Mingled in the Flow

A review of Robert Macfarlane's "Is a River Alive".

The Snowy River at Dalgety.

The way we’ve treated waterways in Australia is abysmal. Since colonisation we’ve polluted creeks, dredged rivers, dried springs, built dams, introduced pest species, and drained wetlands – carbon sinks more important than forests. We’ve extracted water to grow crops and lawns in the outback, created the conditions that produce mass fish deaths, allowed outbreaks of toxic algae, and made once pristine water unswimmable because of fecal bacteria produced our dogs, and ourselves. We’ve effectively treated waterways as toilets and the fact that we’ve only made token efforts to reverse the damage is to our great shame as a nation.

That said, our experience isn’t unique. Waterways everywhere have been treated the same way, as victims of extractive economies that prioritise humans over everything else. Whether an economy is based on capitalism or communism, democracy or dictatorship is beside the point. Extractivism and its flip-side, the “externalisation” of waste, has been a global environmental catastrophe of epic proportion.

Indigenous peoples see rivers completely differently from coloniser cultures. The Barkandji people of western NSW, for example, believe that the Barka/Darling River is a mother, an ancestor and a source of life. To injure the Barka is to harm a living being, a relative. When the river suffers, the physical and spiritual health of the Barkandji suffers. To Indigenous cultures, rivers are sacred.

Though author Robert Macfarlane isn’t claiming to be Indigenous he shares a similar view of rivers. In Is a River Alive? it doesn’t take him long to answer the question in the book’s title: “This is a journey into an idea that changes the world – the idea that a river is alive” he writes in the first line of the introduction. This snuffs out any suggestion that the book will read like a kind of thriller, with the question answered at the end, and instead structures the book a bit like a legal case. He presents his opening argument in the introduction, then prosecutes it using his experience of three river journeys in different parts of the world.

This is entirely appropriate because Macfarlane arrives at a logical conclusion: Because rivers are alive they should be granted legal rights. After all, if we can give such rights to non-living entities like corporations why shouldn’t we grant them to living entities like rivers (and mountains and forests) just as we have granted them to humans. He points to examples where this has already happened, including the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, a remarkable reticulated place where multiple rivers find their source.

This is not to say that Is a River Alive? reads somehow like a legal textbook. Macfarlane, a professor of English at Cambridge, is a master at combining rigorous scholarship with spine tingling adventure. The central three chapters each document a river journey taken with various friends and guides, giving voice to other ideas and views beyond his own. Interludes throughout the book feature visits to the springs near Macfarlane’s house, and indeed, the most moving chapter for me was the buoyant epilogue, set at the springs sometime in the future.

It should also come as no surprise that in this book, more so than in his previous, Macfarlane explores the use of language itself. He runs with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s concept of developing a grammar of animacy, a new kind of language in which to communicate a living world. Macfarlane’s composition reaches a superb cascading stream-of-consciousness style flow when he kayaks down the Mutehekau Shipu river in Quebec and writes about the journey with minimal punctuation and onrushing paragraphs. It’s a grammar of animacy made manifest and a passage of absolutely stunning writing. The final line in that chapter will stay with me forever.

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There’s a little creek in a valley not far from my place that is one of the arterial headwaters of the Murray-Darling river system. In the old days the creek flowed with enough clean and deep water for the local school to teach students how to swim. Today you’d be a fool to swim in it, even if there was enough water to fill the waterholes. The creek now barely trickles except in periods of heavy rain and that’s exactly when upstream farming effluent directly enters the flow.

To make matters worse, road workers have spent the last few weeks “improving” drainage and erosion control where the highway crosses the creek by pouring reinforced concrete onto the creek banks. They could have done the job way cheaper and better with plants to slow drainage and stabilise banks and it’s got me wondering…what would it take to treat a little creek like this, a watercourse that helps fill a local drinking water reservoir and flows on to feed one of the greatest river systems on earth, what would it take to see this waterway as a living being worthy of legal rights?

What, indeed. Wendell Berry once titled a lecture “It All Turns on Affection”. Here, with affection for the living more-than-human world, is a starting point.