In best-selling and award-winning author Robert Macfarlane’s new book, “Is the River Alive?” (2025, 374 pages) the title’s question, “Is the river alive?” jumps out at you even before you’ve turned the first page. What does he mean? After 374 pages, you will know exactly what Macfarlane means, and your idea of what a river is will be changed forever. I’ve read a few of Macfarlane’s previous books (“The Wild Places,” “The Old Ways,” “Underland”) and I’ve always enjoyed, been educated and appreciated his intimately comprehensive poetic style of writing. “Is the River Alive?” is a profound extension of these previous books.
Macfarlane’s format for this book is in three parts of around a hundred pages each that are divided into the seasons of winter, spring and autumn, with storylines of extended travels and time spent in the countries of Ecuador, India and Canada. The lucky reader gets to spend quality time in each of these locations with Macfarlane as he travels and tromps through wilderness, and explores three of these three countries major rivers.
The book begins with a kind of diary entry about the author’s life and family in preparation for these major treks he is about to embark upon. We get to know who Macfarlane is and some of his passions and history as a naturalist and travel writer. Right away in the introduction, Macfarlane sets the stage for what is coming in part 1.
“Each of these three rivers 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, Canada, from dams.”
He then gets very personal and brings his perspective home to the body of whoever is reading his words: “Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water, our skin is two-thirds water; even our bones are watery. We were swimmers before we were walkers, slow-turning like breath-divers in the dark flotation tank of the womb. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places.” But “we have become waterproofed,” he proclaims and goes on to quote writers like Ivan Illich and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whom he quotes as saying, “We have largely lost a love-language for rivers.”
Macfarlane says he prefers to refer to rivers as “who” rather than using inanimate pronouns. His descriptions of rivers tend to resemble vascular systems and neural networks. “Everyone lives in a watershed,” he proclaims. He imagines rivers in the future that are flowing “free and clear” and, like the Maori indigenous people of New Zealand believe, that rivers are living, sacred ancestors. He, then, introduces us to the “Rights of Nature” movement that works to legislatively mobilize communities that are led mainly by indigenous peoples and women. “We will never think like a river,” Macfarlane writes; “but maybe we can think with them.”
We start out in winter in part 1 with specific rivers in Ecuador and mainly the River of the Cedars (Los Cedros). “I want to trace back towards its source in the upper gorges of the cloud-forest,” he starts. He, then, describes the river upon arrival: “Where the streams and rivers flow fast over rapids in Los Cedros, they are green-watered, and where they gather in pools they are blue as a glacier’s heart. Pumas and spotted cats drink from them. White-throated dippers fish them.”
It is the cloud-forest, he writes, that is really a water-forest that acts as a collector for the moisture suspended in the mist which allows the river to maintain its flow even in dry periods. In the company of indigenous guides, we trek through Ecuadoran cloud-forest in an odyssey experience with undergrowth, overstory and, of course, the river, which he musically describes as, “The white noise of the cascade, with its repeating elements, is a Philip Glass composition.”
In part 2, it is spring, and we are with Macfarlane in India at the mouth of the Adyar River at the Indian Ocean with his Indian guide Yuvan and the book’s section on “Ghosts, Monsters and Angels”: “The ghosts are those rivers who had to be killed for cities to live. The monsters are the terrible forms those rivers 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,” he writes.
These metaphors go a long way toward telling the story in this section referencing humans who have lived and died by the rivers of southeast India for 1.5 million years. In this section, we venture down Indian rivers alongside pelicans, painted storks, spoonbills and snakebirds. From darker inferences, Macfarlane brings the name and work of Thomas Berry to the fore to give this section and this country’s rivers an ecological and spiritual boost. This and the mention of “sea-sparkle” helps to brighten the monsoon season and the whole ocean or river glitters with sea-algae “like magic,” he says. “You can see all the veins of the forest lit up — you can see that everything is connected,” says Yuvan.
Spring turns to autumn in part 3 and we find outselves on “the Living River,” as Macfarlane refers to the Mutehekau Shipu River in Canada, with a female indigenous Innu woman named Rita, who takes us on a more spiritual journey from a Native American perspective through the provinces of the French-Canadian landscape and an inland lake only reachable by float-plane. “A river births a lake, a lake in turn births a river. Who is the parent and who the child?” asks the Innu guide. But the chapter goes on for another 50 pages of human interactions, camping, and hiking with rainstorms and wind, and various indigenous rituals, and the stories of the river guardians who oversee its protection and who chant the provocative phrase to end this book’s profound prophetic journey: “Death and love and life, all mingled in the flow.”
(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of more than 30 books, including the award-winning nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods,” and is a longtime resident of Jackson County.)