If a shrewder Muggle had been casting HBO’s coming series on Harry Potter, the person chosen to act as a wizard might well have been Robert Macfarlane. He is, officially, a professor of literature at Cambridge, but, happily, no writer sounds less professorial. Macfarlane climbs mountains, plunges into the underworld, collaborates with artists on books about lost words, lost spells. He makes films, writes songs and operas, has published a book-length prose poem. Not yet 47, he has already brought out 11 substantial works, delivered in prose as dense as a forest but flooded with sunlight.
“Mules are the shopping-trolleys of the ungulate world,” he delivers at a somewhat typical moment in his latest work, only a few pages before daring to proclaim, in a very different vein, “The light of the rising sun sets the world singing like a ringing bowl.” For 300 long pages he sustains one such line after another, mostly in short, vivid brushstrokes, and then, when riding a series of rapids in a kayak, he expands to a sentence that stretches across 26 lines, then one that lasts 36 lines, and, finally, to one that extends over 42 lines, till at last we collapse, just as he does, in an ecstatic heap.
In Is a River Alive? the tireless explorer takes off on three long journeys: to the Los Cedros cloud forest, in northern Ecuador; around contaminated waterways in southern India; and for two weeks along an imperiled and turbulent river in Eastern Canada. In every case, he works to remind us that by rescuing rivers, we begin to restore ourselves; our lives depend on theirs as much as theirs depend on us. And, as the growing Rights of Nature movement keeps reminding us, if corporations have legal rights, so, too, surely, should such living entities as rivers.
Macfarlane is the most engaging—the least snarky—of British writers, to the point where he sounds at times as native to the New World as such inspirations as Barry Lopez and Peter Matthiessen. Yet he draws on an erudition less often found in earnest works of conscience. A moth’s wings are likened to a William Morris print on the same page that a cascading river becomes a Philip Glass composition. The author hands out, near and far, copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh, but, as a father of three, he can equally easily chat amiably with Indian schoolkids about the pros and cons of Manchester United.
He also, savingly, has a sense of humor. On each of his three trips, he is accompanied by slightly wounded scientists, artists, and eco-activists, all of whom he treats with warm reverence. But he’s not shy about noting that two of them, legal scholars both, bring to mind a howler monkey and an armadillo. He all but acknowledges that it takes a kind of eccentric—or extremist—to devote a life to fungi, or to dreaming of boiling an egg using moonlight.
Some readers may raise an eyebrow—or two—when a Macfarlane companion confesses that one of his “daemons” is a millipede or when an Indigenous sage intones, “Be a bird. Be a tree. Be a river. Yes. On the river, be a river.” But if anyone can make such pronouncements plausible and winning, it’s Professor Macfarlane.
As the book progresses, we encounter one horrifying statistic after another. There are more than 50,000 dams in the Yangtze catchment alone, and they have measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth. In India, rivers are so polluted that they blister human skin and move locals to dream of suffering from asthma, instead of the cancer that’s assailing them. One hydroelectric project in Quebec involves an area the size of New York State.
Against this, Macfarlane tenaciously assembles a history, and a geography, of hope. After the government of Ecuador drafted a new constitution, in 2008, enshrining the rights of the natural world, other bodies from Canada to New Zealand followed suit. From Bangladesh to England, judiciaries have favored rivers over factories. One judgment by a High Court in India actually halted mining in a riverbed overnight.
Near its end, Macfarlane’s book is honest enough to point out that even if rivers do have rights, we cannot know what bodies of water would choose. It’s far too easy to project our preferences on the natural world around us. By then, however, Macfarlane has brought so much to electric life that it’s hard to think of anything as dead. “Twenty-foot-high columns of midges warp and fold above the marsh. Scores of bee-eaters loop-the-loop through the midges, glittering rainbows, scoffing their fill at this glorious, all-you-can-eat buffet.”
What his brilliant colleague Richard Powers has done for trees and oceans, Macfarlane here does for embattled waterways. Burning with an Elizabethan energy and curiosity, grounded in the conviction that humans are not the center of the universe, he ends up, on those rapids, showing us how a river can be his ruler, his god, and, most invaluably, his survivor.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist at Air Mail and the author of more than a dozen books, including The Half Known Life and, most recently, Aflame
