Is A River Alive? A word from Robert Macfarlane
This week marks the release of Robert Macfarlane’s highly anticipated latest book, Is A River Alive? Passionate about the health of our waterways, and the actions we can and must take to restore them, Robert pens his thoughts on the Big River Watch –– after surveying his local river –– and on the importance of connecting with the beauty and life of our rivers
25/04/25
Today the Big River Watch begins –– a week in which thousands of people in Britain and Ireland help to monitor the health of their local rivers and streams. The BRW is an invitation, in the Trust’s words, for communities to “love their local river and be part of the movement better for our rivers.” The present state of our rivers is devastating –– but the rise of citizen science and the wider river-guardianship movement in these islands is cause for tremendous hope.
At the core of this movement lies a central, shared belief: that rivers are life-forces, not only resources. All of us involved in river activism know, deep in our hearts, that healthy, living rivers enliven everything around them, including humans –– and that a wounded or dying river is among the most depressing places in a landscape. Simply put, we love rivers, and we hurt when they are hurting.
Out of passion springs action: we are moved to work for the revival of our river system because at some level we understand that our fate flows with that of rivers –– and always has. As the early conservationist John Muir beautifully put it, “Rivers flow not past, but through us; tingling, vibrating, exciting every cell and fibre in our bodies, making them sing and glide.” Yes! We are all part of the water cycle. Everyone lives in a watershed.
Less than a mile from my home in south Cambridge rises one of the few hundred chalk-streams in the world: an ecosystem far rarer and more fragile than cloud-forest or saltmarsh. In a small wood close to a railway line, nine springs fill a hollow in the chalk. From there this gin-clear water flows away as a brook to join first the River Cam, then the River Great Ouse, and then the North Sea at The Wash. This was the stream I monitored for this year’s Big River Watch. It is also the stream which I have visited most weeks for the past twenty years or so. The site of a spring, where a river is born, has always seemed to me one of the most miraculous places in a landscape.
We know that humans have been drawn to these springs for at least six thousand years: recent archaeological work found Mesolithic flint scatters and charred hearth stones dated to between 4000 and 6000 BCE. Such spring sites were revered across the country during Celtic and Roman times. Many of our rivers were named after deities: the Dee (Deva), the Shannon (Sinnan). Now, though, such reverence has been largely lost. The specificity and sacredness of individual rivers has been replaced by their generalised definition as ‘service providers’ –– as sumps and dumps. We have made ghosts of our gods.
How has it come to this –– and where do we go from here? I have spent the last five years researching and writing a book called Is A River Alive? When I began work on it I could not have foretold how decisively rivers would move to the centre of politics in Britain. Nor did I fully understand how desperately injured our rivers had become. I only knew that I wanted to seek an answer to the ancient, urgent, complex question which gives the book its title. I travelled to places around the world where rivers are being imagined radically ‘otherwise’: where they are understood as living beings with lives, deaths and even rights –– with transformative consequences.
In Ecuador, I saw a cloud-forest river saved from total destruction by gold-mining thanks to a Constitutional Court ruling which recognised the ‘right to life’ of both river and forest. In Quebec, I saw the wild Magpie River defended from death by damming, in a river-rights campaign pioneered by both white and Innu communities. ‘Rivers are the veins of the territory’, said one Innu activist, Uapukun Mestokosho: ‘more than just waterways or resources, they are living beings with their own spirit and agency.’ In southern India, I travelled with indefatigable young river guardians who were trying, in desperately challenging circumstances, to resurrect rivers that were biologically dead, with zero species count and zero dissolved oxygen. And in between these periods of fieldwork I returned again and again to that little chalkstream who rises as springs less than a mile from my home in south Cambridge, and who flows through my years and my landscape as a time-keeper, friend and lifeline.
Among the many things I learned on these journeys was that rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours
back –– and with it, ours too.