Marriage meets murder in a fun read

Is A River Alive? is not only a magnificent paean to rivers, but is also an urgent call to transform the way people think about the natural world

- Olivia Ho

IS A RIVER ALIVE? By Robert Macfarlane Non-fiction/Hamish Hamilton/ Paperback/375 pages/$49.42 ★★★★★

In the first eight pages of Is A River Alive?, British writer Robert Macfarlane covers 12,000 years in the life of a river. With dizzying virtuosity, he spins the reader through a vast sweep of time: the retreat of glaciers, the first human settlements, the rise and fall of civilizations through war and plague, his own birth—for this river is the unnamed chalk stream near his house—all the way till the summer of 2022, the hottest on global record, when the river nearly dies.

Macfarlane, a professor at University of Cambridge, is one of today's foremost wordsmiths of the natural landscape. He has explored mountains, wildernesses and, in his last non-fiction book, the extraordinary Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019), the subterranean spaces in the depths of the earth.

His latest book is a magnificent paean to rivers, but it is also an urgent call to transform the way humans think about the natural world, the "other-than-human" beings with which they share a planet.

It is no spoiler to say that the answer to the book's eponymous question is a resounding "yes", but as Macfarlane shows, much work remains to be done if people choose to define a river as not just spiritually, but also legally and politically, alive.

Across the world, landmark legislation has sought to enshrine the rights of rivers, mountains and forests in law. For example, the 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act in New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, recognizing it as a living ancestor to the iwi, or Maori tribe, of the same name, whose life and health must be protected.