Rivers are our lifeline. Sources of water, food, settlements, agriculture and transport, celebrated in song, myths, literature and art, we abide by them, with them, and at times – with flooding -- in them. They provide, support, and extinguish. Bereft of rivers and riverine habitats, human and nonhuman life may not have survived long enough to greet us, as it has in 2025.  

The status of rivers and environs, their health and ill health, what we have done to them, what they have done to us, form a broad compass of scientific research and engineered response. The existential variable is just as important, perhaps more so as the Anthropocene evolves. So, Robert Macfarlane believes in this striking, poignant, and revealing book that portrays three rivers and environs, each at risk from human incursions: the Rio Los Cedros and the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador; the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar in India; and the Mutehekau Shipu river and basin in Canada. True to his focus, he also depicts their significance to him as subjective bodies (note the pronoun used in the Introduction): “ … this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages . . . .  They are my co-authors.”  

The relationship that Macfarlane so quickly establishes is collaborative and vivacious, as much with the rivers he writes about as how he does so for us, his readers. He is a writer of uncommon artistry, precise and poetic. Not only does he chart his personal journeys via these rivers but also their revaluation, particularly by environmental movements that seek to preserve them; a revaluation that extends beyond their existential, cultural, and political contexts into cartography and philosophy. The former involves a kind of “counter-mapping” attuned as much to the life in a geography as its material features. The latter pivots about a word coined by American ecologist Thomas Berry, “one of the … fathers of the modern Rights of Nature movement”: inscendence – an invitation to enter deeply within the diverse webs of living and dying that feed our natural cycles rather than transcending them or our constraints when encountering them.  

The shift of focus from self to other and what it imparts richly informs Macfarlane’s journeys throughout the book. No longer is the question, for humans at least, who speaks for the river but what the river says, how we can hear it, and what our interpretations provoke? Macfarlane’s sensitivity to age tested indigenous perspectives weave through this mix as aids, both ethically and sensorially.  

The book is structured in three parts whose titles beckon over three seasons: The River of the Cedars (Ecuador): The Springs (Winter); Ghosts, Monsters and Angels (India): The Springs (Spring); and The Living River (Nitassinan/Canada). An Epilogue: The Springs (Autumn) concludes the narrative. A Prologue (The Springs) precedes an Introduction (Anima). Back matter content includes a glossary, notes and other relevant content.

Considering rivers as subjective bodies equal in law with people and corporations is an animating vector in the Rights of Nature movement. Its several victories in Europe and South America, but also in the U.S. if at the local level -- preserving rivers and environs from damming for hydroelectric purposes and industrial pollution, etc. -- parallels the rise of legitimate debate about the issue in policy circles. Be that as it may, species loss accelerates as does development in urban and rural settings, absorbing natural environments. The stakes need not be repeated. Macfarlane understands this, as I suspect readers of Leonardo do. But rather than discussing it with the same cliched, media-guided warnings that usually fade off into a kind of ideological static we have learned to live with, Macfarlane undertakes his journeys as personal encounters that guided this reader’s attention, for one, from his first to his last phrase: “Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born” and, finally, “I am rivered.”  

Between the two phrases this book is testimony to what a rushing, placid, still, or turbulent white-water river allows us to embrace, attentive to its fluctuations and the comfort it offers or the danger it presents, and how to maneuver within them.  

I live in Manhattan with the Hudson River visible just several blocks away. I walked up the west side of the island today on a warm autumn afternoon, distant white clouds against a blue sky, the immense tidal power of the Hudson beside me, the sun glittering off its dark surface. Young parents with their infants in carriages, elders in wheelchairs, runners, middle-aged couples strolling hand in hand, tourists snapping photos, kids on skateboards zooming about, all enjoyed their proximity to this flowing body of water in the park built for it. I thought of Macfarlane’s book and how that morning before leaving I, too, felt “rivered,” if just a little, then with the Hudson moving in and out of NY harbor, its eroding tidal forces deepening its bottom channels. Farther west, across the river, the New Jersey scape, skyscraper high, seemed to float on a thin strip of bedrock as if an ephemeral notation to the river’s age, in this area, nearly 13 millennia.  

Is A River Alive? is the question Macfarlane has asked. His answer, with those of his colleagues who accompanied him, is yes.