Rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings- who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Is a River Alive? is a a passionate, immersive and revelatory story which will open hearts, spark debates and lead us to the revelation that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.

Renowned nature writer Robert Macfarlane takes us on several exhilarating journeys across the globe, including the Ecuadorean cloud forest and the head forest of Rio Los Cedros, onto the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the dying waters around the city of Chennai in India, the Mutehekau Shipu (or Magpie river), 600 miles north-east of Montreal, urging us to vest rights in natural objects, confronting the realities of living, beating heart of the riverine world. 

Macfarlane confronts the gross failure of our existing laws to protect rivers from harm, and homes in on developments. He acknowledges the beliefs of indigenous communities, who have embraced nature-first worldview for millennia. 

He writes of Ecuador’s constitution, amended in 2008 to recognise actionable rights of nature, of a judgement of the Uttarakhand High Court, in 2017, decreeing that the Ganges river is recognised as a “living entity” with rights under the law and of resolutions adopted by First Nations indigenous communities and local authorities that recognise the Magpie river to be a “legal person” with “fundamental rights”.

Macfarlane offer us the power and timeliness of the nature world, in a familiar style to his many readers but now adopting a more overtly political tone, with a call for a new direction. Our classic law built around the human, have failed, and we need another way, one that ruptures the shackles of our learnt and inherited imaginations, and the limits  of the legal institutions that have trapped us. Let’s imagine that a river lives and has rights of its own.

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton £25/ WW Norton $31.99, 384 pages.