Early on in his new exploration of how we conceptualize the nature that surrounds us, Robert Macfarlane considers the power of pronouns. He’s not diving into the gender wars, but rather unpacking the consequences of imagining nature as an “it.”
One example: In a 2021 letter from an inter-tribal coalition about protections for Utah’s Bears Ears region, activists wrote, “We relate to these lands who are alive.” Macfarlane quotes this and adds: “These lands who are alive. Words make worlds. In English, we ‘it’ rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff.”
This isn’t mere academic quibbling. As listeners will find when Macfarlane speaks about his book, Is A River Alive?, at the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities at Rhodes College on Thursday, October 1st, at 6 p.m., he brings a sense of urgency to rethinking such concepts.
With climate change and environmental degradation running rampant, Macfarlane offers a perspective on the very heart of nature as it lives in our imaginations. And, as with his previous works like 2019’s Underland, he does so with a refined sense of both the poetry and the practicalities of the landscapes that surround us.
This befits one who straddles several disciplines, which Macfarlane undoubtedly does as professor of literature and the environmental humanities at the University of Cambridge. Beyond that title, he also does work on “rights and well-being for humans, non-humans and the web of life that sustains us all,” and holds the Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo.
But what really qualifies him to speak comprehensively and deeply about such matters is his attention to language. By Macfarlane’s own account, he’s “an absolutely obsessive reviser and editor,” rewriting every sentence in his books “20, 30, or 40 times.” Yet what could be considered overwrought in the hands of others is deeply rewarding here, where he deftly conjures the pith and pulse of landscapes as we experience them.
The opening prologue alone is an exquisite evocation of a single nameless stream near Cambridge (on the River Cam) over eons. “Rain-fed, the spring’s stream surges seawards: gravity at work, or something like longing. The stream joins the river who winds in fat meanders to its mouth where at last — between bronze beaches — it reaches the ocean, and is havocked into waves by tide and wind’s commotion. Shadows shift between the trees around the spring: here are people for the first time, drawn to this place where water is born.”
Reminiscent of the opening of Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which portrays a single tree over the course of a family’s generations, Is A River Alive? sets a tone of awe and inspiration in the face of the persistent natural companions to our lives, so often ignored in our prosaic pursuits. And herein lies the tremendous value of mixing the sciences with the subtler nuances of the humanities, so regularly under threat today. The poetry of the book stirs us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes.
And yet there is some solid reportage here as well. Exploring how a simple attribution of life to rivers (or forests, or mountains) “changes the world,” as he puts it, he focuses on three landscapes in particular: the headwaters of the Río Los Cedros in the mountains of Ecuador, “the wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries of the watery city of Chennai in south-east India,” and the area locals call Nitassinan, hundreds of miles north of Montreal, homeland of the Innu people.
As he writes, “each is a place where rivers are understood in some fundamental way to be alive — and in each place, too, the survival of rivers is under severe threat.” Memphians who treasure the Mississippi River that churns just beyond our bluffs will find some crucial insights here, as when he considers the shifting nature of our local waterway. “The Mississippi, like any unhindered river occupying a wide floodplain over time, was restless. It wandered, in great hooping loops.” In charting the river’s comings and goings, Macfarlane writes, the cartographer Harold Fisk “had mapped the Mississippi’s memories.”
