This book is a journey into an idea that changes the world – the idea that a river is alive.
It explores the histories, people, places and futures of that idea and others in its family: that a forest might think, for instance, or a mountain remember. It asks what happens if we take seriously the idea of a river’s aliveness. What does such a recognition mean for perception, law and politics? It is an attempt to imagine water otherwise.
Is a River Alive? unfolds across three main landscapes. First, an Ecuadorian cloud forest named Los Cedros, the “Forest of the Cedars,” home to the headwaters of the Río Los Cedros, the ”River of the Cedars.” Second, the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the watery city of Chennai in southeast India. And third, the wild interior of Nitassinan, homeland of the Innu people, through which runs the Mutehekau Shipu, also known as the Magpie River, who makes seafall at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, six hundred miles northeast of Montreal.
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 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 from dams.
I wish to say plainly and early that this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages, among them the Río Los Cedros, the Adyar, the Cooum and the Kosasthalaiyar, the Mutehekau Shipu, the mighty St. Lawrence, and the clear-watered stream who flows unnamed from the spring that rises at Nine Wells Wood, a mile from my house, and who keeps time across the pages that follow. They are my co-authors.
Most of us, I think, once felt rivers to be alive. Young children are natural explorers of the vivid in its old sense: from the Latin vividus, meaning ”spirited, lively, full of life.” Young children instinctively inhabit and respond to a teeming world of talkative trees, singing rivers and thoughtful mountains.
The language of hydrological governance refers to rivers, streams and lakes as ”waterbodies.” To the forty thousand recognized waterbodies in England, Wales and Scotland should be added another 65 million or so – for every human is, of course, a waterbody. 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.
Urban planners speak of ”daylighting” streams and rivers. This is the practice of un-burying the watercourses over which many cities have been built, and which have been confined to drains and tunnels, flowing invisibly down in darkness. These imprisoned watercourses are sometimes known as ”ghost rivers”: their voices are heard at street level, if at all, as whispers drifting from manhole covers or drain grilles.
London has more than twenty such ghosts. You could walk the streets of London for years and not know that you are crossing rivers other than the Thames each day, entombed beneath the asphalt: the Fleet, the Moselle, the Walbrook, the Tyburn and the Westbourne to the north of the Thames, and south of it the Quaggy, the Peck, the Neckinger, the Effra, the Falconbrook and others, their names now largely lost to concrete and culvert. The celebrated 1865 ”Viele Map” of New York records the locations and routes of Manhattan Island’s natural springs, streams and marshes. It shows New York once to have been a water-city.
”Daylighting” lets the water of buried streams meet the sun again. It is a means of bringing river ghosts back to life in towns and cities, of re-encountering rivers as friends and fellow citizens. In cities where daylighting has occurred, the results have often been socially trans-formative. In Seoul the Cheonggyecheon Stream was freed from the highway that had encased it: the public park created along its banks now draws ninety thousand pedestrians on an average day. Summer temperatures at the waterside can be five degrees cooler than surrounding areas, and air pollution levels along the stream’s corridor have dropped by more than a third
In the pages that follow, I want to daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us – and to see what trans-formations occur when rivers are recognized as both alive and killable.
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Pages 15–18 – Edited for length)
Excerpted from Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. Copyright © 2025 Robert Macfarlane. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
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