The World is Alive; or, How Robert Macfarlane Came to Trust His Senses

“While writing about landscape often begins in the aesthetic, it must always end in the ethical.”
–Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
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There is a sentence 256 pages into Robert Macfarlane’s newest book, Is a River Alive?, a spell, really, of 329 ecstatic words, that eddies and flows and is, as far as I know, utterly unique in the ten books of prose, essays, and poetry that he has written over the last twenty-two years. Macfarlane and his friend Wayne, as well as three guides, Raph, Danny, and Ilya, are paddling 100 miles of the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, in Quebec, a river which, until it was granted legal personhood in 2021, was in danger of being dammed into stillness.

But that’s all backstory, because that single sentient sentence marks a moment of revelation, not just in the book, which is, itself, a watershed effort for Macfarlane, but in the writer’s storied career. It’s the moment when he comes to believe what his senses, what his very prose itself, has been telling him for as long as he’s been writing.

Macfarlane is the best-known and most-beloved living nature writer working in the English language. Beginning with his first book, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (2003), he has developed and honed a technicolor-bright descriptive sensibility that, as he once wrote of Nan Shepherd, practices “precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion, exactitude as tribute, description structured by proposition and facts freed of their ballast such that they levitate and otherwise behave curiously.”

He would come down from the mountains to adventure about the equally wild, if more accessible, corners of Britain, its islands, valleys, moors, saltmarshes, and holloways (roads sunk deep into the countryside by pre-automobile generations and which “speak of habit rather than suddenness”) in The Wild Places (2007); he would walk across ancient paths laid down through peat, on limestone, and over snow in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012); he would wriggle underground through claustrophobic caves beneath the city of Paris and deep into the blue heart of a Greenlandic glacier in Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019).

Along the way, Macfarlane published a brilliant and quirky book called Landmarks (2015), which is a mix of literary criticism, a love-letter to literature, and a glossary of hundreds of endangered or extinct British words that describe particular landscape features, such as “twitchel,” which is a word native to the Midlands and describes a narrow path between hedges; two books of poetry; and a handful of chapbooks that have allowed him the brief space to sing his love of reading, of witchy places, and of his time with the nature writer Roger Deakin, who died suddenly from a brain tumor in 2006.

Adventure, travel, history, literary criticism, all deeply felt and closely observed—a Macfarlane book blends all this together with a maximalist love for language and the keen ethical proposition that the world is worth paying attention to. That world is, most obviously, the physical one, and for Macfarlane that mostly means rural, or woodsy, or wind-swept places thinly populated by humans (at least, compared to Cambridge, where he lives and teaches), but it has also always been a world of texts, and there’s something congruent about the full-bodied way that Macfarlane experiences the word and the world. “The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature,” he writes in The Old Ways. “A walk is only a step away from a story and even a path tells.” Or as he revised and distilled it for Is a River Alive?: “Words make worlds.”

Just what sort of a world, then, is his new book?

Is A River Alive? begins with both a prologue and an introduction, a bit of a double-time quickstep at the outset that allows Macfarlane both a speculative, 12,000-year deep landscape history of the springs near his home in Cambridge—to which he returns after each of the book’s three chapters—as well as a more direct opening that could almost be at home in an academic monograph and is launched by something like a proposition to be tested: “This book is a journey into an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.”

That bipedal start sets the pace for the pages that follow, which blend the richly observed, precise lyricism for which Macfarlane has justly become celebrated (here he is, describing the moths in an Ecuadorian cloud forest: “More moths come, and more. They perch on my hat like a fisherman’s flies, on my shoulder like leaves, on my cheek like touch after gentle touch. I am in a dream. I have foliage, not skin, shifting and alive.”) and something that is new, something closer to the kind of carefully reported environmental journalism with an edge practiced by writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, Michelle Nijhuis, or Elizabeth Rush—which is to say it’s a book with a point, a tool for getting something done. Or, to put it another way, Is A River Alive? is Macfarlane’s first explicitly political book.

Properly done, politics is more than just virtue signaling, more than a rhetorical position that one takes, and Is A River Alive? is political in the precise meaning of the term, where politics is the realm of power, of the interrelationship between individuals and the state, of who gets to participate and the means whereby a people, or some subset, can set the course of the future for the collective whole.

Only in this case, Is A River Alive? examines what happens when water has rights, and each of the three chapters—set in Ecuador, India, and Canada—sees Macfarlane following the flow of a river (the Río Los Cedros; the stretches of the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar, as they flow through Chennai; and the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie) along with a local human water protector or two to document the world-wide struggle for the rights of nature. “We live in a polyphonic world,” Macfarlane writes in what has got to be one of the most pointedly political lines he has yet penned; “but also one in which the majority of Earth’s inhabitants—human and other-than-human—are denied voice. To be silenced is not the same as to be silent; to go unheard is not the same as to be speechless.”

Like that plaited start, the book’s aim is twofold, and by far the bulk of the book is taken up with witnessing the ground the rights of nature movement has gained across the globe. Macfarlane’s history begins in 1971 when a young law scholar named Christopher Stone, seeing that his students were bored senseless by his efforts, tried a desperate ploy. What would our legal system look like, he asked, if trees had rights? It caused Stone’s sleepy students to take notice, as would the legal world a year later when he wrote up an article for the Southern California Law Review called, “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” That piece, and the book that would follow, has become a staple of environmental humanities classes for decades and still stirs vigorous classroom debate today.

It was also that rare academic exercise that took root in the fresh air beyond the lecture hall, perhaps most famously in New Zealand’s 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act, which recognizes the Whanganui River as not only alive, but as a legal person, giving it the same legal standing as if it were a citizen. Nearly a decade earlier and half a world away, Ecuador had ratified a new constitution, and with it four new articles, known as the “Rights of Nature Articles.”

And so it is to Ecuador that Macfarlane travels in the first of the book’s three chapters, to the cloud forest Los Cedros, home of the Río Los Cedros, whose source he’d like to find. If this were like his other books, we’d follow Macfarlane on an exquisitely observed, mostly solo adventure that blends deep observation with inner insight, literary history, and moments of revelation—but this is not those books, and instead we get a fairly mellow group outing with César Rodriguez-Garavito, a lawyer fighting for trans-Amazonia Indigenous and natural rights and founder of the MOTH (More-Than-Human) Rights Collective; Cosmo Sheldrake, hooch-swilling, weed-infused-chocolate munching musician and field recordist; Giuliana Furci, mycologist who detects vanishingly rare, or even unknown-to-western-science fungi based on little more than what she calls a “‘fuzz in the matrix’” and a loud “woo-hoo,” scores of which punctuate the chapter, every time she stumbles on something fungal; and two legal scholars, Ramiro Ávila Santamaría and Agustín Grijalva Jiménez, both key Ecuadorian Constitutional Court judges who played a role in using Ecuador’s Rights of Nature articles to save Los Cedros from international mining interests.

There’s comparatively little of Macfarlane in this chapter or the next, set in the Indian city of Chennai, to which he has travelled to meet an angelic young water-protector named Yuvan Aves; instead the pages are given over to explanation—the geopolitical, economic, and legal history of Los Cedros; the Living Forest movement—and dialogue. Though all of Macfarlane’s books feature fellow travelers, they are always supporting characters, their patter at once both crucial to the particular scenes in which they appear (think of the lovely, brief portrait of Deakin as he accompanied Macfarlane on their joint exploration of Dorset’s holloways in The Wild Places: his car, a “dark-green Audi….had moss growing in its footwells, and in the grykes between the seats. ‘Three different sorts,’ he said proudly, when I pointed this out.”) but also secondary to the narrator’s capacious, voracious sensibility and the landscape through which he travels.

Not so here, and instead, in the first two chapters, the roles are reversed: Macfarlane is mostly quiet in the backseat, playing the journalist who melts into the scenery the better to record his subjects, while his characters steer a course through the chapter. The problem is that dialogue is difficult to write when you need your characters to convey certain pieces of information in specific ways for the audience’s benefit, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to speak according to one’s own literary sensibility. It’s even more difficult when their task is expository: there’s not much narrative tension in the first two chapters; little of either the adventure that most of Macfarlane’s books have long relied upon, or the nearly spiritual insight gained from deep attention to text and landscape. The result is that, too often, there’s an odd, scripted quality that feels overly pedantic.

Here, for example, is Sheldrake, marveling over the Los Cedros soundscape: “‘I don’t think I’ve ever listened to such a pristine soundscape…. If what Josef tells us is right, this forest has been speaking more or less like this for tens of thousands of years or more—way back into the Ice Age. Listening to it is like trying to learn a hundred different new languages at once. I’m struck by how much more…spacious the relationship between the forest’s speakers is here than in England, for instance. Each voice has its own rhythmic room and frequency. It’s a hell of a place to be an ear-witness’” It’s as if he’s delivering an edifying soliloquy to an audience just out there in the darkness, beyond the proscenium edge.

Macfarlane is on more secure footing in Chennai with Aves, who, though his lines also march stiffly across the page, is only one voice, and so affords Macfarlane the opportunity of distance from which he can examine, rather than report. In some of the most moving and deftly penned pages in the book, Macfarlane tells Aves’s story, of the horrific abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather, of how he ran away from home with no aim other than to pursue his education, of how he learned to sit quietly for hours and watch the world of butterflies and crickets and toads come alive around him, of how he founded a trust called Palluyir, which takes as its mission the advancement of ecological knowledge and practice in Tamil Nadu.

“He learned that patience,” Macfarlane writes of Aves’s education after running away from his stepfather’s fists “was perception’s ally; that he must retune his own sense of time in order to watch life’s network thrumming and trembling around him. ‘Waiting is the act of witnessing life unfold beyond the constraints of one’s will,’ he wrote in one of the journals he kept.”

Interwoven about all of this, and mirroring Aves, is the slow ecological violence visited upon the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar rivers of Chennai—but also their halting rejuvenation, which culminates in a scene of birth and rebirth, every bit as miraculous as anything Macfarlane has written about his journeys through Britain’s wild places, down among “shards of funerary clay pots, charred sticks, human turds and plastic bottles” where he helps a dedicated group of volunteers move into protection Olive Ridley sea turtle eggs on the coast of the Indian Ocean.

Something different happens when Macfarlane launches his kayak at the start of a 100-mile descent of the Mutehekau Shipu in the final chapter “The Living River (Nitassinan/Canada).” His prose shifts. It flows more freely, becoming riverine in places. Partly, the difference has to do with the relative remoteness of the setting: Macfarlane and his four companions paddle for days without seeing anyone else on the river, which seems to give Macfarlane the psychic space he needs to let his senses rove freely.

It also has to do with the adventure, and you can feel the old familiar surge of adrenaline coursing through Macfarlane’s words as he shimmies his boat through chutes, over huge standing waves, and through crashing rapids. His prose changes, his character observations sharpen: here he is on one of his guides, Ilya, a “ginger bear of a man,” a fisherman who lives in the woods “on a billow of exposed bedrock, right above the sea” with his partner and their two boys and who joins their trip down the river. Macfarlane writes, “If you ask him a question of any kind, he will pause before answering, crook his head slightly to one side as he thinks, and scratch his stubbly skull. Early in our acquaintance, I sense someone very moral. I also sense someone who has been born in the wrong century.”

And he slips more easily into the metaphorical mode, something akin to lucid dreaming, cousin of revelation, that he has been mastering over the course of his career: “The loon calls and calls. The world turns to other metals. The calls are liquid mercury, wobbling over the steel water. The forested slopes and ridgelines of the eastern shore are islands of bronze, footless in shadows of ink.”

In between moments of reverie and the sublime terror of adventure, much of the chapter is taken up with a long, intermittent, philosophical conversation between Macfarlane and his friend, Wayne, a writer, adventurer, conversationalist, poet, rambler, threadbare thinker—“Leibniz in a hoodie,” Macfarlane puts it—in flight from a series of terrible losses, held aloft by a brilliant roving mind, and wracked by emotions only partly kept in check. This, too, is new.

Somewhere about the chapter’s middle, as Wayne and Macfarlane swap ideas, it becomes clear that this book is not really about the rights of nature, at least in the dry, legalistic framework of standing and lawsuits and enumerated protections. This book is not really about a political movement at all.

One of the most compelling and unexpected threads that weaves throughout the book is of dark doubt, for Macfarlane’s literary disposition is typically sunny. The characters in the first two chapters are all written up as heroes, which is another way of saying that each works against long odds fortified by the certainty that they have found truth and that their true faith will prevail. Heroes are simplistic. They’re easy, if unrealistic, role-models, which is why we love them: heroes don’t ask all that much of us, because their perfection lets us off the hook, and I suspect that’s why their lines feel so canned.

It is the troubled, the ambivalent, the indecisive, the fallible, the angry and hurt and doubtful—that is to say, it is real, humane humans, like Wayne and, to some extent Macfarlane himself, from whom we learn, the only ones for whom there is any chance of redemption.

It turns out that doubt is the key to the book. There has always been a tonic strain of apophatic unknowability running through Macfarlane’s work: though we are in and of the world, there is an unutterable, unbridgeable difference between what we experience and what we can say—“Ice and snow have always been substances off which language slides and slithers, unable to get a good grip,” he wrote in his first book; “Unruly, fluid and utterly other….we will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them,” he writes in this one—and this difference is not to be feared, for it is the source of wonder, the midwife to attention, and without attention there can be no ethical action.

It’s also the source of doubt, and subtly, once or twice in each chapter, Macfarlane takes a skeptical step back from the work of his heroes. “This river,” he writes of the Río Los Cedros near its source, “the river dashing and crashing at our feet—is this really a ‘legal person’? In the flaring brightness of the ongoing moment, it seems bizarre to think in these terms. I can’t help but feel a fundamental incommensurability between the stiff discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘standing’ and this quicksilver being running three yards away from me.”

“I remain sceptical of the notion of giving voice to or for a river,” Wayne tells Macfarlane as they near the end of their journey, and as Macfarlane nears the end of his book. The day before, the boaters had crossed the invisible, unmissable line connecting the long and flat Lake Magpie, down which they had paddled for days at the start of their trip, into the mouth of the Mutehekau Shipu, a moment marked in the book by that glorious, free-flowing 329-word sentence, an “event horizon,” Macfarlane writes, “the frontier beyond which all things tend towards the river…and then I understand that at some level I must surrender agency to this incomprehensible presence.”

It’s the incomprehensible presence, the surrendering once in the mouth of the river, for which Wayne worries the western understanding of rights is too restrictive. “It strikes me as both insufficient and fraught with the risk of ventriloquizing,” Wayne continues. “Better by far to help the river do as it will.” To which Macfarlane replies that the question to be asked is not “‘Who speaks for the river?’ but ‘What does the river say?’”

Here, just on the lip of the river’s mouth, is the point—not rights, but language—toward which the whole book, toward which all of Macfarlane’s books have been flowing.

“Words make worlds,” Macfarlane had written at the beginning—and it’s worth pausing a moment to consider that simple, but by no means simplistic sentence. One way to read it is that culture, human culture, by creating the perceptive scrim of words, ideas, and images through which everything we experience filters, is the only world that we can know, and that it in fact blocks us off from the other world, the one that exists independently of us. Or as Macfarlane put it in his first book, “when we look at a landscape we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there.” The inclination toward idealism and cultural construction helps explain why each of Macfarlane’s books is as concerned with literature as it is with the physical landscape through which he travels.

And yet, his precise, first-person, metaphorically rich ekphrastic prose, the fresh way he bends verbs and sentences to fit the contours of the land argues against the strictly ideal, cultural construction of the world. The direct immediacy of lines like these from Underland—

The next day at the tideline I find a small iceberg, rounded and dark blue, stranded in a rock pool. It is a relic of the dark star. I am just able to lift it. I carry it in both arms, cradling it, calling to the others. It numbs my hands and chest. It feels far heavier than it should. I stumble uphill towards the camp and place it on top of a boulder by the tents.

The sun shines through it. Air bubbles inside it show as silver: wormholes, right-angle bends, incredible zigzags and sharp layers.

—stand witness to the fact that even if we have not directly experienced a chunk of climate-change-induced iceberg calf ourselves, Macfarlane has. The world is not just a literary trope. When we look out, we’re not seeing our own reflection, only. The world is there, there to be held, to be seen, to be felt. And to be shared.

“I have tried where possible to let the language of the book be thickened, refined or patterned by the forms of the landscapes with which it is concerned,” Macfarlane wrote in one of the last lines, buried at the end of the acknowledgements section, in The Wild Places. A landscape that can thicken one’s language is not far off from a landscape that suggests, offers, spurs the sensitive writer: words make worlds, sure, but what Macfarlane’s prose has always shown, even when he was arguing that all we can see is ourselves, is that the world also makes our words.

In the past, Macfarlane has been careful to distance his thinking from animism, from the idea that the world is alive. In Landmarks, he equates it with “systematic superstition,” but there, at the mouth of the Mutehekau Shipu, whatever Macfarlane heard finally convinced him to trust his own prose. The world has agency and influence and can act. When Macfarlane asks, “what does the river say?” he is not writing metaphorically. Though he doesn’t, cannot know the answer—“water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied,” he writes—he has come to know that the river does speak, and it is his obligation, not to find the words for the river but to bring the glad tidings that the river, that the world is alive.

Something happened to Macfarlane during all that time spent deep underground in his previous book, Underland. He called that book a “terminus” to his fifteen-year project of writing about “the relationships between landscape and the human heart.” But I’m not sure that’s true. Macfarlane came back up into the light, changed by the earth itself, finally ready to hear what the world had been telling him, what his prose had long known to be true, and the result is a book that he has spent his lifetime writing toward.

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Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? is available now from W.W. Norton.

Daegan Miller

Daegan Miller is a writer, critic, and landscape historian whose essays and criticism have appeared in a wide range of venues. He has taught at Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan, but now lives with his family in the woods of western Massachusetts. He is the author of This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (2018).