Is a River Alive?

by Robert Macfarlane

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Travel writing, ecological reporting and history flow together in a portrait of one of nature's most powerful features.

A New York Times "New Nonfiction to Read This Spring" Recommendation • A Guardian "Nonfiction to Look Forward To in 2025" Pick • A Washington Post "Book to Watch For" in 2025 • A Financial Times "What to Read in 2025" Selection • A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of 2025 • A Next Big Idea Club May 2025 Must-Read Book

From the best-selling author of Underland and "the great nature writer…of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), a revelatory book that transforms how we imagine rivers—and life itself.

Hailed in the New York Times as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,” Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393242133
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/17/2025

Nature writer Macfarlane (Underland) serves up a lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights. Recounting his travels along the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, Macfarlane profiles the dogged conservationists defending the river from logging and mining interests, and discusses how their activism secured the inclusion of legal protections for the natural world in the country’s most recent constitution, ratified in 2008. He weaves together his recollections of kayaking Canada’s Magpie River with an account of how Indigenous resistance to hydroelectric development successfully prevented the river’s damming and led a municipal government to recognize it as “a living, rights-bearing being” in 2021. The fate of Ennore Creek—an offshoot of the Kosasthalaiyar River in Chennai, India—serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when rivers aren’t protected, Macfarlane suggests, describing how British colonial zoning practices concentrated polluting industries on the city’s outskirts where the water still flows “grey-green and sluggish... slick with effluents, sewage and other pollutants.” Macfarlane skillfully braids his immersive travel writing with illuminating historical background, all told in lithe prose (“The horizon widens into ocean and the co-motion of sky and water is lost in a white, grainy light, and there the river’s last trace is slow-vanishing spirals in the water, shallowing as they slip on”). Nature lovers will be riveted. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane’s astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation."

Merlin Sheldrake

"One of the big publishing events (if not the biggest) of 2025—a new book by Robert Macfarlane … Personal as well as political, Is a River Alive? is almost as certain to shift readerly perspectives as it is to be a bestseller."

Guardian

"Robert Macfarlane is one of earth’s keenest celebrants."

Diane Ackerman

"Like its subject, Is a River Alive? is work of flow and counter-flow. It is lyrical, evocative, closely observed, and deeply moving. Robert Macfarlane offers new ways to think and, just as importantly, feel about the majestic and mysterious non-human world."

Elizabeth Kolbert

"Robert Macfarlane is a once-in-a-generation virtuoso, and I don’t know when his kaleidoscopic language and world-expanding scholarship have been used to more potent effect than in this impassioned, resounding affirmative to the title’s urgent question."

John Vaillant

"Robert Macfarlane’s writing reminds us of the astonishing variety of things you can see when you go at walking speed, and of how strange and rich the world is."

Philip Pullman

"Is a River Alive? is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time—exciting, brilliantly comprehensive, mind-altering. In one of its many stunning moments, Macfarlane describes the myriad rivers trapped and buried under the concrete of our cities. ‘Daylighting’ occurs on those rare occasions when these ghost-rivers are dug out & released to the surface to feel the sun, to expand—majestic creatures—and spread life once again. To read this book is to feel your ghosted soul undergo such daylighting—metaphysical, political, emotional, linguistic. Any soul going dormant, any citizen going numb, will be revivified and propelled back to their essential core, where rage, wonder, and imagination intertwine, and a powerful hope for the earth arises. A spellbinding, life-changing work."

Jorie Graham

"Is a River Alive? is a beautifully written, poetic testament to the vitality of the Earth and the forms of politics that can be based upon that premise."

Amitav Ghosh

"Robert Macfarlane is a magician with words. His writing is like a vortex … once caught, you’re pulled deeper and deeper with each page."

Andrea Wulf

"This book is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of Indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways."

Rebecca Solnit

"A rich and visionary work of immense beauty. Robert Macfarlane is a memory keeper. What is broken in our societies, he mends with words. Rarely does a book hold such power, passion, and poetry in its exploration of nature. Read this to feel inspired, moved and, ultimately, alive with the world."

Elif Shafak

"Profound and playful, revelatory and realistic, intimate and epic, humble and absolutely huge—this supremely enjoyable masterpiece will change the world"

Patrick Barkham

"When a book’s title asks a question, you better answer it as an author. And Robert Macfarlane does so in style. He combines his love for nature with a swift pen, making readers aware of ecological problems while also allowing them a moment of literary joy."

Travel Tomorrow - Camille Van Puymbroeck

"Shattering and sublime, Is a River Alive? offers a question, an answer, and perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity of our times: to accept our place in the mesh of things and act accordingly in the interests of the whole"

Amy Jane Beer

"What happens when rivers are considered living entities with rights? Macfarlane, a prolific nature writer, journeys to the polluted Ennore Creek in India, recounts activist efforts to conserve the Los Cedros River in Ecuador and kayaks along Canada’s Magpie River—officially recognized as 'a living, rights-bearing being'—in search of an answer. His resulting book is a lyrical hybrid narrative of travel, history and environmentalism."

Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson

"One of the big publishing events (if not the biggest) of 2025—a new book by Robert Macfarlane … Personal as well as political, Is a River Alive? is almost as certain to shift readerly perspectives as it is to be a bestseller."

The Guardian

★ 03/28/2025

Macfarlane (Underland: A Deep Time Journey) begins with a simple premise: what happens ecologically, politically, and spiritually if rivers are treated as living beings with legal personhood rights? Traveling to areas where this idea is being tested, Macfarlane tracks the legal, scientific, and cultural impact of affording rivers inalienable rights, such as the right to reach the sea and the right to exist without undue pollution. Macfarlane visits a river in an Ecuadoran cloud forest, a system of horrifically polluted rivers and lagoons in Chennai, India, and an imposing river in northern Quebec threatened by hydroelectric damming. These expeditions contrast with the experience of visiting a delicate system of springs near his home in England. One of Macfarlane's strengths is precision in vocabulary and description. The back matter of the book includes a glossary, notes, bibliography, and information on the music and people who inspired the author as he wrote. VERDICT This is a fundamentally hopeful book about an overwhelming ecological catastrophe, answering the titular question with a resounding "yes." It is also a call to arms, introducing the relatively young Rights of Nature movement to a mass audience.—Rebecca Brody

Library Journal

★ 2025-03-08
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.

In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.

Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.

Kirkus Reviews