Is a River Alive? (2025). ISBN: 978039324133 By Robert Macfarlane

In this fascinating book about rivers, Macfarlane reflects on and challenges our relationship with the natural world that surrounds us. The book takes you across continents and, most importantly, to the people who depend on rivers to survive. “Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places.” He stressed the importance of seeing the river as more than a flowing mass of water; it is a true ecosystem, filled with life. Filled with hope. When rivers fail, human civilizations fail, as rivers are the veins and capillaries of this planet. When we clog or divert them, we change more than their route. We change who they are, and by default, we change too.

The author asks, “Can you murder a river?” Can a river be treated like a person? While some efforts to give personhood to a river have succeeded, for example, New Zealand’s Whanganui River, it is not always the case. But whether the river receives this status or not is not the issue. The fact that we have to even consider this is. Lack of recognition of the connection between the living world is one of the greatest issues and challenges facing modern civilization.

Rivers and their movement have inspired people since antiquity. The famous Heraclitus quote goes: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Yet, the rivers are so much more. They are the oasis of life. We rely on them much more than we realize. Their health reflects who we were, and who we are: “That the river is time, and we are always within it, even when we think we’re standing dry-footed on the bank, watching the current pass.”

Modern civilization needs to figure out a way to protect the living world while maintaining progress. These two seem to be in constant conflict. More modernization and expansion require destruction, but does it always have to be that way? Urban planning can take into account the living world that surrounds us. It requires active thinking and engagement from all sides: investors, ecologists, and inhabitants. We have to ask: what is the impact of this river, and if we change it, what will change as a result? It is always more than we expected.

I highly recommend this book to challenge the way you see the world.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” – Norman Maclean