Is A River Alive?

Rob strips down to his shorts and wades into the waterfall. He finds his balance and stands still for a moment, with clear water crashing down around him. He has flown halfway around the world and spent days hiking through the Ecuadorian cloud forest to reach this place. ‘It seems clear to me then,’ he writes, ‘that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. To call a river alive is not to personify a river but to further deepen and widen the category of “life”’. 

We’ve probably all had moments like this – perhaps not quite like this – but ecstatic moments, when, just for a moment or two, we feel emboldened by the beauty and strangeness of these experiences to break through distinctions which feel much more rigid and difficult on dry land. You’ll have had them. Where? When? But then Rob starts to doubt. ‘I’m counterstruck,’ he writes. Is this ‘too easy’? ‘Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proofs?’

‘To call a river alive is not to personify a river but to further deepen and widen the category of “life”.’

Let’s take a step back.

In 2003, after finishing his first book, Mountains of the Mind, Rob received a favourable quote from one Roger Deakin, familiar to many swimmers as the author of Waterlog. ‘Like everyone else,’ Rob explains, ‘I’d read Waterlog and fallen under its spell, so we fell into correspondence and quickly became close friends. Roger once said: “I want my friendships to come up unstoppably like weeds”. That’s how it felt. He became a mentor to me and I became a kind of son to him, someone he could share adventures with. We had a simple, uncomplicated friendship: we loved doing the same things.’ While intense, this friendship came to an abrupt stop, when, in 2006, Roger was found to have a brain tumour just four months before he died.

In the same year as Roger’s death, Kate Rew, a young journalist-turned-activist with her own vision to unite swimmers, reached out to Rob – they met for the first time on a punt in Cambridge – to ask if he’d like to be involved in a new project to encourage more people to swim outdoors. ‘I remember being a little wary at the start,’ Rob recalls. ‘Roger was always sceptical about attempts to brand or monetise swimming, but after talking to Kate, I soon realised this wasn’t going to be anything like that. This was an attempt to celebrate the power of water to connect people and places. In truth, Roger should have been patron of The OSS,’ Rob reflects, ‘but he was dying just as the organisation came into life.’

There are many things which make Rob an excellent patron of The OSS. Few people have done as much in recent times to reimagine our relationship with the natural world. But as he freely admits, Rob is also an unlikely patron, because 15 years ago, not long after The OSS ‘came into life’, he developed an extreme histamine reaction to cold water (known as ‘cold water urticaria’), partly because, as he explains, ‘I was doing some pretty extreme things, such as hurling myself into glacial water’. While he’s now learning to live with the condition, Rob’s had a couple of very serious reactions, including one New Year’s Day in Devon when he almost lost consciousness after jumping off a rowboat only to find his vision suddenly ‘telescoping down to a tiny spot’.

Since his first book came out in 2003, you’ll know Rob as the author of many more bestselling books, including The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Landmarks (2015) and Underland (2019). These books have explored everything from mountain summits to strange subterranean spaces, but in recent years, his focus has turned to rivers, horrified by what’s happening both in the UK and beyond.

‘I started working on this in the summer of 2020,’ Rob explains, ‘around the same time that people began to realise there had been a great collective failure in legislation and imagination’. Rob borrows the phrase ‘slow violence’ to describe what’s happened to our rivers. Rob Nixon, another leading voice in the Environmental Humanities, first coined the phrase, defining ‘slow violence’ as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’. ‘There will also be a slow healing,’ Rob Macfarlane predicts, ‘although rivers do heal themselves very fast if you give them the right conditions’.

‘Rivers heal themselves very fast if you give them the right conditions.’

So what are the right conditions and how do we get there?

In the first part of his new book, Rob travels to Ecuador, where he visits Los Cedros, a rare cloud forest, ‘one of the most biodiverse and bio-abundant places on Earth,’ and discovers what he calls a ‘geography of hope’, a kind of best-case scenario for how human beings can effect legal change to protect complex ecosystems.

In Ecuador, almost 20 years ago, a legal revolution took place when the Constitutional Assembly voted to introduce four new articles into the Constitution, articles which granted nature – or ‘Pacha Mama’ (‘Mother Earth’) – the right to exist, regenerate, to be restored and to be respected. In 2021, after the Ecuadorian state mining company had partnered with a Canadian ‘prospect generating’ firm to assess the mineral potential of Los Cedros, the Constitutional Court deployed these Rights of Nature articles to rule that any mining would ‘violate the rights of Los Cedros’. Just think about that for a moment: the Constitutional Court ruled that these lucrative commercial activities would violate the rights of a nature-rich but non-human habitat.

The Constitutional Court ruled that these lucrative commercial activities would violate the rights of a nature-rich but non-human habitat.

Since the introduction of these Rights of Nature articles, there have been judicial and legislative breakthroughs all over the world, including Bolivia, the USA, New Zealand, Colombia, India, Brazil, Uganda, Canada, Panama and more. The UK is not totally absent. In early 2025, Lewes District Council in Sussex passed a motion recognising the rights of rivers, with a charter being developed to grant legal rights to the River Ouse.

After this list of brave court decisions and ambitious constitutional reforms, I ask Rob if he’s frustrated by the relative lack of progress in the UK. ‘We just don’t have the legislative bedrock for a brave High Court decision,’ Rob explains. ‘After all, this is where William Blackstone’s theories of property were developed in the 18th Century and exported around the empire to become the foundations of almost all property law.’ But Rob is still optimistic about what’s happening in Sussex. ‘Yes,’ he admits, ‘this might be ultra local, but it’s creating the space to reimagine rivers’. He anticipates more ‘crocus-like groups’ emerging all over the UK to advocate for the Rights of Nature.

Is A River Alive? is about much more than court decisions and legislation. While exposing the absurd pretence that a company set up yesterday should have a stronger claim to legal protection than a complex and life-sustaining ecosystem which has evolved over millennia, Rob’s new book goes beyond the legal fiction of ‘personhood’ to ask a bigger question about the nature of ‘aliveness’. As he explains, ‘the various Rights of Nature campaigns are downstream rapids of the real questions: What is alive? What is dead? What is life made of?’

Rob suggests these are difficult questions for anyone raised in an intellectual culture of ‘rationalism’. I ask what he means by rationalism. He laughs, ‘There was a 12,000-word answer to that in the book, which I had to cut. It was less a speed bump and more a crash barrier.’ But in short, this version of rationalism refers to a belief in ‘human exceptionalism’, that the natural world is made up of what Isaac Newton called ‘brute matter’. ‘The rise of rationalism and technocracy has brought extraordinary benefits,’ Rob explains, ‘but it has also instrumentalised rivers into one-dimensional beings which are there to provide so-called “ecosystem services”’. Rob’s approach to ‘aliveness’ seeks to reimagine rivers as ‘life-forces’ rather than resources to be exploited.

He hopes the title acknowledges these difficulties. ‘The title was a question I jotted down to myself very early in the book’s development. I jotted two others beneath it – “Can a mountain remember? Does a forest think?” – but it was the river question that wouldn’t let me go. In the end, the answer to it took me the best part of five years and 300 pages.’ But why pose the title as a question, rather than – say – ‘Rivers are alive’? ‘Because I wanted the readers to be drawn into the same puzzle that I was. I wanted readers to begin the journey in doubt and uncertainty. For the title to have been a statement would have been to declare this as dogma, when the fact is it’s a formidably difficult question, even if it also happens to be very urgent.’

Rob’s approach to ‘aliveness’ seeks to reimagine rivers as ‘life-forces’ rather than resources to be exploited.

When we accept that ‘aliveness’ doesn’t have to be an anthropomorphic concept, what can we learn from rivers about being alive? Rob doesn’t stop to think. ‘That we are many and that we are always in relation. We have this idea of the singular self – in Latin, the word “individual” means “undivided” – but we’re not undivided. Instead, we’re beautifully and endlessly in relation with one another and the world. That’s what I came away with most strongly: the idea that life is a continual process of gathering and collaboration.’

Rob’s book is itself a collaborative act. ‘I wrote this book with the rivers,’ he says. ‘They co-authored it. That’s not a trick. I mean it. I wrote it with them, I could not have written it without them, they were fully participatory in the experience.’ You won’t be surprised to learn that Rob refers to these rivers as living beings. ‘In English, we “it” rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals,’ he writes, ‘but I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow’.

‘In English, we “it” rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals, but I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow.’

This small linguistic change raises big questions for swimmers. Might swimming itself be a collaborative act? Might rivers be more than just places we go? Might they be active forces in our lives? Might our relationships with these waterbodies (waterbeings?) change and deepen over time? Might we start to know these rivers as we know the loved ones in our lives?

‘There are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come,’ Rob writes. What can we do to be part of the change? This book is a call to action, not to protest or march, but to break through difficult distinctions and explore what aliveness might mean in our own relationships with rivers. ‘Take some time,’ Rob suggests. ‘Think about the rivers in your life. Think about their different personalities. Think about what you’ve learnt from them. Think about how they’ve helped you in ways you didn’t expect or can’t explain. Now think about the things you can do to help them thrive.’