We treat corporations like living things with rights. Why not rivers?

English writer Robert Macfarlane is often described as a nature and travel writer, but that label barely scratches the surface. His work — spanning books and collaborations with artists, musicians, documentarians and now, rivers themselves — is far more expansive. His latest book, "Is A River Alive?," asks that question not metaphorically but urgently, inviting us to rethink our relationship with the natural world at a fundamental level.

Macfarlane’s writing has always resisted easy categorization. Across his many books, including the dense and wondrous "Underland," he takes in everything around him with fluid, impeccably crafted prose —somehow managing to hold together science, myth, memory and movement in a single voice.

His third book, "The Wild Places," set the tone for much of what followed: adventure, the exploration of wild landscapes (in this case, within the British Isles), and a reverence for language—unsurprising from a former Oxford English don. His earlier works include the acclaimed "Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination" and a scholarly study of plagiarism and originality in 19th-century English literature. Today, Macfarlane lives just outside Cambridge and is a fellow of the university’s Emmanuel College.

Yet his work has never stayed cloistered within academia. From a forthcoming choral libretto premiering in Finland to a graphic novel retelling of the "Epic of Gilgamesh," Macfarlane’s creative orbit keeps expanding. His writing remains mobile, poetic, and deeply human. Even in his bestselling book about language, "The Lost Words: A Spell Book," co-created with artist Jackie Morris, there’s a sense of play and resistance —reviving nature-related words that had been dropped from a British children’s dictionary due to disuse among increasingly nature-alienated kids.

Now, in "Is A River Alive?," that linguistic and ecological urgency deepens. The book challenges our default tendency to objectify the natural world—even as we grant legal personhood to corporations and intellectual property. As Macfarlane wrote in 2017's "The Lost Words ":

“We’ve got more than 50% of species in decline. And names, good names, well used can help us see and they help us care. We find it hard to love what we cannot give a name to. And what we do not love we will not save.”

This interview has been compiled, and edited for length, from Macfarlane’s written responses to initial questions, followed by a video conversation between Salon’s correspondent in Toronto, and the author's home in Cambridge, England. It kicked off with a good five minutes about the local weather and our varied relationships to climate, and another five on local elections in the United Kingdom and the Labour Party’s missteps, and moved on from there.

Do you see this book as fundamentally being about Rights of Nature/more-than-human rights? Or something else? 

Five years ago, I scribbled three quick questions to myself in a notebook: ‘Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? Is a river alive?’. It was the last of these which wouldn’t let me go, and propelled me into years of travel to places in the world where rivers are being ‘imagined otherwise’. That’s to say, where rivers are recognised as alive, enlivening presences in story, art and law, rather than –– as Isaac Newton put it –– ‘brute inanimate matter’. River as life-force, not dead resource. I want readers to imagine rivers as having lives, deaths and, yes, even rights –– and to see what flows from such a radical re-imagining. So I suppose you could say that ‘fundamentally’, the book is an enquiry into the nature of life and the life of nature. That, at least, is its source, its philosophical spring. The fascinating legal question of the ‘rights of nature’ is a downstream rapid. 

In my country, England, all our rivers are dying. There isn’t a single river in the country in good overall health, according to Environment Agency standards. Flowing water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, and now in places even untouchable without falling sick. This desperate crisis is one of imagination as well as of legislation: we have forgotten that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. 

Rivers need new stories telling about them –– and some of those stories are very old. I went in search of those stories. To attach a brief political context to such ideas: it has long been in the interests of certain kinds of power to deem the living world dead, in order the better to extract from it. Power therefore also has an interest in suppressing worldviews which perceive land and water as animate presences. ‘Find their river and slit its throat’, writes the Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz in her brilliant poem ‘The First Water is The Body’, ventriloquising the shock-doctrine of colonists seeking to control colonised populations. What is murdered when you slit a river’s throat is both the practical access to drinkable water and, metaphysically, a way of being in the world. Seventeenth-century Spanish colonists in the ‘New World’ literally flogged animism out of those they conquered: anyone who referred to a river as alive was sentenced to a hundred lashes in the street by what was chillingly known as the commission for the ‘Extirpation of Idolatry’.

In England during the Reformation it was not only the altars that were stripped, but also sites in the landscape which were associated with animacy. Rivers, streams and springs were particularly targeted: springs were filled in, chapels built to worship the healing power of water were razed, and those who made pilgrimages to spring-sites were placed on trial at regional assizes.
 

When I spoke with one of the lawyers involved in the Atrato River case some years after the decision, she told me they were surprised the judge ruled in their favor. That it was surprisingly easy. The hard part, she said, has been implementation. That also seems to be the case since the Los Cedros decision, and with some of the other successful RoN cases. Could you address the significant discrepancy between good laws and poor implementation? 

Such an important question. The ‘implementation gap’, as lawyers refer to it. As it happens, César Rodriguez-Garavito –– the brilliant Colombian human rights and Rights of Nature lawyer who is central to the Ecuadorian section of the book –– was himself involved in the implementation of the Atrato ruling; and yes, it has been hard, very hard, not least given the de facto absence of the state in the upper regions of that river where illegal mining and narcotraficantes [drug traffickers] work hand in hand with one another. Of course, implementation gaps aren’t endemic to Rights of Nature rulings; they happen all over law and governance. As such, the practical difficulties of implementation shouldn’t in my view be used to invalidate the philosophical-jurisprudential radicalism of the best Rights of Nature judgments. In the Los Cedros case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court ruled in the winter of 2021 that a mining concession which looked set utterly to destroy an intact area of largely primary cloud-forest (an area of miraculous abundance and diversity of life) would violate the rights of the forest and its rivers to exist and to flourish –– as guaranteed by the four Rights of Nature articles which have been present in the Ecuadorian Constitution since 2008.

The ruling itself is a beautiful document, conceptually and stylistically –– and a very powerful one. The mining companies were forced to abandon all activities immediately, and make good any initial damage. So this was largely a case of harm forestalled rather than harm halted: implementation is easier in such cases, as no ‘making good’ is required. Nevertheless, it is an ongoing effort –– one with which I have become closely involved –– to ensure that the ruling is adhered to and upheld in both letter and spirit. The mining companies continue to circle, hungrily.

I give this answer in the same week as the Goldman Prize –– the Nobel of environmental activism –– has been won by the brilliant Peruvian river defender Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari for her work using the Rights of Nature to defend the life of the Marañon River in Peru. She and her fellow activists won a landmark legal victory declaring the Marañón River a rights-bearing entity, and secured protections for its ecological integrity. There’s a terrific recent interview with her by Katie Surma, in which Mari first lays out the central, clear vision of relatedness that exists between her people and the river: ‘For us, the river isn’t just a body of water. It’s sacred. It’s fundamental. […] If the river gets sick, we all get sick. That’s why we protect it […] when something happens to the river, it isn’t just an environmental issue, it affects everything.’ But (and) she then goes on to note that the legal victory is just a start; implementation is the next challenge: ‘We’re organizing, holding meetings and workshops, and preparing to meet with the government. To make this real, we need technical advice, and we need funding.’ 

You describe this book as being co-written with the rivers. How was the writing process, and this sense of co-authorship with your subject, different from the way you see any other subject (often environmental, often about beloved entities) you've written about before?
 

I truly mean this claim of co-authorship with rivers. I could not have written it –– could not have thought it –– without the sustained encounters I had with (and on, and in) rivers. My notebook pages are wet and blotched by water! As you’ll know from the final pages, too –– in an incident which took me utterly by surprise –– I experienced almost literally what it was like to write with a river. To acknowledge water’s indubitable force as a co-creator seems to me a very straightforward thing, even though copyright law in almost every jurisdiction denies the moral authorship of the living world in respect of art. Certainly, from its early days onwards, this book has felt like no other.

Writing it has been a torrential experience –– like wading upstream in a fast-flowing river, often unsure of footing, but following the clear, strong path of the water. There’s been a ceaseless flow of rivers, cases, encounters, surprises, ideas, contacts and legal cases. Now, a year on from finishing writing, the currents still flow on: I remain closely involved with lives and fates of four of the rivers at the book’s heart: the Río Los Cedros in the Ecuadorian cloud-forest, the Mutehekau Shipu in north-eastern Quebec, Ennore Creek in Chennai and the fragile little chalk-stream which rises in a spring-site a mile from my house here in Cambridge, England, and flows through my years and through the book’s pages.

You talk about “hydropoetics”, and through the book, there’s a lot about rhythms and cycles. At one point you talk about being “cloud makers with every exhalation”. There are little bits all through that kind of hint at a water cycle. And I wanted to hear how intentional that is.

I'd love to just say that it's really nice to talk about language and form, I'm doing perhaps less, less of that than than I might be doing, just because, as it were, the politics and the ideas of it are so forwards and kind of urgent in lots of ways, as well as being very, very old. So there's an intentional answer to this. And then I suppose where it gets really interesting is where intentionality leaves the room. I had a very clear sense that I wanted the water cycle to kind of circulate through it as it were, and a sense that we are part of that water cycle. And the water cycle now is not just a geophysical but also a sort of moral and political and bodily phenomenon for us as humans. And so it's really nice that people like you notice that sense of us as cloud makers, the little metaphoric embeddings of that pattern.

Then, I guess just hydrologically, or geomorphologically, we begin and end at the spring site [a chalk spring, an extremely rare ecosystem, near Macfarlane’s Cambridge home], so that the book turns full circle in that sense. And between that, it does start up in the cloud forests and then end up back more or less at the sea, at the Gulf of St Lawrence. And of course, it doesn't follow that purely, but there is that sense of a return to source. But of course, a great deal has flowed between the first spring and the last, as it were. And then, of course, there's a sort of explicit wrangle all the way through, a tussle with this idea of finding grammars of animacy for different sort of water – water worlds, water rhythms – and this slow realization that water does not speak with a single voice, does not utter with one tongue and each different sort of system required its own different anima, grammar and response.

So the cloud forest is sort of reticulating and branching and tributary making, shall we say, and then the circulatory qualities of Chennai, where I really had to come to the realization that water is continually metamorphosing itself In Chennai, in the bodies that it inhabits, human and landscape, and then, and then just this turbulence and relentless, powerful flow, undammed flow of the Mutehekau Shipu. And of course, that's where language really gets rivered and really, whole new orders of punctuation arrive – often their absence – and orders leave. And then I guess there's the unintentional part of the answer, which I won’t spend too long on.

But to say that what happens at the gorge, which, of course, is a thing we speak with a part of the body, as well as a structure in the land, and then the epilogue [at the chalk spring]. But with both, there was no premeditating. The gorge happened more or less as best I could write it down. And then, yeah, I thought the book was finished with, “I am rivered,” as you would. Although I did wonder whether to put a full stop there or not. In the end, I did. Probably I shouldn't have. And then I came back, and a few days later, I ran up to the springs, and the epilogue just sort of formed itself in my mind's eye… and I went home and more or less wrote it down. So yeah, highly intentional sort of hydrological poetics, and then, and then two complete surprises. 

[Note: Macfarlane uses the term "Ecozoic," a word coined by Catholic priest and writer Thomas Berry in the early 80s to describe a future era he imagined when humans will live harmoniously with rather than dominate other living things and the cycles of nature, and an antidote to our current Eremocene –the Age of Loneliness – which is biologist E.O. Wilson’s term for this age that others have called the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans.]

How optimistic are you that we will reach the Ecozoic before we drive ourselves, as well as countless other creatures, extinct?

There’s a kind of dialectic, dual track of braiding of hope and futility that runs all the way through the book. It's partly the sort of realpolitik of the chalk network that I live on, which is just this spectacularly rare ecosystem. 

Two hundred of them in the world, you said?

Yeah, it is a kind of Great Barrier Reef. But it's also sludged up with filamental algae and sewage slime. It's over abstracted. It's sluggish. It has high turbidity. It has invasive species. And this whole kind of thriving living network of a more or less unique, contemporary ecosystem is so fragile that it might not survive. Like it just might not survive towards the end of this century. So I suppose, yes, the springs are flowing, but I was up at them five times last week, partly to see what's happening to them in the drought, this early spring drought, which is not a great time, obviously, and they're really low. And the augmentation pump, that kind of life support system that they are on, is working already and there was even a sort of heart monitor device floating in the water. And all this happens just 500 yards from one of the biggest hospitals in Europe. So there's this, parallel I just can't get away from, of human lives on life support and a spring on life support.

Over the years of writing this book, I’ve come to reflect that despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline. By which I mean something like this: in the course of these journeys, I saw people working in immensely challenging situations to restore both the lives of rivers and those who live with rivers, human and more-than-human. What right would I have, in my circumstances, to lapse into the passivity of despair, having witnessed the ardour and courage with which such people have pursued their struggles? As my inspirational friend Rebecca Solnit put it in her recent ‘Piece For Hard Times’: ‘They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.’ And ‘hope is a discipline’, (an echo of a Tim Winton line) because change requires both the ability to dream alternative, better, more just futures and the work required to realise such futures. This circles us back round to how we close the implementation gap, perhaps.

To what extent do you think that the paradigm shift required for us to live in a relationship of equality and interdependence with the natural world needs us to take on animist ways of thinking, an interest in trading jokes with whales, a desire to speak of rivers using pronouns, or even the fervent love of nature of someone who lives closely with it or for whom its study is a profession or a way or life? To what extent does it require individual immersion in nature and a felt sense of our inseparability from it?

Language is a world-shaping force. Grammar embeds frames of perception which in turn inform action. In English we ‘it’ the living world; the objectifying, de-personalizing pronoun. In English, there is no verb ‘to river’ –– but what could be more of a verb than a river?! I have come to prefer to speak of rivers ‘who’ flow (as, in fact, the French do); recognising rivers’ presence and force as story-tellers, history-keepers and lifelines. To call a river a person is not to anthropomorphize water, but rather to widen and deepen the category of ‘person’.

Such seemingly minor adjustments matter, it seems to me, because the ascendant worldview in the US at present is a profoundly, intensely de-animating one. The new Trump administration is committed to the assetization of everything. Doug Burgum described public lands as ‘America’s Balance Sheet’ in his Senate confirmation hearings. The EPA is rolling back regulations designed to protect and ensure clean water and clean air. Forms of relation with land and water which exceed the fiscal are being flattened towards extinction. At such times, imagination and language –– ways of dreaming and speaking otherwise –– become more, not less, vital. Oh –– and personally I have no wish to trade jokes with whales! I hope their spectacular language system and communication history remains intact, encrypted and separate from our own.

For now at least, I simply don’t trust humans with the ethical responsibilities that would come from being able to ‘speak whale.'