Reviews - Is a River Alive?

284 reviews for:

Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane

4.41 AVERAGE

rprkrshearer's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

The introduction to this book was so beautiful I was afraid I was going to need to get it on paper, necessitating annotation; the author is scientist and poet. I may need to do this anyway, as it is gorgeous in its entirety. Much of the introduction alludes to and overlaps with tenets that have been broached in other readings I’ve explored this year, like shifting baseline syndrome (referred to in Crossings, and how the bugs in your windscreen are markedly lesser than they were in the early nineties after a long trip across the country; the habitats explored in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, the rewriting of the constitution and its boldness of environmental protections, recognition of nature and indigenous people, their rites, and cultures, as well as the Indian mountains in Eight Bears; and the environmental activist work by Indigenous women detailed in works by Wall Kimmerer and Krawec. Their understanding of rivers as living, and as deserving of legal protections and inherent rights, extend to other cultures and communities, in academia, and especially manifest in Māori culture and legal work in Aotearoa New Zealand, which inspired the same type of legal protections for the Ganges in India, and whose influence continues to spread.

The extensive time spent in the Ecuadorean cloud forest in the first third of the book was so lush and contemplative. Again, much overlap with Crossings and the trail of the spectacled bear from Eight Bears, the reciprocity and syntax of animism begotten by Wall Kimmerer’s work. This text is also strongly braided with literary works like the epic of Gilgamesh; rather than a legend, functioning as a warning against the hubris of godhood, and the etymology of Ancient Greek words forewarning a desolate wasteland that may yet be our future because no other living beings may remain to share it with us. There were also beautifully relatable passages about the contemplation of death that recalled for me the logistical and existential importance of these conversations with those we love as evoked by Doughty’s many works, as Julia, a fungi scientist, grapples with her love of things that bloom amid decomposition, in juxtaposition with the loss of her father, which she has found overwhelming and unbearable. She expresses a desire for her body to be left to return to the forest, and remarks that she needs to put that in writing. While none of these things relate directly to the sentience of a river, they exist among it, alongside it, as the life that teems alongside its tributaries. The author argues that the question of the title is not anthropomorphic, or personifying, because the life he insists is present is not like that of personhood, or people. It defies hierarchy.

I also loved the recurrent imposition of racism and its function as a root cause harm upon the environment, and the Indigenous people who have served as its stewards, (e.g. Macfarlane quoting McGee in 1905 as, “geologist, anthropologist, racist” and further described “conqueror” of rivers, loved this). The voices, languages, and names of these communities are prioritized in each chapter, both in the histories of each place and river, and contemporarily.

When the author moves his inquiry to Canada, I whooped for joy at the invocation of project CETI, the program committed to translating the language of sperm whales. Macfarlane muses, what are their stories and song about? Have they already mastered irony?

This latter part of the book is probably my favorite, and the most powerful of the narrative, despite my own low-grade retraumatization by the descriptions of running whitewater rapids of the Mutehekau Hipu. Macfarlane describes this journey of traveling this river so ethereally, almost as though it is another planet, like a place unmoored from time, from other humans. And yet, this place that is so untamed, power, beauty, and life unbridled, is revealed to be at risk of being dammed, which becomes devastating to both author and reader by the zenith of the navigation of this river. On our knees before the question, “is a river alive?” how can we answer in any other way? Like Coleridge, Macfarlane gives these rivers a “grammar of animacy”. He disrupts the hierarchy of human supremacy over other life, earth, and being; a reciprocity of phenomena.

These meditations are beautiful, prosaic, and deeply moving, and they function doubly as a call to action, as many of the texts I’ve referenced do, too: that we are always within this world, and it is our duty to preserve it. The end notes are rife with specific, actionable resources the reader may pursue to get involved to protect our planet, and support existing efforts to do so.