When I’m in need of head space, I have often sought out rivers. I find the whispering, glittering waters a non-judgemental companion. But can a river be considered living, and possess rights similar to animals or humans – rights that can be defended in law?
Through meeting rivers that give life, rivers that have viscerally shown him their life-force and rivers that are dead, writer and university professor Robert Macfarlane argues that rivers are living entities and need to be defended from pollution, extraction and destruction.
We meet in the centre of Rob’s home city, Cambridge, to walk up a river that is deeply important to Rob. It’s a hot sunny day and he’s wearing polarised sunglasses for seeing into water. “Normally people follow the flow,” says Rob, “but we’re going to walk upstream instead. We’re going to go all the way to where a river is born. And the water that flows from that spring site flows through my life and my books. We start with the problem, and we end with the past and the future, where the water rises clear from the ground. As we walk, we’ll see the water move into better health.”
- Who is Robert Macfarlane? Everything you need to know about the writer – including his famous mountaineering grandfather
- The Plodcast: A walk and talk with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane
We begin our walk at Hobson’s Conduit, a channel that ends in the city at the Market Fountain, a monument to the city fathers who canalised the river in the early 17th century to bring fresh water to the people. But now it is virtually lifeless and algae coats the streambed.
“Our rivers are dying,” Robert says. “We see that around us. And I wondered what it would mean to reimagine rivers as living beings, as presences with life and with death and with rights. And there are places in the world where that kind of imagining happens.”
Robert also joined Fergus for an episode of The Plodcast – listen below.
Is a river alive?
His latest book Is a River Alive? reveals Robert’s quest to go further afield and perhaps bring back help for Britain’s waterways. It features three great adventures – in Ecuador, India and Canada. I say adventures, because each account brims with exploration and fellowship. At the heart of each story is an individual or group fighting to protect its river by recognising that rivers have life and must be shielded from mining (in northern Ecuador), pollution (in Chennai, India) or hydroelectric dams (Quebec, Canada). All three tales have reflections in Britain’s own horrific river stories.
Along Hobson’s Conduit we stop by a cedar of Lebanon, whose outswept branches shade the water. For Robert, the cedar conjures both the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories in the world and a tale of destruction of ancient cedar forests, and also Los Cedros, the River of the Cedars in the cloud forest of Ecuador, where he explores one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth.
“The mining in Ecuador is just horrific,” he explains. “Forests are destroyed and rivers poisoned with cyanide by gold mining interests. It’s easy to externalise and excuse oneself, but we’re all entangled in this extractive system. The gold that is mined there finds its way into investment portfolios and laptops and the phones in your back pockets.”
Fortunately, though, the cloud forest and its rivers were saved by an extraordinary legal ruling in November 2021. Robert explains that this judgement was only possible because, back in 2008, Ecuador’s entire constitution was reimagined. “Central to it was the inclusion of four articles, recognising ‘Rights of Nature’ to maintain its dynamic and healthy ecosystems.” The same could happen here, he says.
The state of the UK's rivers
As we walk, the water becomes clearer and I spot a stickleback or two. We admire a moorhen’s feet as it paddles and thoughts turn back to Britain and that universal problem of extraction. “This is a very water-stressed environment,” Robert says. “Cambridge, amazingly, has around the same rainfall as Barcelona and Monaco – it’s a very low rainfall area with high water needs. There’s explosive growth happening here. A lot of housing, a lot of developments.”
The result is a catchment that suffers from nitrate concentration and excessive water extraction, causing turbidity, or cloudy, murky water. We are in the middle of an extraordinarily dry spring and already systems are strained.
Rob explains that the problems are exacerbated by poor planning. The water companies, he says, “have divested billions and billions and billions to shareholders since privatisation. They have not invested in infrastructure. And it’s well known that since privatisation in 1989, there hasn’t been a single reservoir built in England. And there’s been a failure of regulation. It just hasn’t been enforced.”
I’m sad to see sewage fungus swaying in the now-flowing water – signs of agricultural run-off and domestic pollution. Depressingly, you can see this in most British rivers. “Every English river is dying,” says Robert. “In statistical terms, rivers are given an ecological health rating by the Environment Agency and a chemical health rating. And there is no river in England that has both a good chemical rating and a good ecological rating.”
Learning from Chennai
And this links to the Chennai story, where the great rivers – the Cooum, Kosasthalaiyar and the Adyar – that flow through this city of up to 13 million people are entirely dead, killed by sewage and industrial and agricultural effluent. And yet, campaigners fight “almost inconceivable power structures” and win battles to bring in measures that restore life through recognising the rivers’ rights.
But there are other lessons from Chennai. Firstly, that the dead rivers come alive after the rains and remind the city dwellers and politicians of their power through dangerous flooding. “The rivers’ ghosts become monsters,” and cannot be contained. But they have a softer, healing side, too.
“One of the many surprises in the years of writing this book, is that in each place, I saw someone in some way heal or be brought back from within the shadow of death by the river.” In Chennai, it is the indefatigable Yuvan – a young man who somehow survived his violent father through his connection to the water. “When rivers recover, we recover with them,” says Robert.
The geography of hope
By now we have reached tendrils of woodland and meadow that flank the little stream. We’re still in the city but there are chiffchaffs, blackcaps and brimstone butterflies. Robert points out that we can now see the gravel, the chalk over which this stream flows. We’re both grinning – there’s magic here. “We’re rolling back time into a past, but also into a possible future. While we’re walking beside it, what we’re experiencing as this unflows, blows against time, is something I call the ‘geography of hope’.”
For pure adventure, the description in Robert’s book of a kayak trip downriver in Canada is hard to beat. Taking a floatplane to Lac Magpie, Robert and his companions kayak 100 miles to the sea through a close approximation of pure wilderness. Before the journey, Robert encounters Rita, a poet, healer and spiritual guide who leads the Innu people’s campaign to have the rights of the Mutehekau Shipu river recognised.
“The Innu people have had continuous inhabitation with that river for thousands of years. It’s their highway, their larder, their pharmacy. It’s absolutely self-evident that life and living there is inseparable from the life and living of the river. So, to name and recognise the river’s rights is essential.”
Rita asks Robert to perform a series of rituals during his expedition and declares that he will discover a question that he must ask the river. What follows is a physically and emotionally testing journey that explores a river’s power to shape landscape and mindset. There are experiences that Robert admits he cannot fully explain.
We reach the edge of the city and beneath skylark-dappled sunlight we head across fields to a small woodland called Nine Wells. Blackthorn blossom froths and we see absurd numbers of orange-tip and brimstone butterflies.
Before long, Robert is delightedly showing me the springs within the wood. These are deep pits within the chalk full of ice-clear almost turquoise water. He explains that people have been using these springs for millennia: “We’ve got a Neolithic causewayed enclosure over there. We’ve got Bronze Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon of course… And it’s such a modest place, and that’s one of the reasons I love it.” It’s a momentous thing to stand at a spring among the birdsong and think about the journey this water takes, from brook to the River Cam, then the Great Ouse and on to the sea at the Wash.
But this is not quite the end of our journey. Robert shows me something disturbing in the field margin at the back of the wood. There are two manhole covers. He explains that beneath each is a pump installed by the local water company to pump water to the wells when over-extraction by the same company causes the springs to almost stop flowing.
“We are 500 yards from the hospital where patients are on ventilators,” he says. “And here the spring is on its own life support. The water company is extracting so much further down. And all this is used in order to pretend that everything is okay.”
For a better future
This is a gloomy moment on such a bright, butterfly-filled day, but it seems so natural to talk of the stream and its springs as having a life force. In light of this and many other challenges, what hope does he have for our rivers? What can any of us do?
Robert points to the citizen science movement that has grown up in the last 10 years in Britain. “And it’s made up of many kinds of people, swimmers and walkers and anglers and kayakers and everyday folks who just don’t like seeing wounded rivers. It has become incredibly important in filling the gap that has been left in monitoring by what I take to be long-term strategic underfunding, by the Conservative Government in the first instance.
“Then there’s River Action, an amazing group who I’m closely involved with. They’ve been taking Government to court and taken direct action against polluters, such as the big chicken farms on the River Wye. And they’ve also just released this fantastic River Rescue Kit, which is a huge resource covering how you campaign, what the law says, what individual’s rights are, and much more. It’s happening. And we also have the Independent Water Commission currently underway…”
We walk back through the wood to a new stretch of the stream, flowing over chalk with shoals of minnows darting. It is burbling with life. And Robert is optimistic. “I think in the next five years we will start to see very positive signs.” It’s an optimism that glows in the book’s deeply moving epilogue, which I admit brought a tear to my eye.
Robert pauses and says: “There’s a WH Auden line: ‘A nation’s culture is no better than its woods.’ And I always think you could substitute rivers there.”
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Top image: Robert Macfarlane by the Hobson Conduit. Credit: Peter Flude
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