A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
“BARRENNESS IS ALMOST ALWAYS A STATE OF MIND, ONLY RARELY A STATE OF LAND”
At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Image credit: MIEKE CAMPBELL on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
The river bends – water does not...
They say that to be deemed wise,
you must know how to find
the water in the river.
– Buddhadasa Bhikku
This poem, and the many others in River Poems (Everyman’s Library, $24) are a testament to our relationship with life-giving rivers.
Celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane composes a different sort of ode to rivers in Is a River Alive? He describes water worship through the ages, with rivers and springs being revered as sacred.
At once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change, the book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys.
The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining.
The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway.
The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an Innu poet and leader.
Macfarlane prefers the pronoun who for rivers. Rivers who flow, not rivers that flow.
Bhupen Hazarika was an Indian singer, songwriter, writer, filmmaker and politician from Assam. O Ganga tumi boicho keno was a haunting ballad he composed, questioning the River Ganga on why she continued to flow when multitudes on her banks were suffering.
Rivers are worshipped in India and on the subcontinent. They are assigned a gender. All rivers in India are female, except the Brahmaputra, which is considered male. Ancient Tamil documents record curses specific to the sin of defiling water.
Macfarlane describes shifting baseline syndrome or generational amnesia. While someone born in the 70s might recall car windscreens spattered by countless insect impacts after a long journey, windscreens today bear a fraction of those marks. “But someone born in the early 2000s would not recognize this as signifying a drastic decline in flying insect populations because they never knew the earlier abundance.”
The same syndrome has masked the stages of rivers’ ruin, he writes.
The brilliant, perspective-shifting new book answers a resounding “yes” to the question of its title.
At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law.
Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.
He travels to Chennai in search of ghosts, monsters and angels. “The ghost are those of rivers who had to be killed for this city to live. The monsters are the terrible forms those river ghosts take every few years, when they are resurrected by cyclone or monsoon. The angels are those who watch over the lives of the rivers where they survive and who seek to revive those who are dying.”
Activists like Yuvan Aves who says, “Barrenness is almost always a state of mind, only rarely a state of land”. Who shares the alarming and yet horribly fascinating tale of the river that a state government “disappeared” from maps to give developers access to an ecologically sensitive area.
And men like Arun Venkatraman working to protect Olive Ridley Turtles who come ashore to lay their eggs.
The young “rights of nature” movement has lit up activists, artists, lawmakers and politicians across six continents – and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.
In Bangladesh, Macfarlane informs readers, the judiciary has enforced the closure of 231 unauthorized factories which were judged to be violating the rights of the Buriganga River.
The Rights of Nature – to exist, to regenerate, to be restored, to be respected – were enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution.
Judges in Uttarakhand high court decreed that the Ganges and the Yamuna – two of Hinduism’s most sacred rivers – should be recognized as living entities with attendant rights. Four days later, Brij Khandelwal called a police station in Agra to report a crime – a rivercide – the poisoning of the river Yamuna.
He was laughed at.
And in Quebec, Mi’kmaq elders coined the notion of Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing. In essence, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing and focusing together to protect nature.
These actions led to the recognition of the Mutehekau Shipu as a living, rights-bearing being and have inspired new actions.
Macfarlane quotes Ursula L Kee Guinn who says “one way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings – kinfolk.
There are revelations about rivers we pass every day.
In the 1930 and 1940s, the Don River in Toronto suffered such contamination from the oil refineries on its banks that it twice caught fire and burned. In the 1990s, Lake Ontario was so chemically polluted that it was possible to develop photographic film by dipping it into a bucket of lake water.
In Quebec, the James Bay hydroelectric project redirected four major rivers into new watersheds, changing the climate of the region and altering rainfall patterns.
Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane is published by Random House Canada, $39.
“To say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’,” Macfarlane believes.
On May 5, 2022, “the modestly named, philosophically disruptive Bill C-271 was given its first reading in the Canadian House of Commons,” he writes. “It is the draft of an act that seeks to give legal capacity to the St Lawrence River.
“If you find it hard to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying river or a dead river. This is easier.”