Mark Dery
Learning to speak riverine: Robert Macfarlane’s latest book endeavors to rewild our minds.
Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane,
W. W. Norton & Company, 374 pages, $31.99
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What are a river’s pronouns? “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,” writes Robert Macfarlane in Is a River Alive?, his cri de coeur for the world’s dying watercourses. “In English, pronouns for natural features are ‘which’ or ‘that,’ not ‘who’: the river that flows; the forest that grows. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow.”
With that one-word incantation, he hopes to transform our subject-object relationship with nature—the “I-It” mindset of Cartesian dualism that exalts us over and against nonhuman beings and the natural world—into something closer to the philosopher Martin Buber’s vision of an “I-Thou” relationship, in which we’re existentially entangled with our fellow humans, creatures, trees, and so forth.
Our insistence on it-ing nonhuman animals and natural features has exacted a terrible cost, says Macfarlane, writing from an England where “every single river and lake” is “polluted beyond legal limits.” Aided by Descartes’s mechanistic worldview and abetted by the malignant fiction of human exceptionalism, capitalism, with its insatiable appetite for raw materials, is—literally, in the case of mass deforestation—sawing off the bough we’re sitting on.
A professor of literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge and the author of much-praised works of New Nature writing like Underland (2019), The Old Ways (2012), and Mountains of the Mind (2003), Macfarlane invokes the Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s notion of a “grammar of animacy.” In Potawatomi, she explains in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2013), “we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.” Plants and animals are regarded as animate, naturally, but so, too, are mountains and rivers. “The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.” English, by contrast, “doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing.”
Macfarlane takes up the tune: “As the living world has been further distanced and deadened into ‘brute matter,’ ” he writes, “so language use which recognizes the liveliness of land and water . . . has become rarer. We have largely lost a love-language for rivers.” He wants to move us to action before we wake up, one morning, in the Eremocene, E. O. Wilson’s term for the desolate moment when humanity finds itself alone in the world “as a consequence of its own actions,” marooned on a “mute planet” where, as Macfarlane puts it, “the speech, song and stories of other beings have become inaudible because extinguished.”
Is a River Alive? takes us along on Macfarlane’s search for the headwaters of the River of the Cedars in Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest, a garden of otherworldly delights so beautiful and biodiverse it makes Pandora, the paradisal planet in Avatar, look beggarly. Los Cedros, we learn, only narrowly escaped rape and pillage by the logging and mining companies who have ravaged millions of hectares of Andean cloud forest. From there, we head to the city of Chennai in southeast India, whose “wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries” weren’t so lucky: “unfit for any kind of life,” they’re festering sewers, fouled by human waste and poisoned by heavy metals. Yuvan Aves, an environmental activist and river whisperer, has dedicated his life to healing them. Despair, Macfarlane learns, is a first-world luxury. In Nitassinan, in Canada, the homeland of the Innu people, we join him for a white-knuckle kayak ride, all the way to the sea, on the bucking back of the treacherous, storm-swollen Mutehekau Shipu (in English, the Magpie River), the first natural feature to be legally recognized by the Canadian government, in 2021, as “a living, rights-bearing being.”
If Macfarlane holds out hope for any activist strategy, it’s for the Rights of Nature movement, which wages courtroom battles to secure legal personhood for natural features like rivers. Rooted in the law professor Christopher D. Stone’s 1972 article, “Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” the movement has racked up impressive wins in recent years, emboldened by Ecuador’s paradigm-shattering constitutional acknowledgment, in 2008, that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” (It was this passage, Article 71, that spared the Los Cedros cloud forest from despoliation.) Indigenous peoples have spearheaded the fight for nature’s rights. In New Zealand, the Māori successfully negotiated with the Crown to grant Mount Taranaki, the vast Te Urewera rainforest, and the Whanganui River, all of which they hold sacred, the same legal rights as living persons.
Running like a crosscurrent beneath Macfarlane’s passionate, activist storytelling is a bracingly new approach to nature writing. It swirls together a Mike Davis–level mastery of earth science, a Philip Larkin–esque ear for the music of sentences, a spooky phenomenology (he name-checks Heidegger), and a love of the backwoods weird reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood (whose masterpiece “The Willows” he riffs on). “I’ve always been interested in the limits of nonfiction,” he told an interviewer this April, “what happens when we bring in techniques from fiction, when we bring in anthropology, cultural history, vision, poetry, the lyric voice, and use all of those to create a new form.” In the course of writing the book, he learned to speak riverine. “The river really brought itself to bear upon language in this book,” he noted, so much so that, in the end, “language itself begins to liquefy.”
Is a River Alive? is a Joycean riverrun of a book, giddy with eddies, twisting and turning from miniaturist masterpieces of close observation to real-life characters who’ve stepped out of a magical-realist novel to wordplay worthy of Lewis Carroll to Whitmanesque lists of plant and animal names recited for their sheer deliciousness, so musical they make a kind of birdsong in the head. Macfarlane wants to rewild our minds. To stretch our moral imaginations to encompass “our kinship with all of the animate world.” To rouse us to raise forests from the amputated landscapes left by loggers and resurrect rivers murdered by miners. He dreams of nothing less than the re-enchantment of the world.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. He has taught journalism at NYU and “dark aesthetics” at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and a fellow at Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh; and has published in a wide range of publications.