Autumn 2025: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

“We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.” In the introduction to his newly published book Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane quotes his friend, another nature writer, Barry Lopez. It seems unceremonious to begin an essay about Macfarlane’s work with someone else’s words, yet, the intertextuality of the book itself forms a riverbed for legal terms and political debates, poetic portrayals and philosophical reflections, alongside personal accounts and transcultural conversations to run through. The concern for singular authorship, therefore, becomes meaningless. And parallel to Macfarlane’s question, “Is a river alive?”, my question is: Is our boat found?

In the first part of the book, Macfarlane recounts walking along the Río Los Cedros in the cloud forest of Ecuador, where he and his companions crossed streams by hopping among stones, “much as the river does.” I’ve shared the same experience – at least in my conception, the same – when hiking through and across a river with childhood friends, when stepping barefoot onto the stones and into the waters in summers of unbearable indolence one could only have in the beginning years of life. The river I mentioned is the only one that resides in my hometown. It is a tiny town in southwest China surrounded by mountains, almost inaccessible, but the river comes and goes with an ease that none of us have. And when there is only one river in a town, it has no name, but the “river.”

It even gives me a pang of jealousy reading Macfarlane’s luxurious journeys. He travelled along the endangered “river of the cedars” in Ecuador, the wounded channels of Chennai in southeast India, and the wild, living Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River of Quebec. What a feast of encounters. To follow these captivating, intelligent, compassionate, and above all nonconformist human beings in turning pages felt like a middle school excursion. I was again an ignorant teenager among a group of experienced, intimidating adults: mycologist, lawyer, forest guard, ecologist, activist, geomancer and the writer who knows everything. 

In their company, I was thrilled for every unknown path, amazed by strange scenery, and interested in overheard anecdotes. Still, at times I was bored, even irritated, by ceaseless teachings humming in the background. Also, I was secretly ashamed for not paying full attention to the lessons, and always, always harboring questions and objections. Yet perhaps that is part of the experience Macfarlane invites: to be taught by him is to oscillate between wonder and fatigue, between enchantment and the quiet discipline of learning.

Is a River Alive? is a pedagogical book: a glossary, almost a dictionary, for rivers and the Rights of Nature movement. To my surprise, when asked at a book talk whether he intended to “educate” readers, Macfarlane seemed not to have thought much about it. But even on the educational level, this book stands out for the precision and elegance of its diction, and the gentle, teacherly patience of the author. 

Advocating a love-language for rivers, or what he draws from Robin Wall Kimmerer “the grammar of animacy,” Macfarlane depicts the aliveness of water with care, even restraint. Because when he trudged up to meet the river, “the river says nothing back.” He entangles himself in the paradox of “water literacy”: the tension between the ideal of listening to the river and the practice of speaking about the river in a book.

…The voice sings what I cannot understand, however much I long to, and my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense at the shatter-belt of my awareness of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river-being…

To speak for the river risks anthropocentrism; but to ask the river to speak for itself risks unintelligibility. For Macfarlane, the way out is to enlarge the scope of life, to thicken the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, and to co-author with nature, until we see a river as alive as a person, and vice versa. 

But how to grasp a minimal fragment of running waters, a short glimpse of an ever-changing vision, a being that resists the governing power of language at its never-existing core? By metaphor, says Macfarlane, joining like to unlike, is to is not, center to periphery.

More of metonymy, I would argue, when we speak of the more-than-human world. Because the subject of our discussion lives in an everlasting transformation. It can only be approached through relations. We refer one to another, then to another, and another… Until the very end, the writer claims, “I am rivered.” I deeply appreciate Macfarlane’s method, and the interconnected world he archives in the book. But the extent to which his attempt succeeds remains an open question.

For me, Macfarlane’s aesthetic falters not because language is inevitably human, but because the world he listens to is already filtered through comfort and distance. While reading other reviews of the book, I came across one reader’s complaint:

Hundreds of pages stretch on with no events, no characters, just a few people drifting on a river. No matter how exquisite or precise the language, it feels empty.

One could defend the book, noting that it is not a novel with deliberate plots or characters; its subject is the river, and it is, in a sense, an experimental practice. Yet such defenses risk sounding elitist, or excluding sincere, ordinary readers from the polyphonic conversation of the beautiful text.

I understand what the reader means by “empty.” Some characters, though real, feel insubstantial; their stories verge on repetition. Certain discussions barely began before they vanished, like rainwater disappearing into the underground. I am not suggesting that Macfarlane is not sincere, but he is sincere in a distant way. When he rescues the sea turtle eggs on the riverbank and inexplicably weeps on the sand, we know he is not hypocritical, or at least, he is not hypocritical enough. 

He writes for Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution but not for the unpleasant economic realities that followed the recognition of nature’s rights. He describes mining and dam construction, but sidelines the lived entanglements of miners, farmers, and displaced families. He criticizes the conspiracy of capitalism, but leaves underexplored the struggles of developing countries as they navigate short-term economic crises and the protection of their natural resources.

Of course, I should not demand that a modest travelogue encompass all this. Yet even among the figures described in the book, the emotional range is limited to love and grief, little else. How river, life, and death are intertwined, the question is posed without a satisfactory elaboration. Undeniably, Macfarlane and his friends’ love and protection for the rivers are genuine and admirable. It is a shame that his passion and writerly craft have not carried him far enough to self-reflect and re-examine that grand resolve from which his journey began. As a result, his intimacy with the river becomes an extraordinary spectacle, an experience difficult to empathize with, and an intellectual pleasure.

However, in the interspersed passages, when Macfarlane writes about the small river near his home, something tender surfaces. He confesses the fear of not being present in his children’s happiness, feeling an anticipated mourning for the future loss. Though seemingly plain, these fleeting moments are when we can glimpse the “bare heart” of a writer.

In October, I attended Fish Wu, an artist’s book launch of his graphic book Tibet Crossing. His work recounts a journey with his wife crossing the border from Tibet to Nepal. It ends with a story of an elderly woman in a Kathmandu inn. An exile who, in 1959, fled Tibet on foot for twenty-nine days, never to see her family and friends again. The artist realized that his own day-long journey by car, though arduous regarded by himself, was in fact nothing compared to this. Macfarlane’s writing, so self-enchanted, elegant, and continuous, as if embroidered with the delicacy of a needle pulling silk, lacks this simple humility.

This is where I begin to think of the river in my hometown. How clear it was, reflecting the mountains that gently cradled the town beneath the evening sun. On the Ghost Festival, my father, our dog, and I would burn spirit money for our ancestors by the riverbank. The burning paper drifted upward, turning from gold to ashes, and vanished, as if truly entering the other world. The choking smoke filled the valley. The dog dipped his paws into the water; I leaned close to see his face, and together we tried to escape the haze. On the clear ripples, the grass swayed; beneath the surface, stirred again, the other world. 

Macfarlane says to ask whether a river is alive is to ask what life itself is. Life, like the river, is not always joyous. It resists us, even as it sustains us. I remember the collective fear when everyone in town gathered by the bridge to watch the flood; the tragic drowning of the breakfast shop owner’s son; and how the county’s efforts to restore the river were unexpectedly successful. In time, otters appeared, and people said their presence was proof of purity. Yet the mineral-rich water that flowed into our taps caused my mother’s kidney stones. After her surgery, our dog and I accompanied her on slow evening walks. And the dog would always stretch his head under the railing, having caught the sound of an otter’s call.

The central idea of Is a River Alive? is that a river is a living being which deserves legal rights. This is not a revolutionary view. As the author notes, many Indigenous cultures already hold such a belief, and traditional conservation movements have also proposed other frameworks for granting rights to nature. As for whether a river is alive, my own answer is, of course, yes. But whether Macfarlane has found the boat for us to flow with the river, I am not sure.

The ship of mass industrial production is too vast, beyond reach; the vessel of words is too fragile, failing to carry many ordinary souls. This essay is written for all those who, after finishing the book, feel emptiness in their hearts, and for those who may never have the chance to read it. Because you are the boat, which we forgot to build and are eager to find. Your inspiration needs no borrowed medium. Whether you decide to take a walk to the river nearest your home or pick up a book about rivers in a bookstore, just “find the current, follow the flow.”

Good luck. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shupei Pan is a research master’s student in Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. She is interested in nature writing, and enjoys exploring the diverse, fluid, and co-creative relationships between human and nonhuman beings in both academic and creative writing.