Could a river sue a corporation? Robert Macfarlane’s books change the world – now he’s advocating for the world’s waterways

Robert Macfarlane is not easy to pin down – song writer, nature writer, children’s author, environmental activist, documentary film maker, mountain climber and restless adventurer, spoken word performer, literary historian, librettist, linguist and researcher. Likewise, his books are so various and yet so much themselves, it seems he has forged his own genre.

Review: Is a River Alive? – Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Random House)

He has won many kinds of prizes for his books, so many that he has been spoken of as a likely Nobel Prize winner several times over the past few years. Each of his books changes the world a little, possibly sometimes profoundly.

His latest takes as its title and starting point a question his young son once put to him, “Is a River Alive?” If we can talk of rivers dying (and we do), then isn’t there an assumption somewhere along that line of thought that a river does indeed constitute a life?

MacFarlane lives south of Cambridge, England, not far from a rare chalk stream spring that feeds the early reaches of the River Cam, which flows through the town. This is one of the four troubled rivers he explores across the pages of his book.

In England, climate change will put such springs at risk not too far into the future. He reports in his brief inter-chapters on the River Cam that the nationwide privatisation of riverways has put the health of England’s rivers at risk of dying as viable natural ecosystems.

His book takes us across the globe. To the Ecuadorian cloud-forest named Los Cedros, where the “river of the Cedars” is under threat from gold-mining.

Then to Chennai in south-east India, a city of three rivers and a surrounding marshland. All three rivers have been declared “dead” due to a total lack of dissolved oxygen in their waters as they pass through this city of three million people, taking up raw sewage and industrial waste in huge quantities.

The final journey is into Quebec’s wild Magpie River, named Muteshekau-Shipu by the Innu people who have lived for 8,000 years with this river. Its flow, he writes, is now threatened by a hydro scheme that would transform it into a series of chained reservoirs – an incursion into one of the largest intact ecosystems in the world. Already, power lines from a just-completed hydro scheme that has drowned a nearby river are crossing the Muteshekau.

We visit, alongside Macfarlane, each of these rivers, and encounter with him the characters entangled with them. Often these individuals are quixotically heroic, damaged by their tilting against governments and corporations, deeply insightful, determinedly optimistic, and always (in his appreciative hands) articulate.