Review by Peter Reason
It is very unlikely that many readers of Shiny New Books have missed Robert Macfarlane’s new book. It has been reviewed in most of the major periodicals; chosen as ‘book of the week’ on BBC Radio 4; Macfarlane is making appearances at Book Festival’s across the country; Amazon heralds ‘The Instant Number One Sunday Times Bestseller’. I doubt the book needs much by way of introduction; but it is an important book and deserves and extended review.
Is a River Alive? takes a classic Macfarlane form. He identifies a field of inquiry, a question about some aspect the more-than-human world – the meaning of mountains, that nature of old pathways, the qualities of underland – and journeys to them and into them with his notebooks, finding local guides to help him experience and reflect on these places. The journeys are often strenuous and challenging, and he describes them in sensuous detail, taking the reader with him; and along the way he reflects on how to understand the places and people he meets. Is a River Alive? is ‘a journey into an idea that changes the world – the idea that a river is alive.’
In pursuit of this question, Macfarlane ventures to the cloud forests of Rio los Cedros in Ecuador; to the highly polluted Adyar, Cooum, and Kostasthalaiyar Rivers that flow through Chennai; and to the untamed Mutehekau Shipu, a wild river in Quebec. As he takes the reader on his travels, he invites us to reflect on significant themes. In Ecuador he reflects on the world-wide movement to establish rivers as legal persons, which was in many ways started when the new Constitution of Ecuador established the living rights of nature. In Chennai his focus is on pollution, the ‘poisoning’ of the rivers, the consequent loss of other-than-human life forms, and the brave people doing their best to protect them. ‘Can you murder a river? he asks. In Quebec he meets Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, who has ‘always known the river is alive’. He takes instruction from her as to how to comport himself with a living River; before descending in a kayak with friends and guides, shooting major rapids, portaging around waterfalls. Between these adventures he visits a chalk spring near his home in Cambridge. Macfarlane knows his craft and take us to these places and his experience of them vividly.
I came to this book with a particular interest and perspective, which might be seen as a bias, and so with a critical eye. Over the past five years and more I have, with a group of colleagues, initiated a series of co-operative inquiries exploring what is means to see Rivers as living, sentient beings rather than inanimate objects; and asking, if we call to Rivers in this manner, might we elicit a response? And how would we understand that response?[i] These inquiries have involved over one hundred human persons and Rivers across the world, drawing on the ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ approach of Australian philosopher Freya Mathews, who is also influenced by Indigenous Australian wisdom.
However, most of the critical expectations I brought to my reading were unfounded. I was quickly drawn into the early narrative of the chalk spring, started making copious notes as I read the early sections, but abandoned this as I was drawn more deeply. In the last pages I was simply urgently following the narrative. This is in my view Macfarlane’s best book, drawing attention to an urgent issue and doing so in the engaging style the reading public has come to expect of him. Nevertheless, this is an important book that deserves to be read critically.
There has always been what Veronica Swann, writing in the TLS, calls a ‘swashbuckling’ quality to earlier books – Kathleen Jamie notoriously criticised him as being a ‘lone enchanted male’ in her 2007 LRB review of Mountains of the Mind. I see some of this quality remaining in Is a River Alive? There is more than a little neo-colonial quality in travelling to distant parts the world to explore his questions; and echoes of Edwardian explorers in the physical challenges he chooses to endure. There are so many Rivers in England he might have explored (as Amy-Jane Beer does effectively in The Flow: Rivers, water and wildness”[ii]). I must also draw attention to the carbon cost of at least six long-haul flights – we cannot afford to be flying around the planet at a time of climate catastrophe, and influential people like Macfarlane have a responsibility not to normalize such extravagant carbon emissions. But all that said, there is humility in this writing, an authenticity in his encounters with the people he encounters, a very genuine sense of inquiry which shines through the elegance of his writing and his erudition (The book rests on substantial literary and academic research as well as adventure).
I see Is a River Alive as resting on three pillars, informed by three perspectives: the movement for legal Rights of Nature; the ‘death/killing’ of Rivers and their ecosystems through pollution; and the indigenous or animist understanding of River as a living being. I think Macfarlane addressed the first two well – not in the sense of an academic review, but as an accessible narrative for the lay reader.
His approach to the third pillar is much more uncertain. It is as if he is teetering around, not really sure whether to take the plunge into a radical alternative view. Rowan Hooper in the New Scientist is upset because they think Macfarlane is advocating animism. I would be happier if this were so, but as reviewer much more concerned about the ambiguity of his position. Does he really know what he means by his question, ‘is a river alive?’ There are hints through the book of an animist sympathy. He tells of Indigenous shamans purifying the assembly chamber and calling in the spirit of Pachamama, Mother Earth, before the vote on the Rights of Nature was to be held. In the cloud forest he tells with some wonder how his companion, mycologist Guiliana Furchi, can intuit the presence of rare fungi as if they are calling to her. He refers to los Cedros as ‘anima’, as ‘aboundingly relational being’. Before travelling down the Mutehekau Shipu, Macfarlane and his companion are instructed by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, how to comport themselves ceremonially in relation to River. As instructed, he offers tobacco to the water and to the land each day. And at the dramatic gorge where Hydro-Quebéc is seeking to build a dam, Macfarlane finds a tiny spruce tree growing in the rock, ancient but no more than eight inches high, which he identifies at the World Tree, a point of resistance. As Rita instructed, he takes the red thread she tied around his wrist and wraps it around the sacred tree. Experiences such as this are described – with acknowledgment of the challenges they pose to his rational upbringing – but to what extent does he take them in? Do they shake the foundations of his world? Are they truly honoured, or do they largely remain as largely curiosities?
Toward the end of his journey down Mutehekau Shipu he muses ‘… we need to find new kinds of imagining, new ways of being that would leave us less alone in the world’. This is not a new thought: in 1972 polymath Gregory Bateson wrote, ‘The most important task today is… to learn to think in the new way’. [iii] Regrettably, we have collectively changed very little, and the dominant ways of imagining and being continue to wreak havoc on the ecology of Earth. But how far does Macfarlane stretch his own imagination? Later he remarks to a companion, that the crux of the matter is not ‘Who speaks for the river’ but ‘What does River say?’ and reflects that ‘while it is relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.’ But he makes no attempt to even begin to address this task. There is a significant body of literature on contemporary animism that sees ‘a world of persons, only some of whom are human’;[iv] there is substantial writing by Indigenous scholars and Elders for whom their world is kin;[v] there is within contemporary Western philosophy a resurgence of interest in panpsychism, which argues that some kind of innerness – mind, sentience, subjectivity, the will to self-realization – is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind;[vi] there is the imaginative storytelling of novelists such as Richard Powers whose The Overstory reflects deeply on the sentience of trees[vii]
I understand the point put forward by Blake Morrison in the Guardian, that Macfarlane is ‘less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer’. But by his own admission, Macfarlane is asking a deep philosophical questions, and if we never really know what he means when he asks, ‘Is a river alive?’, we may be (as I was) enthralled by his prose but left mystified rather than illuminated. Of all people, Macfarlane has the capacity to write lucidly on these deep questions for his broad audience, and I am sorry he did not do so.
Maybe to ask, ‘Is a river alive?’ is to ask the wrong question. As Macfarlane’s son Will points out, the answer is self-evidently ‘yes!’ Rivers a key parts of living ecologies; and as James Lovelock’s Gaia theory shows, the great rivers of the world are also alive in the sense that they contribute to the stability of atmosphere and climate of our living planet. So maybe the truly radical question – one that would draw us to ‘find new kinds of imagining, new ways of being’ – is not Is a River Alive? but rather ‘Is River sentient?’ Does River have voice, carry any kind of inner presence, of being-for-itself in the world, as my colleague Andreas Weber argues?[viii] This question is touched on and sidestepped throughout the book. It may well be a question too far for a mainstream nature writer like Macfarlane. But it is certainly a question that would stir our human imaginations, a question that must be at the heart of any way of being in balance and harmony with our living world. As Amitav Ghosh puts it so clearly in The Nutmeg’s Curse:
It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.[ix]
[i] Reason, P. (2024). Learning How Land Speaks. Learning How Land Speaks. https://peterreason.substack.com/; Reason, P. (2023). Extending Co-operative Inquiry Beyond the Human: Ontopoetic inquiry with Rivers. Action Research. https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503231179562
[ii] Beer, A.-J. (2022). The Flow: Rivers, water and wildness. Bloomsbury.
[iii] Bateson, G. (1972). Form, Substance and Difference. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (pp. 423-440). Chandler.
[iv] Harvey, G. (2017). Animism: Respecting the living world (Second ed.). Hurst and Company; Harvey, G. (Ed.). (2015). The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Routledge.
[v] Poelina, A., Webb, B., Wooltorton, S., & Godden, J. (2024). Waking Up the Snake: Ancient Wisdom for Regeneration. In M. Lobo, E. Mayes, & L. Bedford (Eds.), Planetary Justice: Stories and Studies of Action, Resistance, and Solidarity. Bristol University PressPoelina, A., Bagnall, D., Graham, M., Williams, R. T., ; Yunkaporta, T., Marshall, C., Diop, S. A., Samnakay, N., Maloney, M., & Davis, M. (2024). Declaration of Peace for Indigenous Australians and Nature: A Legal Pluralist Approach to First Laws and Earth Laws. Springer Verlag.
[vi] Mathews, F. (2023). The Dao of Civilization: A Letter to China. Anthem Press; Mathews, F. (2003). For Love of Matter: A contemporary panpsychism. SUNY Press. Mathews, F. (2024). The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos. Learning How Land Speaks. https://peterreason.substack.com/p/the-deep-law-of-the-living-cosmos. Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Rider;
[vii] Powers, R. (2018). The Overstory. William Heinemann.
[viii] Weber, A. (2016). The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, feeling and the metamorphosis of science. New Society Publishers.
[ix] Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. John Murray, p.201. My review for Shiny New Books here
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Hamish Hamilton, 2025). 9780-241624814, 384pp., hardback.
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