Ripple effect

Even before he began travelling along the rivers of Ecuador, Canada and India for his new book, nature writer Robert Macfarlane spent hours beside the 10,000-year-old chalk springs of Nine Wells, near his home in Cambridge, England.

- Sukanya Datta

These streams drew life to the region, as rivers tend to do: at first, they fed the birch and hazel trees; then the deer and foxes; then people, kings and a city. "These streams are where a river is newborn," says Macfarlane, 48.

His new book, Is a River Alive? (May 2025; Penguin), focuses on what happens further downstream, in three massive river systems: the Rio Los Cedros (River of the Forest of the Cedars) in Ecuador, now under threat from gold mining; the choked, polluted and encroached-upon creeks, lagoons and rivers of Chen-nai; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River of north-eastern Quebec, which was granted personhood in 2021, following a pitched campaign led by the indigenous Innu people.

For two years, Macfarlane has toured these regions, trying to answer the questions: Who decides what is and isn't alive? How is this changing? And what does it mean to recognise, both in law and the imagination, that rivers (as well as mountains, glaciers, forests) are liv-ing entities?

"In a sense, Is a River Alive? is a love letter to riv-ers, and their many defenders," says Macfarlane. "The book is also a political and philosophical con-frontation."

Over the years, we've accepted the idea that a cor-poration can have rights, including the rights to pri-vacy and fair trial, Macfarlane adds. Isn't it strange that we're uncomfortable saying the same of a river's right to flow, go unpolluted, or bring life to the earth around it? Excerpts from an interview.

What first sparked your love for nature?

I grew up as a climber, in a family of mountaineers. My grand-father, Edward Peck, was a mountaineer. My parents have returned time and again to the Himalayas.