Is A River Alive? Robert McFarland. 2025. 301 Pages. (Hardcover.).

This British author visits river systems in Ecuador, India, England and Quebec, tracing the movement to grant natural systems like rivers and mountains legal status as living beings with rights. As such, this is in some sense an autobiography. The Rights of Nature movement has become a powerful force with some remarkable successes as an antidote to extractive exploitation and pollution, as he documents.

There are many references to native cultures with the tacit assumption that Natives always protect the environment because they believe their ancestors become a part of it in some ethereal manner. This is certainly non-science if not nonsense, and it is not at all clear that the natives always knew or could know what to prioritize in a constantly changing environment. The damming of rivers for hydroelectric projects is repeatedly condemned, but no alternative realistic plans for electricity production are offered.

It takes considerable linguistic gymnastics to accept rivers as living beings in the usual sense of the word ´living’ without any nucleotides or cell structures.

A long quote may give readers a sense of some of the vagueness of parts of this book: «Rivers flow through Rita’s poetry…. She is both water-thought… and water bodied, (free to feel the water in my veins). She speaks of the sky as her father, the river as her mother. She figures poetry itself as a river. There is a powerful sense throughout her work that she is speaking with- being flowed through by- natural forces greater than her individual self: indeed the sense that the idea of the individual as an island or singular unit is irrelevant, even deceitful. In Rita’s poetry, humans are part land (my heart is made of pine branches) and subject to sudden transformation; to skin -slipping and shape shifting (I will become salmon). … the rivers, the land and their beings speak. Caribou listen and addressed the reader. A bear is a grandfather, and wolves are great-uncles. Streams whisper, the sky utters, and rivers murmur the name of an Elder who has passed away. »

My all time favourite singer and song is Paul Robson’s rendition of of Old Man River, with its emphasis on the almost complete irrelevance of an individual human life in the grand scheme of the universe. I do value conservation and preservation, but as a scientist I believe it needs to be done in a careful and at least semi scientific manner, not by blindly following some creed of dubious value.

3/5

Thanks, The Economist.