Is A River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. 2025. London, Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books. 375pp. Hardback £25.00

Readers will have probably heard of this book as it was the Book of Week during early 2025. It was written by the author over three and a half years having visited three main rivers, one in Ecuador, one in India and one in Canada. The author is a Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge, and has written or co-authored nine other books.

However for this book he has other co-authors, as he says ‘I wish to say plainly’… ‘written with the rivers that run through its pages….They are my co-authors.’ He also wishes to make it clear that he refers to rivers as living, as in ‘river who flow’, rather than river that flow.

Macfarlane has as his main aim to fathom out ‘Is a river alive’. He also questions ‘Does a forest have a mind?’, for he is forever in forests through which rivers flow. He reminds us that we are all living in a watershed. Too true. Most villages, towns and cities are based around an original water source, and he refers to London’s now lost rivers, ‘ghost rivers’ 20 lost in London, others in New York….. These are ‘imprisoned’ rivers that have died. In Europe over one million barriers he says have been erected over watercourses, and he says that the body of water contained in the Three Gorges dam in China has ‘measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth’. There are copious references (and index), though not attributed to particular texts, three maps and a few black and white photographs.

So in this book we have more on the impact of man on the ecology of watersheds and the demise of rivers, and the people that live in the forest, than the nitty-gritty answers of are these rivers alive, are forests mindful, and is there any evidence of sentience by the rivers? 

The author spends a lot of time with people of the forests, how they have endured the loss of forest, gold-mining,  logging, expropriation, draining of wetlands and forests, canalisation….. etc. Some of his contacts with people are described in a verbatim manner, better for the radio, than in a book and not addressing the core questions.  

I would like to have the author cut to the chase with the results of his investigations. I would have like to have seen more on the evidence of sentience rather than the plight of people in the forests subjected to loss of their intimate environment which has been told many times over.  Yes, people in watersheds have always revered the water, just like sun and stars as stable entities. Yes, rivers are essentially alive. Most keep on flowing. It’s what they do.  

As for my own experience I have travelled the Amazon and its tributaries and am aware of its vagaries and its persistence, and need, and obligation to flow (melting snow water). It certainly has presence, standing and one has to be very respectful, and it makes its presence irrevocably known. Sure it is a living body of water and you need to be aware of that.

Rivers are given the right to flow by us, not to be abstracted or polluted. If they are to be ‘protected’ in the world we have chosen to live in, we have to speak for them as they do not have a voice. It is our anthropomorphic choice and we have chosen that avenue to protect one of our natural assets; an essential one.