates the legal and political process that led to Ecuador’s almost miraculous decision to enshrine the rights of nature in its 2008 constitution. The protection in the Los Cedros Forest was threatened 10 years later by secretive mining contracts, but those concessions were shut down by a Constitutional Court in a ruling written by one of the people who joins Macfarlane’s cloud-forest trek.

It’s a less optimistic story when Macfarlane goes to Chennai in southeast India, where he finds the ghosts “of the rivers who had to be killed for this city to live.” Fortunately, he’s an intrepid traveler and erudite observer of the natural world who also has a gift for describing his human companions. His guide in Chennai is Yuvan Aves, who ran away from his home at 16 because of a stepfather “whose violence towards Yuvan was regular, methodical and committed.”

Once he’s free, Yuvan finds his place in the world as a teacher and naturalist. “It cannot always have been easy to be Yuvan’s colleague” at his school, Macfarlane writes. “Each year he would delay the start of spring-cleaning until he had been able to gather up all the spiders from every vertex and corner,” which he then released into the school’s staff residence, as he explained, “to acquaint myself better with these arachnids.” As Yuvan and Macfarlane visit a waterbird sanctuary, a small urban park and a stretch of beach where volunteers rescue sea turtle eggs, it’s clear that the victories eco-warriors like Yuvan can claim are narrow and tenuous.

In Macfarlane’s prose, rivers sing, dance, and nurture the lives in and around them as he contemplates their natural, legal, and political rights to live. Sickened by gold mines, poisoned by chemicals, and paralyzed by dams, they can also die. Few people, even those who feel deep compassion for fates of rivers and other animate beings in the industrialized world, will ever see such magnificent sites as the Rio Los Cedros and Canada’s Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River. Macfarlane’s resources, physical stamina, and poetic insight take us to the waters. 

In Canada, Macfarlane is joined by an eccentric friend named Wayne, “kind, weird, super-smart,” whom he describes in a rambling five-page tribute that touches on Wayne’s wish to go to the Italian Phlegraean Fields to “dive beneath the surface of a volcanic crater and wait for quakes to occur.” They enlist three river experts to guide them on a 100-mile journey by kayak down the Mutehekau Shipu, “the first river in Canada to be recognized as a living, rights-bearing being.” Even on the page, the trip through raucous rapids, blackfly swarms, and pounding rain is momentous.

Macfarlane, an English professor at the University of Cambridge whose previous nature and travel books include Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), and Underland (2019), closes the account of his Canadian river sojourn with the simple words, “I am rivered.”