Is this river alive?

As pollution levels hit record highs and fresh water becomes ‘the new oil’, is it time to radically reimagine our relationship to the natural world?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/26/is-this-river-alive-robert-macfarlane-on-the-lives-deaths-and-rights-of-our-rivers
Guardian | Robert Macfarlane Sat 26 Apr 2025
Adapted from Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, published on 1 May 2025 by Hamish Hamilton.

There are worldwide examples of rivers, good and bad, in this article (and book). Macfarlane "made three long river journeys to regions where rivers have become a focus for revolutionary thinking about what the philosopher Michel Serres called “the natural contract”. In each of these places, rivers are understood in some fundamental way to be “alive” – and in each place, too, the survival of rivers is under extreme threat: from mining, pollution and damming."

This very pertinent article includes this Aotearoa-related piece:

On 20 March 2017 an extraordinary piece of legislation called the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act was passed in Aotearoa New Zealand’s parliament house, accompanied by tears and songs from many of those present. The act concerned the Whanganui River, who rises as meltwater on the slopes of three North Island volcanoes and flows for 180 miles to its mouth at the Tasman Sea.

At the act’s heart is a radical claim: that the Whanganui River is alive. The act speaks unambiguously of the river as an “indivisible and living whole”; a “spiritual and physical entity” with a “lifeforce”. “We want … to begin with the view that [the river] is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief,” said Gerrard Albert, lead negotiator for the Whanganui iwi (tribe) during the act’s drafting. To its declaration of the river as alive, the act added a second dramatic innovation: it also recognised the river as a rights-bearing “legal person”, with the capacity to represent itself in court.

The passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act rang like a gong-strike around the world and supercharged the dynamic, disruptive current of ideas usually known as the Rights of Nature movement.

^{The upper reaches of New Zealand’s Whanganui river flowing through a forest.
Photograph: Brett Phibbs/AP}

"In the course of those journeys I met stolen, drowned and vanished rivers, and I saw the ruthlessly executed power of companies, criminals and governments. I also watched three people being brought back from within the shadow of death by rivers. I witnessed two mycological discoveries, one of which shifted slightly the whole story of life on Earth. By the time I finished writing, it was irrefutable to me that the rivers themselves had been my vital collaborators and co-authors."

Guardian Interview
Rob Macfarlane : ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me’
Jonathan Watts, global environment editor
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/17/rob-macfarlane-sometimes-i-felt-as-if-the-river-was-writing-me

The writer and poet on reimagining rivers as living beings, the ecological crisis near and far and why copyright laws should protect nature.

A couple of the questions asked of Macfarlane, and the answers that were most pertinent to me.

Q: Of all the books you’ve written so far, you state that none has felt as urgent as this one. Why?

A: The world’s ecological precarity, I suppose, is the plainest answer to that, and especially the precarity of the world’s rivers and freshwater bodies.

Q: Despite the global reach, the different elements seem to be brought together by relationships?

A: Absolutely. Other than that of the river, if there is a motif that weaves through the book, it’s that of the mycelium. It’s the mycelium that sets the night-forest alight in the first pages of the Ecuadorian section, and I hope it is the mycelium that is what might be called the visible “ethos” of the book. All that emerges in the book emerges as a function of cooperation, of collaboration, of working together. I wanted to try to find a literary form and a kind of polyphonic texture, in order to reflect the many voices and agencies involved in river-thought and river-guardianship.