Robert MacFarlane, who’s been called the greatest nature writer of his generation, rejects the term, which in a 2017 essay he called “tautological, confining, and bland.” His books combine careful observation of the natural world with history, philosophical reflections, and memoir. In Mountains of the Mind, his extraordinarily accomplished debut, he mixed historical essays on the discovery of plate tectonics and the concept of the sublime with vivid accounts of his own hair-raising mountaineering adventures. He’s continued this method since. His books are distinguished by his fine prose style, his erudition, and the fact that he often risks his life writing them. They’re books of history and adventure as well as nature.
In his tenth book, Is a River Alive?, his subject is rivers, specifically the global state of their health, which is bad. As he writes in the introduction, quoting the environmental activist Feargal Sharkey, “The simple truth of the matter is that every river in England is dying.” The book is not so much a call to action on the rivers’ behalf as an account of how this action is already being taken by the advocates of a movement called The Rights of Nature. This movement, as the name suggests, seeks to establish in law that natural bodies like rivers, wetlands, and forests are not simply property but entities with rights, such as a river’s right to flow undammed to the sea. At a time when the United States is rolling back environmental protections as fast as the Supreme Court will allow (which is pretty fast), this goal may sound farfetched, but the movement has had surprising success. Courts in New Zealand, Ecuador, and a number of other countries have established some sort of legal personhood for “natural entities.”
These rulings are not just symbolic. MacFarlane travels to different sites in which activists are using them to try to protect rivers threatened by pollution or development. In Ecuador, he swims in a pristine river in a cloud forest that had been opened by the government for mining – before, against all odds, being closed again when the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that mining would violate the forest’s rights. Next he goes to Chennai, where “all major waterbodies running across the city are dead for all practical purposes,” polluted by industrial runoff and sewage. Finally, he joins a group of kayakers on a 10-day trip down the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River) in far Northeastern Quebec, an area scheduled to be flooded by an enormous complex of dams, in a kind of wholesome Canadian version of Deliverance (minus the murderous hillbillies, fortunately).
MacFarlane’s past works often feature solitary quests, and the mood is sometimes brooding. In one of the most well-known lines of Mountains of the Mind, he writes, “People who love mountains are half in love with themselves and half in love with oblivion.” In Underland, an extended meditation on the Anthropocene, he almost dies in a suffocating vertical shaft in the Paris catacombs. Compared to these books, Is a River Alive? is mellower MacFarlane: more hopeful, less solitary, and, it has to be said, not as interesting. Part of the pleasure of his earlier books is being left alone in some remote place with the author and his well-stocked mind. But it seems that in this one, he’s done his best to make himself something like a side character. Most of the main characters are activists, who do good work and have often had quite unusual lives. But in MacFarlane’s portrayal, they’re so uniformly pure of heart that they begin to blend together. “Barrenness is almost always a state of mind, only rarely a state of land,” says one (very brave and dedicated) activist in Chennai. They all say things like this, and the reader respects them for it but begins to get bored. MacFarlane, gifted writer though he is, seems a little reluctant to write about people, particularly about the weaknesses – feuds, pettiness, vanity, self-interestedness, and all the rest of it – that make them interesting to read about. This may, of course, be partly a matter of taste. Readers with a better education in natural history – who get a mental picture when MacFarlane observes “waxwings on the rowan” and don’t have to google it – may not find much lacking in these chapters. I wished for a little more tension, a touch of skepticism, a grain of salt.
The prose, also, is not always up to MacFarlane’s usual level. To be sure, Is a River Alive?, like his past work, contains some very good writing. On a long day of kayaking, he and his fellow paddlers “each enter a private cell of labour.” A swamp hen in Chennai “walks with the exaggeratedly slow gait of the mime artist.” But his poetic passages can border on the purple or the academic. On the jungle: “Life, here, stands clear as process, not possession. Life is as much undergone as done. We are constitutionally in the midst. This forest, this river – they enliven.” There’s also too much filler. Many scenes should have been summaries, and long pages of dialogue (“Hey, how’s it going, Ilya?” says Danny. “Oh, not bad, not bad”) should have been cut. As I read, I found myself fully in sympathy with his subjects and their causes, suitably affected by the despoliation of nature, and somewhat impatient with the book.
For all my frustration, though, I found that as the book went on, Is a River Alive? was ultimately effective. First of all, it avoids common pitfalls of environmental writing. MacFarlane does not lecture or pile on bleak environmental facts. And though the book has slow parts, MacFarlane paces it well and doesn’t let any one section run on too long. Most importantly, the very lack of irony that I first found wearying eventually grew on me. In one scene in the last section, before MacFarlane begins his kayak journey in Canada, he and his friend Wayne seek the blessing of Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet who has been active in trying to protect this river. They visit her in her hut, where she ties red ribbons around each of their wrists.
“One of these,” she says, “you must tie around the sacred tree when you find it on the Mutehekau Shipu. You will find the sacred tree, or it will find you. It may not be the greatest or the tallest, but it will… blaze out. The other bracelet you must leave on your wrist. Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it.”
Two middle-aged men, one of them a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, sitting in a hut in the wilderness and solemnly letting colorful ribbons be tied to their wrists: there might be something endearingly silly in this image. But MacFarlane never seems tempted to crack a smile. Indeed, in the book’s afterword he mentions that, years later, he’s still wearing the ribbon. It’s this sincerity that ultimately wins you over. There’s a deep seriousness to the book. Although, urban philistine that I am, I got less than others would out of the descriptions of nature, I ended up admiring what I have to call the book’s, and the author’s, moral qualities. It’s clear that this subject – care for, attention to, and love of the natural world – is for MacFarlane a spiritual matter. You can’t help but respect the way he refuses to look away from environmental destruction or to take refuge in cynicism or ideology. There’s something noble – almost vaguely knightly – about his travels to these (possibly sacred) rivers, which seem always to involve his sleeping on the ground and rising at dawn before mounting up and riding on.
He seems most in his element in the last chapter, an adventure down a perilous river in which he almost dies several times. Characteristically, he seems slightly embarrassed about his own bravery, in a way that comes across as both leftish and British. Deciding, along with Wayne, to run a particularly dangerous stretch of rapids, MacFarlane reflects, “There is something cussed in both of us to even consider running this, something stubborn and dumb and probably male, something I need to interrogate further but don’t have the time to do so right now.”
The book ends in just the right place: at the end of this kayak journey, where the river is most powerful and when MacFarlane’s experience of it is most intense and personal. “Days on the water,” he writes, “have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing-together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it… Here, now, it seems incontrovertible to the point of trivial that the river is alive.” What’s relevant, we understand, is that he is alive. Other river-lovers he’s met, activists and researchers in Ecuador and Chennai, have had their lives changed by their relationship with these ancient natural “entities,” and here on the Magpie River, MacFarlane gets his profound experience of the river as well. We get just a little of it along with him.
Writing about nature inevitably means projecting one’s own ideas onto it. There’s a famous scene in Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, where a young Werner Herzog glares into the camera and declares of the jungle: “There is a harmony here, but it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” MacFarlane’s attitude is a little different. It’s a kind of animistic reverence for nature’s wildness combined with a vaguely Christian appreciation for the way it can bring out the best in people. He walks the edge of sentimentality without ever falling into it. A sense of fullness of life, a celebration of it, runs through this book, and by the end, it wears away the reader’s complacency and discouragement.
Aaron Labaree
Aaron Labaree's work has appeared in Literary Review, L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.