Robert Macfarlane has climbed to the icy summits of windswept mountains and plunged into the darkened depths of the earth to research his books, and he says that may have given people the impression that he was a bit of a loner.
“There was a time, maybe 15, 20 years ago, when I was reputed as somebody who wrote about being alone — and alone and enraptured, let’s say. And possibly that was briefly true,” says Macfarlane, whose early author portraits showed him on lonely mountain passes and barren coastal landscapes.
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“Actually, I love writing about people,” says Macfarlane, while discussing his new book, “Is a River Alive?,” during a recent Zoom call from his home in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow at the University of Cambridge. “This is a book about community in many, many ways. A river is a community, change is driven by community … everything is joined.”
A vivid work of nonfiction, “Is a River Alive?” explores the challenges facing rivers and the communities and cultures that coexist with and rely upon them. The book also examines the growing movement to grant legal rights to rivers as a way to prevent their destruction by corporations and governments, which are themselves protected by a vast array of legal rights.
“When people meet the idea of a river bearing rights, it can seem hippie woo-woo, but in fact, to me it makes staggeringly more sense to think of a river as always having possessed rights: A river that has flowed through my landscape for 10,000 years presently has no rights — whereas a company founded yesterday has a whole suite of them,” says Macfarlane, adding that pretty much everyone has an “instinctive love for flowing fresh water.”
An image of a spring from “Is a River Alive?” by author Robert Macfarlane. (Photo credit Robert Macfarlane / Courtesy of W.W. Norton)Despite his earlier reputation, Macfarlane’s interests have always been clear, whether writing about the fascinating local experts he finds to guide him through unfamiliar landscapes or about the influence of his friends and mentors. This latter group includes the late authors Barry Lopez and Roger Deakin, literary influences Nan Shepherd and J.A. Baker, and a seemingly endless array of current collaborators: musicians Johnny Flynn and composer Matthew Whittall; artists Jackie Morris and Stanley Donwood; and filmmakers Willem Dafoe, Darren Aronofsky and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. (Macfarlane is even interested in his interviewers, recalling the names of their family members and shared interests from earlier conversations.)
Exactly how does he manage to have so many projects percolating at the same time?
“My mum taught me two key skills, wonder and triage,” says Macfarlane, explaining his multitasking abilities. “She would always be doing three things at once. I think that’s just where I live now.”
On research journeys for the new book, Macfarlane teamed up with a rotating crew of vivid personalities to explore three distinctly different, farflung locales: the Los Cedros cloud forest near the sources of the Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador; the shockingly polluted rivers in the city of Chennai along India’s coast (which were deemed “unfit for any kind of life form”); and Canada’s surging Mutehekau Shipu River, which is under threat of being dammed up — a move that would block its titanic flow with concrete, flood the surrounding banks and carve up pristine forests for roads, hydroelectric plants and an a range of associated structures to serve an incoming workforce.
“In all those three places, rivers are under threat,” says Macfarlane. “And in all three places, there are people who are trying to imagine rivers radically otherwise.
“At some level, the book is an imaginative invitation or provocation. It has a question mark in its title for a reason. This is not a declaration: A river is alive. It’s a question, and it beckons, I hope, the reader, even the skeptical reader, into at least temporarily imagining what it would mean for a river to have a life, a death and even rights. Rivers are, for me, profoundly hopeful beings, presences in the landscape.
Macfarlane pauses a moment before continuing.
“I just lost a dear friend two weeks ago, really fast, far too young. And, you know, I turned to the water. He was one of the first people to read the book, it was one of the last books he read,” says the author, who honored his friend by visiting the local springs for three successive days to think about him. “To me, it is self-evident that our life, and indeed our deaths, flow with those of rivers.”
Spending so much time on rivers and thinking about them changed him, he says.
“I see and know in a way I did not before that we are all always afloat on times flow, and even as a writer, you sometimes think you’re standing dry-footed on the bank with your little notebook in hand, watching it all happen,” he says. “No. Tumbled like a river rock, all of us.”
The author, who has famously filled his books with lists of richly descriptive natural terms in danger of being lost to our increasingly digital existences, offers another linguistic element in “Is a River Alive?”: He uses the pronoun “who” rather than “it” to describe rivers and coins new verbs like “rivered” and “torrented” to describe the life-altering — and at one point in the book, potentially life-extinguishing — power of the rivers.
“This is not something you can step straight into — this recognition,” he says. “I quote the great Ursula K. LeGuin who talked about how to de-objectify the living world. She says it may involve ‘a great reach outward of mind and imagination.’ And I want the book to allow people to make that great reach outward of mind and imagination that is necessary to recognize river as life, river as alive. And language is this fabulous resource for that, right?” he says.
“One of those things that I do is just that little grammatical tweak — “the rivers who flow” — I use “who” all the way through, he says, adding that language has the power ”to let voices speak where no voice was thought to issue.”
In June, Macfarlane’s voice will be heard during a jam-packed North American book tour, which will feature stops in California, including Point Reyes and San Diego, as well as events in Washington D.C., New York City, Minneapolis, Denver, and more.
“It’s going to be very, very intense, but a little part of me feels that now more than ever, not in a vainglorious way, but just these are ideas that will matter, and they matter perhaps even more now than ever,” he says.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
An image of Canada’s Mutehekau Shipu River from “Is a River Alive?” by author Robert Macfarlane. (Photo credit Robert Macfarlane / Courtesy of W.W. Norton)Q. What does this book mean to you?
This is the book that has torrented me more than any other, the writing of which was more turbulent, more torrential, more surprising than any other. It’s also the book that hasn’t stopped flowing.
This book, the rivers, the people, the ideas, they just course on through my life, and I remain very, very connected to and involved with all of them. I think I’ve come to realize that it’s the book I’ve been learning how to write all this time. And by that I mean that the tributaries that feed its language and its thought have come from the collaborations I’ve done writing song, writing opera, writing film, working with artists and musicians. And each of those has taught me something new about the way language can work. And I think it’s the book in which I’ve pushed nonfiction form furthest of my, as it were, “big books.”
So, yeah, it’s been a wild ride.
Q. In the book, you write about granting legal rights to rivers, which some might consider a fantastical idea. But you also show — as in a passage about a so-called “fraud map” that excluded an area’s rivers to make it easier to evade environmental laws — government or business types may be pushing a fantasy of their own while claiming it’s reality.
That’s such a brilliant perception, and not one I had seen in that way at all. Yeah, exactly right. So, the fraud map just deletes a river because the river is an inconvenience. The magical thinking or legal fiction that is so deeply entrenched in our systems and our legal imagination as to be almost invisible is the fact that corporations have rights; we’re very happy to recognize the rights of a non-human entity when it takes the form of a company.
In the U.K., our companies have rights, including the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial, that are actually guaranteed in part by the European Convention on Human Rights. So that is unproblematic, but when you meet it in its full strangeness, it’s bizarre.
Q. Do you think abstract terms like “the environment” or “climate change” make people feel less empowered to act? Because when an issue is specific — a toxic waste dump planned for your neighborhood, say — people are ready to fight.
I don’t like the word “environment.” I think it’s chilly and externalizing, and one of the reasons this is in many ways a love letter to rivers is because rivers help us make precisely the kinds of connections between the local and the global that you are describing.
When I’m speaking to people about the idea of a living river, it can feel very philosophically confronting or unfamiliar. As I ask in the book, if you find that hard to imagine, try to imagine a dying river. And then people have no problem saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one that has no dissolved oxygen, the fish float belly up, the garbage chokes the outflows.’
So that makes perfect sense to us, but we find it harder to think of the river as alive — but rivers are veins, rivers are arteries, rivers are life forces. It’s just that the story that power now tells about rivers is that they are resources, they are things, they are brute matter to be used.
I am a writer, not a policy maker, and I wanted to go and gather other stories, other ways of listening to rivers. And as you know, towards the very end of the book, the rivers, really, in a nontrivial way, become the writers of the book.
Q. While each of your books is different, this one shows an evolution of both writing and thought.
It has become the most political book I’ve written. It’s also probably the one that is most explicitly personal, and it is probably the one that is most straightforwardly, at times at least, poetic, in the sense of its language.
And I think that living in this age, you cannot help but write politically. I mean, to disengage from politics is a political move now, and the book lives in the flicker between hope and despair, between love and anger, between futility and longing.
Q. Journalism often focuses on what has already occurred, but in the book you also go to endangered places while there is still time to act, saying essentially, “This is what is threatened. This is what is under assault.”
I think that’s right, yeah. There’s a really interesting essay in atmos that called it “speculative nonfiction.” So it was sort of living in the “what might be.” They pointed out that the frame of reference for the book, I hadn’t realized this quite myself, sort of shifted from “The Old Ways,” which was Wordsworth and Coleridge and Nan Shepherd and Edward Thomas. And now here, it’s Stanislav Lem’s “Solaris.” It’s “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” “Princess Mononoke.” It’s Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Word for World Is Forest.” – everything that is living in ways of imagining otherwise, and that struck me as a very perceptive thing,
Where are the forms and the genres that have dealt with communication with more-than-human entities? It’s science fiction, it’s ghost stories and horror, Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” It’s the eerie, it’s the fantastical. And so, yeah, I think I’ve learned a lot from those forms of writing.
Q. Speaking of science fiction, I have to mention that you reference “Star Wars” more than once in the book, including a “Rogue One” shout-out.
Yes! You’re actually only the second person to mention it. “Rogue One” is obviously the best film within the Star Wars multiverse, as it were. Huge “Andor” fan. It’s brilliant, isn’t it? “Andor” has a special place in my heart.
An image of the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador from “Is a River Alive?” by author Robert Macfarlane. (Photo credit Robert Macfarlane / Courtesy of W.W. Norton)Q. What’s something about the new book you’d like people to know?
I think it’s probably the funniest book I’ve ever written.
Nature writing is a phrase that I know you know I don’t like much; there is a tendency towards solemnity, perhaps, in terms of writing about place. And I think if you’re going to bring people along on a journey that involves a great reaching out with mind and imagination, then you’ve got to make them laugh as well.
Q. This book is a call to action in a way. What can people do?
How do we turn passion into action? Well, each territory has a different answer to that, right? I mean, you live in a state in which the story of the de-damming of the Klamath is not a straightforward story, but to me, it’s fundamentally one of the most hopeful happenings of all of last year, in a time in a place where hope is pretty hard to come by.
That was spearheaded by the Yurok tribe, a campaign that lasted over two decades, I think. What it shows is that change can come, and when it comes with rivers, it comes fast. They heal themselves fast. The first Chinook salmon was seen moving up past where the Iron Gate dam had stood within a few weeks of that dam coming down, after a century of anadromous fish unable to migrate past that point up to the headwaters. Now the banks of what were the reservoir have been reseeded by specialist seed mixes, drought-resistant flowers, plants binding the ground together. When I last saw the photographs, they were flourishing — burning orange blossom. That was hope.
So I suppose just because, as Rebecca Solnit puts it, ‘The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.’ So I would say, find your river, find the guardians who exist on it — the groups, the communities, who are working for its health and their health — and join them.
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