Recently, I read and finished Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. The book is more than the author’s musings on the answer to the titular question. It’s mostly about the journey that Macfarlane embarks on with unforgettable people whom I would love to sit down and have tea with. The book is about the bonds that are inevitably forged between people who all want the same thing—for rivers to be clean and unmolested by corporate greed, for ecosystems to thrive, for all life to be protected. The book is about learning that every day people are working to preserve precious resources and the creatures that thrive because of them.
Macfarlane unfurls words in such a lush and elegant way that I would one day like to emulate. I aspire to observe the world and other people the way that he does. He makes connections between seemingly unrelated things and somehow melts them into one poetic entity, like a painter mixing colors to create a new hue. He conjoins stories about Henry Fisk’s maps of the Mississippi River’s history with Leonardo di Vinci’s anatomical sketches and neatly folds them into the main theme of the book—rivers, how they flow, live, die, move, and breathe.
With Macfarlane’s masterful art of noticing, the cast of colorful people in each section of the book are written with such care and attention that even if they are mentioned just briefly, their humanity is still palpable, relatable, and tangible. One such case is Yuvan’s mother, Margaret. Yuvan is one of the many brilliant river guardians who graces the pages of the book. His genius is exemplary. His exuberance is infectious. His sister, Yazhini, was sixteen when she died of heart failure after being prescribed incorrect drugs to cure a stomach-ache. There is an altar in a room in the apartment that Yuvan and Margaret share together, and a 3D-bust of Yazhini on the dashboard of Margaret’s car. On the final page of this portion about Chennai, we are watching a newly hatched sea turtle struggle her way into the surf. The sun is rising. And Macfarlane mentions Margaret once more: she “steps into Yazhini’s room to lay fresh flowers before her photograph.” It is such an intimate inclusion in a book that I initially thought was merely going to be about rivers. A subtle detail that reminds us that like the water that flows downstream in search of the ocean, life continues and endures.
This book reminds me of a quote from Devin Kelly’s Substack post about Jane Kenyon and her poetry. “What is detail other than a gift?” Kelly writes, “A gift the writer’s attention offers the world, and a gift that we are in turn offered once the writer turns their attention to the page.”
Getting to know people like Yuvan and Margaret and the sprawling cast of unforgettable people like Guiliana and Arun and Ilya and Josef DeCoux is a gift that Macfarlane has given his readers who otherwise would not have known who they were. It’s pleasant knowing that there are people out there who dedicate themselves to protecting the sanctity of rivers and forests and sea turtle eggs, when so many people would rather leave the responsibility to someone else.
Is a River Alive? feels to me as if it’s in direct conversation with Dr. Kelsey Leonard’s Ted Talk “Why lakes and rivers should have the same rights as humans”. I first heard a snippet of this TED Talk on an episode of NPR’s podcast TED Talk Radio Hour. The episode was titled “Our Relationship with Water.” Dr. Leonard tells a story of a prophecy that her mentor Nokomis Grandmother Josephine Mandamin-ba told her in which one day “an ounce of water will cost more than an ounce of gold.” Leonard responded that she thinks that time is already here, to which Nokomis Grandmother said, “So what are you going to do about it?”
Macfarlane writes about river guardians—people who protect rivers through means such as advocating for Rights of Nature laws or making sure that water is not polluted by monitoring—or angels “who watch over the lives of the rivers where they survive, and who seek to revive those who are dying”. Dr. Leonard says that protecting water is everyone’s responsibility as “water citizens.” We should not delegate this task to a distinguished few, but we should all do our part to protect water. She urges you to ask yourself, “What have you done for the water today?”
Macfarlane is an observer of activists; Dr. Leonard encourages us to be activists.
Both Macfarlane’s book and Dr. Leonard’s speech have left a lasting impression on me. I am more conscious of all the water around me, especially living in Michigan, a state enveloped by the Great Lakes. Although I consider myself atheist most days and agnostic on others, both of those works remind me why so many past religions revered water, why so many creation myths believe that water predates all things.
Water is alive and sacred and essential for all of us to live. Water is not only a human right, but it should have the right to be clean and unmolested by toxins, chemicals, and waste.
Carismatic Scholar 