British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s new book asks, ‘Is a river alive?’

For more than 20 years, British author and Cambridge University professor Robert Macfarlane has garnered international acclaim for his writings on nature and our relationships to it, from awe-inspiring wonder and life-giving sustenance to relentless extraction and exploitation. For his new book, “Is a River Alive?”, Macfarlane explores the idea of rivers as animate beings, a concept that is connected to the Rights of Nature movement that has spurred a novel legal framework to protect imperiled waterways, animals and ecosystems around the world.

To find out, Macfarlane embarked on a journey that spanned continents and topographies. He trekked through a cloud forest in Ecuador, visited dying and polluted waterways in southeastern India and kayaked down a river in northeastern Canada that was granted legal personhood in 2021 to save it from being dammed. Along the way, Macfarlane introduces us to the people fighting to defend these rivers, creeks and basins while bearing witness to the assaults and threats the waterways constantly face.

Macfarlane joins us to discuss “Is a River Alive?” and the ideas it explores.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. I am really excited and really humbled to have Robert Macfarlane on the show with me today. For about two decades, Macfarlane has written about our relationship with the non-human world, mountains, caves, paths and landscapes in books full of breathtaking prose and heart-filling wonder.

His latest book adds urgency to that mix. It’s called “Is a River Alive?” The answer comes from treks through a cloud forest in Ecuador, a strangled and polluted river in Chennai, India, and an as yet undammed river in northeastern Canada. But that question, is a river alive, is a kind of red herring, because the answer basically is “yes, but now what?” A torrent of new legal, philosophical and spiritual questions follow.

Macfarlane was not alone in this adventuring and questioning. He was with an extraordinary set of companions – poets and artists, seekers and healers, river readers and water defenders. And maybe most importantly, he was with the rivers themselves. Robert Macfarlane, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Robert Macfarlane: Thanks, Dave, very happy to be here.

Miller: You write early on that in Māori, you can greet someone new by asking ko wai koe – I’m probably not pronouncing that correctly – which translates as “who are your waters?” Who are yours?

Macfarlane: [Laughs] I was gonna ask you.

Mine are many, but I’ll take two. One is this little spring that rises a mile from my home. I live on chalk. It’s fragile, it’s clear where it begins, it’s adulterated as it passes through the city only a mile further downstream. It’s my friend. I visit it often, spend time with it, think with it.

And the other is also a spring, but it’s a high altitude spring. It’s the source of the River Dee. My other heartland is the highlands of Scotland. This spring rises vigorously as bubbles in a kind of granite aquifer that soaks full on the summit of the Cairngorm plateau, which is the closest thing we’ve got to the Arctic. It gathers, then it crashes almost immediately down into Garve quarry, one of the deepest quarries in the Highlands. And then it flows away and becomes the Dee. Two sources.

Miller: Do you feel those waters now, 9,000 miles away?

Macfarlane: I’m dreaming of them. I move from air conditioned space to air conditioned space at the moment. But yeah, I cast my mind to them, I look forward to seeing them again.

My father and brother went on a pilgrimage to the Cairngorm Spring the month this book was published. They gathered a flask of water for me. And some of that water is in the ink which is in the pen with which I signed these books. So the spring is with me right now, a tiny, tiny element of it.

Miller: That’s one of the things I love about the way you move through the world is there are all these talismans, many of them physical, that are imbued for you with place and with wonder. It’s like there’s physical magic in the world for you and it comes, in this case, in water form, but in many others.

Macfarlane: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What does Loren Eiseley say? “If there is magic in the world, it is surely contained in water.” Water seeks bodies. Sometimes they’re human bodies, geological bodies. And water can be carried.

But other talismans, that’s right. When I was writing “Underland,” I was given this whale bone owl.

Miller: The question was, where would you put it?

Macfarlane: But the owl was there to help me see in the dark. And I should say it was the carcass of a minke whale that had washed up on the shore of the Outer Hebrides. This remarkable sculptor I know who lives out there, just cut the almost ice age-like owls. So I carried that, slipped it in a pocket in the “Underworld.”

We store our memory and also our feelings in external objects. Like hard drives as it were, but hard drives don’t need to be made of silicon, chips and bits. They can be bracelets, they can be stones carried in the hands, they can be water carried in a bottle. And yeah, these mean a lot to me. They carry a certain magic, they conduct memory, they condense thought. Yeah, I think with them, absolutely.

Miller: What led you to Ecuador?

Macfarlane: Well, I was led everywhere by rivers that were dying, but were also being reimagined in radical ways, or I should say, under threat of death. I went to Ecuador because the glorious concatenation of rivers that flow from a cloud forest called Los Cedros were all under threat of death. And I mean death here. I mean absolute elimination from gold mining interests, a Canadian mining company, you will be amazed to hear, and the Ecuadorian state mining company and army. And a cloud forest is a river maker. It grows rivers and rivers grow the forest.

But in 2021, that forest, which was on the brink of destruction, was saved by this remarkable constitutional court ruling that recognized – and here’s the radical bit – the rights of the rivers to flow, the rights of the forest to grow, the rights of nature, which are guaranteed in the Ecuadorian Constitution.

Miller: What is it like inside a cloud forest?

Macfarlane: It’s the place of most life I have ever entered. You walk in your own socket of luminous mist. You’re surrounded by life, growing on life, growing on life. And the whole animal orchestra plays on.

Miller [speaking over field recording]: We can actually hear a little bit of that because you were there with sound artists, among other folks. So what are we listening to right here?

Macfarlane: The forest is the vocalist here, that’s the first thing to say. You’ll begin to hear the field recordings that Cosmo Sheldrake, this multi-instrumentalist sound artist, made. That little tapping you can hear, that is bat sonar. Cosmo had a little bat listener, and if you listen carefully, you’ll be able to hear it running through your brain.

Miller: And I should say if you’re listening with headphones, I highly recommend it because then you can really hear this.

OK, so there’s bats and birds.

Macfarlane: Later on, we’ll hear toucan barbets, which have this beautiful two tone kind “ooooh-ooh, oooooh-oh,” they’ll kick in. We have the sound of the wind in the forest starting. And here we have the first human voices joining the voices of the forest.

Miller: What’s the connection between all of this life and the rivers?

Macfarlane: Each guarantees the other, each flows into the other. I’ve never been in an ecosystem in which continuity and contiguity was so visibly present, life as a compound entity made of relation, made of process, not as separate elements.

Miller: What does gold mining entail? You said that this is one of the rivers that is facing full-fledged death. So what happens when people come in to extract gold from the earth?

Macfarlane: Well, in this case, the gold is the marrow of the mountain. And to get to the marrow of any bone you have to crack it open and slurp it out. So you raze the forest, you open a pit, you use heavy machinery to dig benches, which are the means by which you kind of delve into the earth and bring the heavy machinery deeper and deeper into it. And then once you have the ore, you need to extract the gold. One of the processes is called cyanidation, which you can tell from the word is poison. You create huge tailings, heaps, and then you soak them in a cyanide solution. And that calls out the metal, the gold as it were, and of course leaves a toxic legacy that is river killing, forest killing.

Miller: Could you read us an excerpt from this section in Ecuador? I should note that among your traveling companions were two of the judges who enshrined those legal rights for this river.

Macfarlane: Yes yes, Agustín and Ramiro, who handed down this remarkable constitutional court ruling. I should say just before I read this, they had not seen the forest.

Miller: This is the first time.

Macfarlane: This was the first, I entered the forest with them. The ruling had happened during COVID so they’ve been unable to meet it. So meeting them and watching them meet the forest was one of the privileges of this journey.

[Reading excerpt from “Is a River Alive?”] “We do not knowingly enter the cloud. It moves up from below us or gathers from around us, I cannot tell which. But we are in it. It is on us. Fog numbs sound, mist sparkles on skin and cloth. It is peaceful to be in that cloud of unknowing. I feel ignorant in the forest, and at ease with my ignorance. Any questing after fact and reason is overwhelmed by profusion and difference.

“The path thins towards nothing. We begin to criss-cross the Rio Los Cedros more often, working slowly uphill, following the water’s path back into the higher forest. A white noise becomes audible at the edge of things, then fills the gaps between them, rising slowly to a roar. We turn a corner. Silver surges through green. A wide white veil of waterfall is above and ahead of us, 30 feet or more high and 20 feet or so across, crashing into the wide pool it has hollowed from the bedrock over thousands of years. This is the biggest waterfall on the Rio Los Cedros. Spray mist floats and dances, rainbowed where the sun finds it.

“The invitation is not to be refused, so I strip to my shorts and wade in boulders slippery underfoot, my arms out for balance like a funambulist’s, feeling steel manacles of cold slide up my legs, from ankles to knees to thighs. And then I just launch myself, huffing with the shock, and strike out across the pool towards the waterfall. Others follow me in, first Giuliano and Cesar, then Ramiro, who yells so loudly he sets the forest echoing and startles birds from the trees, and then Agustín, who peers moleishly without his spectacles and is tentative on the greasy rocks.

“I swim back across the pool and wade out to help Agustín. He reaches out both hands for support. I take them and guide him in, him stepping forwards and me backwards. We move like 18th century dance partners hesitantly working out a quadrille.

“‘This is the river you helped save and the forest you helped save,’ I shout to him over the sound of the waterfall. ‘I was only one among very many,’ says Agustín, ‘and the forest spoke for itself, spoke to us all.’ We embrace. I am touched.

“When we reach the deeper water, Agustín releases my hands and leans forwards into the river, feels it take his weight, support him. And then he swims in neat breaststroke across to the base of the waterfall. I watch in surprise as Agustín first stands up, then backs into the white veil of water so that it’s pummeling his head and his shoulders. He lifts his head back, closes his eyes, flings his arms out wide, and stands there, cruciform, with an expression on his face part way between joy and agony.”

Miller: That is from the section about Ecuador. You also went to India, largely to meet a writer, naturalist and river protector now named Yuvan Aves. Can you tell us about him?

Macfarlane: He’s a young man, he’s not even 30 now. I think he was 27 when I traveled with him in Chennai. We’d known each other for five years. He grew up in a violent household. He was weekly, sometimes daily beaten by his stepfather. At 16, he fled that home and he ran inland to a school called Pathashaala, a Krishnamurti school. And there, he recovered, he crystallized is how I call it, and he’s called it that. All his being reformatted in that place, and it was enabled to do so by the community of teachers, students, but also the wider living world, the snakes and the paddy fields and the bee eaters. He taught himself the names of the creatures, and the relations between things in this amazing act of both autodidacticism and something like spiritual recovery.

I don’t mention this in my book, but one of the books he met there was a book of mine called “The Old Ways.” He read that during that period of crystallism. He later reached out to me, we fell into friendship and correspondence. I came to understand a little of his astonishing powers of being and including. So I traveled to be with him, because as you say, he’s also a water defender. He’s trying to imagine a just future for rivers in a place where rivers have suffered more than any others I think I’ve seen.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the immensity of the task that he has set for himself … not alone, with other protectors. What are they up against?

Macfarlane: Everything. A Hindu nationalist government that is highly hostile to any kind of environmental dissent. It gets castigated as anti-India, anti-development, seditious, even terrorist in activity. A country where press freedom and freedom of speech are actually under enormous assault.

But the rivers themselves, there is basically no water infrastructure, almost all sewage just pours directly into them. Pollution from heavy industry, particularly in the north of Chennai just discharges directly into these waterways. To give a very concrete example, one of the rivers I saw has, for miles at a time, for months of the year, 0% dissolved oxygen – that’s the free floating stuff, not the H2O – and zero species count. Yuvan is really insistent that these rivers are not dead, they are grievously wounded. But life finds a way, at least around them. He says barrenness is almost always a state of mind, rarely a state of land.

Miller: That does make me wonder … This is a huge “if,” but if you set aside the catastrophic human and ecological questions of the timeframe we’ve been talking about, is the river ever dead? Or is it a kind of eventually, on a maybe geological, maybe shorter than geological time scale, a self-cleaning mechanism that does come back?

Macfarlane: It’s such a good question. It’s such an important one. And I think Yuvan helped me recognize this. Rivers, let’s call them self-healing rather than self-cleaning. I think it’s really important to let them have that agency rather than life be something we bestow upon them or take away from them, that actually they are huge agential presences historically, culturally, spiritually, and in terms of their own anima, their own life.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, which burned multiply, and the final burning of which was the provocation to Richard Nixon – surprisingly one of the great environmentalist presidents of the U.S. – to found the EPA. The Clean Water Act came out of that phase as well. A burning river is about as dead as a river can be. So I’ve seen again and again that life can pour back into rivers, and into us, and all the life that they enable, given a chance.

Miller: What have you learned from Yuvan?

Macfarlane: Well, to quote him, that “a small self suffers and creates suffering.” That’s something he said. And to have gone through what he had gone through, he had every reason in life to inhabit a small self, indeed to replicate some of the suffering that had been inflicted on him. And instead he radiated outwards. He has the most inclusive interkingdom, or interkindom as he would call it, vision of life that I’ve ever seen, this tireless working for a better communal good. That despair is a luxury, I learned that absolutely, watching what he and his friends are fighting.

Miller: The second half of that that you sometimes say is that “hope is a discipline.”

Macfarlane: Hope is a discipline, that’s right.

Miller: It’s such a helpful line.

Macfarlane: Well, it’s only half mine, I will say. Tim Winton uses a version, he says “optimism is a discipline.” By it, I mean – and again, I saw this absolutely in action in Yuvan and also all over the world – that hope has one foot in fantasy, the dreaming of a world otherwise, the dreaming of a river alive again, and the life around it, enlivened by that life. It has to have the other in work, in the recognition of the labor, the time,the effort and the belief that will be required to realize that fantasy. And I mean fantasy there in the best sense of that word, imagining otherwise.

Miller: It seems like the night you spent in India walking a beach with a bunch of volunteers is, in a sense, that kind of optimism in action, or the discipline of it. What were you doing?

Macfarlane: That’s such a good illustration of it. Yes, for 20 to 30 years I think, volunteers have during the sea turtle nesting season walked the long strand of Chennai every night, every night, waiting for mother sea turtles to come, as they have been doing for millions of years, haul themselves out of the inky dark Indian Ocean, dig sandpits in which they then lay their eggs and then return to the darkness of the water. The volunteers are there because those eggs are hugely vulnerable now to collapse under tractors, to being dug out by feral dogs. The hatchlings are drawn inland by the lights of the city rather than the lights of the sea. So every night, they dig out those nests, and then they carry the eggs and painstakingly, very carefully relocate them to a hatchery, to a safe area on the beach. And I was lucky to participate in that. Absolutely hope as a discipline there.

Miller: Although, even there it seems like Yuvan was very clear-eyed about it. Do you mind telling us about what happened at the end of the night when you actually saw some hatchlings that had been moved some weeks earlier?

Macfarlane: Fourteen days earlier, yeah. There’s a sort of anti-romanticist realism to Yuvan, as well as this remarkable dreamer. The first hatchling of the season simmered the sand where it had been buried and then emerged. And there was this wonderful moment they put a basket over each of the relocated nests. Aaron, who I was with who leads the walk, he lifted it off, I think I say like a kind of Parisian way, to lifting the cloche from a fine food. And there was this tiny perfect sea turtle. I carried it to the sea and it didn’t look like it was going to make it into the waves. I went to help it and Yuvan said, “no, no, it has to use its flippers, it has to learn and build the strength.” And then I think it was Aaron actually who said, “don’t get too sentimental, Robert, it’ll be gull food by breakfast.”

Miller: You started crying, which was understandable. And he said don’t get sentimental, it’s about be eaten and that’s part of what we’re doing here.

Macfarlane: Absolutely. But it’s also a game of numbers. I actually wasn’t crying at the loss of the single turtle. It was that admixture of just futility and hope that moved me to tears on my hands and knees in the sand there, the absolute love and care that was being extended, had been for decades. Something remarkable was happening there.

Miller: I want to play a part of another song, because part of your project for a number of years now, a number of books now, is to not only put words on pages out there but to work with other artists. Let’s hear part of “Night Swimmer” first, and then you can tell us about its creation.

[“Excerpt from “Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle)” playing – choir humming and singing]

Miller: What are we listening to?

Macfarlane: Oh, it’s wonderful to hear it. Thanks for playing it. We’re listening to a song called “Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle)” that began as a what’s called a guzzle, which is a Persian poetic form, which is in effect a love song to the love object. Here, Yuvan and I co-wrote that guzzle to the sea turtle.And later, the text was taken up by a composer called Lydia Samuels. And what you’re hearing is those words sung by the extraordinary nine voice choir vocal ensemble HOWL. And I love the plain chant, it has that reverence, it has that awe at these night swimmers, these mothers who have been coming through the darkness for millions of years.

So it was a celebration, but also a recognition of their vulnerability in the face of us.

Miller: So over the last 20 years or so, the Rights of Nature movement has been building steam all over the world. And you note that rivers, above all, have been the focus of the movement. Why rivers as opposed to other natural features?

Macfarlane: They seem most alive, I think. They also appear singular. We can imagine granting rights to a river. As soon as we speak of a river, the question arises “what is a river?” And here is where many of the complexities come in. Rivers wander over national boundaries. They are “owned” by different nation states, there are many different interests competing to use them. So even as there is an elegant simplicity to the notion of a river being a rights-bearing being, presence, force in the landscape, which I believe it is and should be, many human complexities attend that question.

Miller: Eight years ago, the New Zealand parliament passed a law that legally recognized a river as alive and as an ancestor to an Indigenous group. It said it recognized the entity as “comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.”

Macfarlane: Wow! Isn’t that amazing?

Miller: And what you’re getting through there is that even the physical elements – mouth, tributaries, flood zone, riparian areas – can be complicated, but I think a little bit easier to understand and imagine writing down in words than the metaphysical elements, to me at least. Let me stop there because it seems like you’re not necessarily in agreement.

Macfarlane: I mean, I’ve spent four-and-a-half years traveling with river people, rivers and river ideas, so to me it makes absolutely perfect sense that we should understand a river as comprising its metaphysical as well as its physical elements.

Miller: Right, all I was saying is that the physical side is a little bit easier, I think, to understand. What do you mean by the metaphysical side?

Macfarlane: Rivers run through us. They are memory keepers, they are storytellers. We think with them. Very logistically, we have built almost all of our cities upon them. We could say the entire urban infrastructure of the planet has been organized by/around/with flowing fresh water

Miller: Certainly, that’s where we are right here. We’re right on the Willamette and Portland is here because it’s the confluence of these two rivers. And that’s the story of thousands of cities.

Macfarlane: Exactly, thousands of cities, right back to Uruk in Mesopotamia, which now seems like it sits on dry land. But when you actually trace the ghost paths of the Euphrates, you see that Uruk was on the living river at the time.

But spiritually, I described the spring near my home recently as a friend. And I do feel that. And I often hear particularly people from Indigenous communities speak of river as a relative.

The opposite story is river as pure resource. The recognition of river as resource and the use of river as resources has been vital to human flourishing. And I’m not arguing that we need to abolish it entirely, it’s completely impractical, inhuman. But it has risen up to overwhelm the recognition of river as friend, river as relative, river as metaphysical accomplice.

Miller: Why do you think that nature’s rights legal movements are proliferating now, in this moment?

Macfarlane: Emergency. We stand on a crumbling ecological brink. We stand in a position of immense planetary precarity. There’s a line from the late great Barry Lopez that forms the epigraph to one of the sections: “We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.” And by that, I understand that “we” – this is the technocratized, Western, as it were white mindset – is racing backwards in time saying there must be other ways of being, there must be other ways of imagining our relations and rights, our negotiations of relations with the living world. And I call it the living world, not the environment, because the environment is part of that kind of chilly resource-based … “the environment” has got us nowhere. The living world supports everything we do. And our rivers are rare and fragile.

Miller: That answer, it makes partial sense to me. And there’s also different ways to define an emergency. But I can imagine a global human response to the emergency of our ecological disaster taking a different form and doubling down on an old legal regime of a more human-based rights. This is happening in Oregon. We are the epicenter of a very different, almost the opposite legal view of how to secure environmental health, to say that humans have a right to a stable environment. And that’s either existing in the Constitution or in existing regulation, or it should be enshrined in the Constitution.

But what we’re talking about is the opposite. And I’m wondering why you think that’s happening now and if you think it’s connected to our increasingly technologically-mediated lives?

Macfarlane: I don’t think it’s the opposite. In 2022, the U.N. added the right to a clean and healthy environment to the list of ratified human rights. This is the connection, really. Broadly, what is good for the living world is good for us as well. So I think decoupling that opposition between human rights and the rights of nature is something I’m always keen to do.

Miller: So in your mind, they’re not as in opposition as they seem?

Macfarlane: No, not at all. And in their best forms, they’re absolutely in continuity with one another.

Miller: You use the word “abstraction” to talk about rivers. I realized reading the book that I was completely misunderstanding literally what you were writing about. I had to look this up, and I learned that there’s this hydrological definition, to “abstract” rivers is to draw water from it. When I’d been reading it– and there were a couple pages early on when you’re talking about abstraction – I was reading it as taking something that’s more tangible and turning it into some kind of a less physical, less tangible, less legible object, making it abstract. And it actually made sense to me. And to me, that helped me understand this developing theory of why this movement might be catching on now, that for a lot of us rivers have become that version of “abstracted.” And we want to reverse that, and to make them more physical and more real to us again.

Macfarlane: Absolutely. To individualize them, to name them, to recognize.

In my country, England, all our rivers are dying. That sounds melodramatic, but we have told a very new story about our rivers, which is the story of privatization. Water as liquid asset, private equity companies from all around the world coming in raking vast dividends out of that water, floating water on the stock market. And the result has been a deterritorialization of water, the collapse of ecological, social and cultural systems around them. We’re in a terrible crisis and that’s crisis born of a story. It’s as I sometimes say a crisis of imagination as well as legislation. So reimagining rivers – and rights is one way to do that but not the only way to do that – seems absolutely vital to ensuring their future flourishing and ours with it.

Miller: Let’s turn to the third big part of the world that you went to for this book. Why did you go to Quebec, to a river at the First Nations Innu people called the Mutehekau Shipu?

Macfarlane: I went because that was in 2021, again an important year in this map, the first Canadian river to have its rights declared. And that declaration took the form of a mirror resolution between the Minganie Regional Council and the Innu Council at the little township of Ekuanitshit, led by this remarkable poet and community leader Rita Mestokosho, who is a friend now and becomes an important figure in the book.

Miller: She gave you a kind of admonition before you embarked on this trip. She said, “don’t think too much with your head, forget your notebooks on the river, leave them behind.” What went through your mind when you first heard that?

Macfarlane: Bang to rights, as we would say in England. That means you’ve seen me. I’m an analyst, I’m a rationalist. By that point I’d spent three-and-a-half years trying to de-rationalize my thinking about rivers, to unlearn. And Rita, and the river that we then followed for 11 days through the wildest water and some of the biggest forest I’ve ever been in, were the final and most consequential parts of that participants in that unlearning.

The notebooks, any writer would tell you, you can’t separate me from my notes, anything but my notebook! But I understood later. She gave me many admonitions, many regulations as it were for opening myself to the river. We came to a settlement which was that I could take my notebooks, but I could only write on the bank. I wasn’t to write on the water. And that was decouple the analyst’s brain, take the pen out from behind your ear, put the book back in the pocket, and just be on the river and with the river.

Miller: Was there a particular moment when you felt like you were most able to think without your head, as she asked you to do?

Macfarlane: Oh yeah. What happened a day from the end of the descent of that river … I should say we were floatplane dropped way up the system and then we paddled out. So there was nothing, there was the river. I mean, there was everything – there was the river, the forest, creaturely life.

Miller: It’s hard to get this out of your head, when you say there was nothing,

Macfarlane: what I mean is all the usual props and struts, all the notebooks and the ways of seeing, they were left at the floatplane base as it turned out. And this river beat us up, buried us, soaked us, lifted us and irradiated us with its presence. And by the time we got a day short of the sea, an encounter happened with the river. The book is the best articulation of this I can give, but I became co-present with something like a god, something like a river being, something like the presence of river, if we just want to call it that.

Miller: And not give it some other metaphor?

Macfarlane: Exactly, none of the trappings work. This is a superlinguistic, extralinguistic experience. It didn’t last very long, but I came to understand that in a way it had been prepared for 44 years. So the intensity of the encounter was actually also a chronic unfolding of multiple encounters with rivers, river people, river ideas.

Miller: Do you mind reading a part here? It’s not an exaggeration to me to say that you could have died on this river at least once. You have a pretty harrowing part here that it would be great if we could hear.

Macfarlane: I will just say that this is not the encounter with the river being that I mentioned, that comes a little bit later. This is where the river is starting to absorb us and tumult us, and also is starting to liquefy language.

[Reading an excerpt from “Is a River Alive?”] “To run water which is far bigger than your ability, you at least prepare with care. You cinch everything tight. You tuck everything away that might snag. My river shoes have a 2 millimeter nylon cord loop lace on them. It’s the thing I worry about most. That cord is more than strong enough to hold my body if it snags on a submerged rock and comes under tension. So I tuck the lace away inside the shoe as best I can, tighten straps, buddy check, weigh-in.

“Then we slip into the water and flow on. And within seconds, the first wide green slope has me, and I glide over and down it and hit the six foot high face of the first standing wave. And the tip of my boat plunges deep into it, then lifts up shuddering out of water thick as cream. I begin to rise up the face of the wave, but then it picks me up as if I would driftward, and tilts me upwards at 45 degrees, and spins me through 180 degrees. So in an instant, I am, I realize through a blur of fear, facing upstream, against time’s flow, and downwards into the hole at the wave’s base, into which I am surely now to be plunged.

“But then I cannot understand what is occurring because effect has not followed cause. A second passes, then two, then a third, and I am still there, suspended in that same absurd, astonishing position, canted on the tilted crest of the wave which is reforming itself continuously around me, facing up time and down world. And I see that by some prestidigitation of river physics, I’m being held there, unintentionally surfing this monstrous wave backwards, no, being juggled by this wave. And all around me from shore to shore are more standing waves. But then suddenly, river has had enough of its game, and I feel the slide and lift of the back of my boat up and over the vertical, and I’m staring straight down into the hole at the wave’s foot.

“And then I’m airborne and slammed into the hole headfirst and upside down. I am exploded out of the boat on impact as if hurled from an ejector seat down into the white hole, and river is punching fingers up my nostrils, and river is ramming fists into my mouth and down my throat. And I’m deep down now, but the right way up, so I grab handfuls of water and haul for the surface on them, as if they are holes on a cliff or rungs on a ladder. But they dissolve under each grasp, and I’m kicking out and feel my feet bang against the rocks on the riverbed, and one of them catches briefly. Did the loop come free? If I snag now, I’m done, cooked, end of. And then one of my shins smashes a sharp rock edge. What the hell is down there?

“But then I’m free, and the flotation device has done its job and bobbed me up like a cork. And three rules, say them back to me.

“‘Yes, boss. 1. Don’t panic. 2. Get clear. 3. Feet up and downstream.’

“Everything is chaos. Four of the five boats are belly up. Where’s Danny? Where’s Ilia? What the hell could have knocked both the boss and the bear over? And only the Salmon is still upright, and he is pounding upstream towards me, yelling at me to swim to a side eddy. And I strike out and somehow traverse the current that’s rushing me downstream, and there are rocks under my hands, under my elbows, under my knees. I haul myself out onto the rocks and lie there face down, gulping like a landed fish, then roll over onto my back and shout laugh at the sky, which is now flooded with a late day’s storm light.

“And that night, the moon is full and huge, and made of egg yolk, and bright enough to read by.”

Miller: What effect do you think it would have if Canadian lawmakers or all the executives of the Quebecois hydropower company were forced to do the trip that you did?

Macfarlane: It would be transformative.

Miller: You believe that? I guess one of the reasons I’m wondering is that you had spent four years preparing yourself for transformation. You fasted for 24 hours on that trip, on the advice or urging of Rita, and you were primed for it. But you believe there’d be a kind of universal human response to that experience?

Macfarlane: Well, I think there’s a precedent here in North America, which is that John Muir famously took Teddy Roosevelt on I think it was a two night, three day trip in Yosemite. And they sat by the campfire under the stars surrounded by the big, big rock. And shortly after that, Roosevelt basically enshrined the national park system. And for good or ill, that was one of the most consequential conservation structures set in place globally ever. And a lot of that seems to have come from that primary encounter.

When wind farms were set to go up in some completely inappropriate places across the Highlands, under the leadership then of Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, I issued a similar invitation to Alex Salmond to come up into the Cairngorms with me and camp for two nights, three days. He didn’t take it up, didn’t get back to me.

Primary encounter is the source of so much passion, love and incontrovertible belief, understanding, knowledge of the inseparability of the living world in us. So even if that takes the form of doffing a suit, getting in a kayak, meeting a river on its terms, not on the terms of hydroelectric dam manufacture, at the very least, the experience will modify, if not convert.

Miller: Not damming a river is one human choice. Another is taking dams down. That’s what happened on the Klamath River in recent years, in our backyard here. How much attention have you paid to what’s been happening in Southern Oregon and Northern California?

Macfarlane: Obsessive, fascinated attention. It’s become the most hopeful story, I think, in a hope-stripped last few years for me. I speak of it often. We have de-damming projects of much smaller scale beginning to occur in my country as well. Salmon returning once the river is, as it were, unfractured, de-dammed. I know it’s not an uncomplicated story and the politics, particularly in the upper watershed, are extremely vexed. But watching the river heal itself, watching hope as a discipline unfold from a way of imagining the Klamath otherwise, and then the work that was undertaken to realize that, to me it is thrilling.

Miller: I said in my intro, and I hope that you didn’t have a major disagreement with it, that in my mind the title’s a little bit of a red herring. Because so many people you talk to, and it seems like you yourself from early on, have a pretty quick answer … Yes, a river is alive, but that’s just the beginning. What are the questions that you’re wrestling with now that follow? Let’s say we say “yes it is.” What do you think are the really important questions that come next?

Macfarlane: Well, many of them are voiced by Wayne Chambliss, the Wayne who was in his kayak with me as we ran that big rapid – a person you know as well, Dave, from his Portland days. He asks a lot of them in the closing pages of that book. And the first is, “what kind of politics emerges from this?” We have to make that series of very difficult moves from something like the aesthetic spiritual encounter, through to the ethical, and then from the ethical to the political. And those are all founded on an ontology, on a recognition of being, of the nature of being and co-being. But they are huge and difficult steps to make.

But we have to begin them. I say somewhere, even the asking of this question, “is a river alive,” is a beginning. And the presumption that a river is nothing but brute inanimate matter there for human use, that is a dead end. That has got us to this point, has made human flourishing possible in many ways, but it is also now the beginning of the end. So we have to turn that question around, ask the portal question, the one that opens so much else: “is a river alive?” Well, what do we mean by life? What do we mean by river? And when we begin answering those with imagination and senses of possibility, we will open a future for ourselves and for water.

Miller: One of the points that Wayne makes in that section and that that you explore is, I think, a recognition that there’s something so inhuman, so unhuman about the life of rivers, that they don’t exist in our language. But law does. Law is the very definition of existing in language, it has to.

So how do you think about parsing what a river needs or wants or or has to be? Because in the end, it’s not the only way to think about this, and your book is not only about law, but it touches on law all the time. That’s why you went to all these different places. In a basic way, how do we go about figuring out what’s best for a river?

Macfarlane: So many thoughts. Édouard Glissant, the great post-colonial theorist, he speaks of the right to opacity. This is a very interesting proposition to me. The right to opacity is the right not to be understood. We do not have to have full understanding of the river in order to comprehend something of what it might wish or need. Similarly, as you know, there’s a huge conversation going on now about being able to speak whale. This drive, which is now Silicon Valley funded, tech bro funded, to crack the speech of cetaceans. I don’t think we need to speak whale to know what whales need. They need us not to harpoon them.

Miller: Or not bombard them with sound.

Macfarlane: Exactly. Keep their oceans healthy enough and silent enough that they can continue to communicate in their language, in their song. We don’t need to speak it.

Miller: Humility is what I’m hearing.

Macfarlane: Humility, a recognition of life as process, as co-flourishing, as interbeing, of which we are absolutely part. The current American administration models life as a pinnacle with humans at its summit. It’s entirely wrong as a model. It is a web in which we are entangled. We are one of many nodes.

Miller: That’s helpful for me. But I have to say that whales – even if there’s some opacity, I don’t speak whale – but they’re mammals. So it’s a little bit easier for me to imagine what whales need, because there’s some biological details that are similar. Does a river want to flow?

Macfarlane: Well, to read across from whales … and I will absolutely agree that the notion of life and intent becomes dimmer and less scrutable to us as we move from human to mammal to plant to fungus to water, we disappear into the mist there. But I think the analogy holds usefully with whales. We understand that a dying river doesn’t reach the sea. I read an interview with Colorado water engineers from the ‘70s who said every drop of the Colorado River that reaches the ocean is a drop wasted. That is not what a river wants. A river wants not to be choked by garbage. A river wants life to flourish within itself rather than itself to carry so many toxins, heavy metals and E. coli that life cannot survive within it. That, to me, is the analogy from whales.

Miller: Without giving anything away – it’s not a question of spoilers, but there are some just beautiful parts that I want readers to experience on their own terms through your written words – there is a sense of the porousness of life and death that’s woven throughout this book in so many of the people that you ended up traveling with and being with along these rivers, often not intentionally. But it just so happened that a lot of these people were dealing with mourning in different ways. Why? What is it about rivers that made that line between life and death so porous?

Macfarlane: Porosity is a really fine way of putting it. And reminds me of this line of my friend Horatio Clare that I like to quote that I carry with me: “the boundary between life and death is porous both ways to love.” And we’re not speaking of rivers here exactly directly, but I think what Horatio meant by that is that, even when dead, those we have loved continue to love us back in memory, in object, in presence. That seems self-evident to me. Those who I’ve lost continue to love me and we continue to love them even across the boundary that seems to lie, which is sometimes figured as a river. When my friend Barry Lopez died, he and his family spoke of him having crossed the river, the McKenzie on which he lived for 40 years.

But yes, three of the people, four really, who are central to this book – Wayne himself, Giuliana Furci the Chilean mycologist, Yuvan who we’ve already spoken of, and Rita in a different way – were all suffering forms of loss. And for each of them, the river became a way of either healing actively from that loss, or grappling with it in ways that rotated it, that changed it, that allowed them to see around its corners. I think in a way I don’t need to theorize that, it just happened and it was true.

Miller: Rob, thanks so much for coming in. It was a pleasure talking with you. I have been looking forward to this for a long time. So, thank you.

Macfarlane: Thank you, Dave. I loved our conversation.

Miller: Robert Macfarlane – his new book is called “Is a River Alive?”

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