Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane. Hamish Hamilton, 374 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241624814
Incubating the Trout. The Story of the Oldest Salmonid Hatchery in the World and the Environmental Fight to Protect It, by Kevin Prunty, Book Hub Publishing, 72 pp, €12, ISBN: 978-1068649073
Like Bedřik Smetana’s symphonic poem The Moldau, this book opens with the emergence of a tiny trickle of water from the rock. But in this case the spring arose from a crack in the chalk 12,000 years ago, near where Robert Macfarlane now lives in Cambridge. The little unnamed stream recurs as a leitmotif running between the accounts of three journeys to distant rivers: the Los Cedros in northern Ecuador; the Adyar, Coom and Kosasthalaiyar in Chennai, in southern India; and the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie) in northeastern Quebec. Yet, this is far from being a simple travelogue: it asks big questions about the fate of our rivers in a world where ‘we now take it for granted that we take rivers for granted’, and in consequence pollute them, bury them, dam them and drain them, viewing them as dumping grounds to sluice away unwanted substances or resources to be exploited rather than a good in themselves. Every one of England’s rivers is now dying, polluted beyond legal limits, a pattern mirrored in various other parts of the world. In response, Macfarlane asks the revolutionary question: ‘is a river alive?’
Traditional societies would have had no hesitation in answering ‘yes’. Rivers, so inextricably linked with the fertility of the surrounding land, were deified. Our own rivers, among them the Shannon (Sinann) and Boyne (Boann), derive their names from Celtic goddesses and feature strongly in mythology. Barry Raftery tells us that each of the rivers in the Iron Age had its tutelary goddess to whom precious goods were donated in votary offerings. (Pagan Celtic Ireland: The Enigma of the Irish Iron Age (1994).) Since the earliest emergence of human society rivers and lakes have been crucial to our existence and for that reason all early settlement took place close to sources of fresh water. Most of us, from childhood, share a fascination with running water.
Robert Macfarlane, internationally renowned writer on nature, whose bestselling and prizewinning Underland: a Deep Time Journey (2019), explores places and things beneath the Earth’s surface, has turned his attention to rivers. A Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, Macfarlane is a prolific writer and campaigner on the environment, writing not only books but also films, libretto and song lyrics. His libretto for a requiem entitled ‘The World Tree’, about the felled Sycamore Gap Tree, is to be premiered in Helsinki in November 2025. One of the joys of reading Is a River Alive is its superb writing, where the language is vivid, powerful, each word employed with a poet’s economy and precision, as in his description of the camp beside the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie) river in Canada:
Flies. Alder. Willow. Smoke blue-grey in the clear air, plumed off the fire by the wind. The tiny blast-furnace of the fire’s heart.’
Each of the environments visited here is threatened in a different way. Los Cedros, just under 12,000 hectares in the north-western Andes, is an oasis of pristine cloud forest of breathtaking beauty and outstanding biodiversity, protected since 1988 by the efforts of several individuals, including Joseph DeCoux, with whom Macfarlane stayed and to whose memory the book is dedicated. In 2006 the socialist democrat Rafael Correa, was elected president, promising reforms, including the protection of the rights of Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples, whose lives and environments were endangered by the activities of oil drilling and mining companies. In September 2008, a new constitution was ratified by a national referendum, which included radical ‘Rights of Nature’ articles, binding the government to respect and protect nature, recognising that ‘Nature ‘has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes’, that it has a right to be restored when damaged and the state has an obligation to restrict activities that might lead ‘to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems and the permanent alteration of natural cycles’.
Shaped by its Indigenous people’s approach to nature, the constitution was a global first and set off what is today’s Rights of Nature movement. It was those provisions that protected Los Cedros from an attempted move by the Canadian firm Cornerstone Capital Resources to mine for copper and gold in the cloud forest, which would have wreaked the same kind of devastation already visited on the surrounding areas, felling the trees and poisoning the rivers. At first it seemed as if nothing could stop them, but following a determined campaign of opposition, on November 10th 2021 the constitutional court in Quito ruled on the basis of the articles guaranteeing the Rights of Nature that mining would violate the rights of Los Cedros, and the mining companies were compelled to evacuate the area within weeks. It was a judgement that thrilled environmentalists throughout the world. Yet the mining and logging companies continue their activities elsewhere. When Macfarlane visited Los Cedros, a young defender of water rights and anti-mining activist in the north of the country had been murdered two days before. She was five months pregnant. The struggle against exploitation of these lands has continued for generations. Accompanied by three companions, Macfarlane hikes up the mountains along the Río Los Cedros, camping in the cedar forest, soaking up his surroundings and reaching as near as possible to the river’s source.
For the present, at least, Los Cedros is safe but in the next section Macfarlane visits a landscape almost totally annihilated by industrialisation around Chennai, in southern India, where all the waterbodies running across the city have been declared dead. Like the impressive individuals he encountered in Los Cedros, his guide in Chennai is a remarkable man, Yuvan Aves, who has dedicated his life to studying the local fauna and flora and trying to defend the environment. This place, where three rivers, the Adyar, Cooum and Kosasthalyar, flow into the Bay of Bengal, has been a site of human settlement for 1.5 million years. Water was a sacred part of the Dravidian empires that rose and fell from the third century BCE onwards and over the area of Tamil Nadu a whole network of eris, or water-storage ponds, were constructed to gather and store the monsoon water for use in the drought months, while the marshes also absorbed, stored and released water. Today, the eris are neglected and the marshes built over, which means that when the monsoon rains come the water has nowhere to go, bursting destructively into the city. In the company of Yuvan’s pupils from Montessori School, the two men set off by bus to see the Vedanthangal bird sanctuary, where the Sun Phara company discharges toxins into the lake, ruining crops, poisoning local people and killing birds. Yuvan is struggling to publicise the damage. They visit the stinking Adyar with its floating lumps of sewage. Beside it is a small woodland planted by volunteers and students from across Chennai on what had been a dump-yard but now provides shade and an urban forest for the local people and a refuge for birds and insects, a small beacon of hope. At Ennore Creek, in a poor district of the city, ‘the air is violent with pollution’, so dirty they must wear face masks. When asked what the locals would like for the future, a woman replies: ‘We’re all getting cancer. It would be nice if we just got asthma.’ The river here is so chemically polluted that it blisters human skin. Yet, against all this, the determination of Yuvan and his comrades in battling this destruction is inspiring – at times Macfarlane struggles to share their optimism.
The third journey is to what Macfarlane titles ‘The Living River’, the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River, one of the last great wild rivers of Quebec. However, it too is threatened, this time by dam construction. As in Los Cedros, much of the resistance has been spearheaded by Indigenous people, here the Innu, women taking a prominent part. Hydro-Quebec is a state company, the world’s fourth-largest supplier of hydro-electric power. In May 2011, it announced a multi-billion-dollar ‘Plan Nord’, a twenty-five-year plan to industrialise the region north of the 49th Parallel, land which belongs to the Innu, the Cree and the Inuit. It envisages flooding the territories they have inhabited for some eight thousand years, drowning the rivers, destroying settlement sites and salmon-spawning grounds and felling forests. For millennia the rivers have served the local people as the highways of the region, routes running north and south, of ice in the winter and water in spring, summer and autumn. The Romaine River, sixty miles east, had been drowned under four reservoirs, despite protests from Innu people who lost their livelihoods and settlements, and the Mutehekau Shipu was threatened with a similar fate. In 2018 an alliance of four interested groups, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, was formed with the aim of gaining the joint recognition and declaration of the rights of the river. A resolution was drawn up in January 2021, with three main principles:
First, that the river is a living being – at once ancestor and descendant – and, as such, sacred. Second, that each generation has a responsibility to protect the river for those who are yet to be born and those they will never meet. Third, that a continuity exists between the human and non-human lives of the river, and that large-scale damming therefore threatens the whole riverine community, including people.
A group of river guardians was established, drawn from both Innu and settler communities and the Mutehekau Shipu became the first river in Canada to be recognised as a living, rights-bearing being.
After meeting with Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist who had played a prominent role in the campaign, and receiving advice from her, Macfarlane and three companions set off on a journey down the river. First, they took a floatplane to the northern tip of Lac Magpie and then paddled in individual kayaks along the western shore of the lake, camping on the shore. After a couple of days on the lake, they headed into the roiling waters of the river, shooting rapids in their small boats, or where necessary, portaging them down the bank. The combination of exhilaration and fear is brilliantly described by Macfarlane, his account concluding in a transcendent crescendo at the Gorge.
At various points in the book Macfarlane grapples with the question of what it means to say that a river is alive. He is clear that he’s not seeking to personify a river or anthropomorphise it but to ‘deepen and widen the category of “life”’. He follows the practice of traditional societies and modern writers who draw on them, such as Robin Wall-Kimmerer, in using the pronoun ‘who’, rather than ‘it’ in relation to rivers and attributes different personalities to them.
A few decades ago, the idea of a river being alive of itself, as opposed to containing a lot of living matter, would have been dismissed as romantic nonsense. But recent scientific work has uncovered not only life but more extensive consciousness than the human-focused Western world had assumed, and in unexpected places. Who would have thought that slime moulds could solve mazes or map road or metro systems? Or plants have awareness of people? Or trees form communities that communicate with each other and react to threats? Or fungi carry messages long distances? Or octopuses play practical jokes? And yet, we now know that they do. All the same, Macfarlane recognises the difficulty of the concept, asking how one could prove it. And as for speaking to or for a river or understanding what it wants, where could one start?
Surely all our attempts to bend the law round so that it recognises the rights of rivers or forests will only end up with human proxies, jockeying for their own position and speaking in incorrigibly human voices – ventriloquizing ‘river’ and ‘forest’ in a kind of cos-play animism.
Yet I wonder if he complicates unnecessarily. Cannot something be alive without having what we would recognise as consciousness or intention?
Is a River Alive? is a part of a cultural shift towards a deeper connection with the natural world. Writers such as Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013) or Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, 2020), as well as Macfarlane throughout his work, have altered our paradigms about the natural world. Whether it be composers, including Cosmo Sheldrake, who accompanied Macfarlane to Los Cedros, or the Finnish Einojuhani Rautavaara, whose ‘Cantus Arcticus’ incorporates recorded birdsong to poignant effect, or the running tide of the ecological art movement, we are finding new inspiration in nature. There is a turn toward sustainable ways of farming and a move to restore natural habitats in rewilding, a hunger for nature just as we have almost destroyed it. Macfarlane’s book provides disquieting accounts of rivers threatened by voracious human greed and yet, despite this, it is a hugely uplifting read and I can’t recommend it highly enough. You’ll never look at a river the same way again.
If all English rivers are polluted, around one-half of Irish rivers and lakes are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as below good ecological health standards and they note that overall Irish water quality is in decline [Environmental Protection Agency, Water Quality Report, 2024, p. 22]. In Incubating the Trout: The Story of the Oldest Salmonid Hatchery in the World and the Environmental Fight to Protect it, Kevin Prunty, a lifelong trout-fisher, committee member of the Oughterard Anglers’ Association and writer on angling-related topics, traces the history of the Oughterard Hatchery. This was founded in December 1852, first as a salmon hatchery and later raising trout for restocking surrounding rivers and lakes, including nearby Lough Corrib. However, since the 1980s, anglers noticed signs of pollution in Lough Corrib and began to voice disquiet. There were a number of causes for the decline in water quality: slurry and nitrates run-off owing to bad farming practices, outdated town sewage treatment plants, resulting in Oughterard town’s sewage draining into the Owenriff River, and misguided planting decisions by Coillte, which sited extensive coniferous forestry on peatlands, applying huge quantities of phosphate, which consequently ran off into spawning streams, killing salmonid eggs and reducing food sources in the water for the young fish.
Thirty years ago, in 1995, the European Commission initiated legal proceedings against Ireland for failing to adapt the Nitrates Directive and Prunty tells us that ‘Ireland has more complaints about the environment lodged against it than any other EU country’. His book charts a prolonged campaign on the part of local people and a handful of leaders to halt the pollution of their waterways, among whom Micheal D Higgins was the first to speak out. Overall, however, it is a story of overwhelming apathy on the part of politicians and administrators, whom, it seems, only prosecution by the EU or the occasional crisis, such as the cryptosporidium outbreak in 2007, causing a tap water ban for Galway residents for several months, can motivate to action. To this day, when Ireland remains the only country in the EU applying for a derogation from its nitrates regulations, that if granted, will allow farmers to continue polluting Irish rivers, the indifference towards environmental reform is striking. Last summer, when I returned to regular walks by the Blessington Lakes, a place I knew well as a teenager, the change in water quality was shocking. The clean, clear water of the 1970s was replaced by sludge-covered stones, floating litter and warnings not to let one’s dog swim in the water when it had a toxic algal bloom for fear of poisoning.
And yet, if only we would halt the continuous pollution, our waterways could recover quite quickly. As Macfarlane puts it: ‘Rivers are easily wounded. But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.’ He cites the example of the Elwha River in Washington state. When the Lower Elwha Dam was removed in September 2011, a century after its construction, its revival was ‘breathtakingly fast’. The sediment behind the dam was flushed to the estuary where shingle banks and sandbars formed, protecting the shore from storms and creating new habitats. A forest soon sprang up, black bears and mountain lions arrived and dippers appeared. Salmon, their route no longer blocked, returned in thousands and people came – hikers, families and members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, whose sacred land had been drowned by the reservoir a century earlier. With a nod to Emily Dickinson, he concludes: ‘Hope is the thing with rivers.’
28/10/2025
Carla King was formerly a lecturer in Modern History at St Patrick’s College, now Dublin City University. She studied in UCD and the University of London and taught in several Irish colleges and universities. She published on various topics, most relating to the Irish land question and Michael Davitt, including an edited edition of his collected writings. Her study of Davitt’s later career, Michael Davitt after the Land League, 1882-1906, (2016) was awarded the NUI Irish Historical Research Special Commendation Prize in 2017.
