Is a river a being? Can it suffer, heal, or speak — if not in words, then in water’s own fluent language?

These are the questions at the heart of Is a River Alive?, the bestselling new book by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Old Ways). Part travelogue, part ecological inquiry, the book explores a powerful idea whose time has come: that rivers are not just resources, but living entities deserving of recognition and rights. With journeys through Ecuador, India, and Canada — each place facing its own battle for the future of its waters — Macfarlane builds a compelling case for a world where rivers are understood not only scientifically and legally, but relationally and spiritually.

In the following excerpt from the book’s first section, Macfarlane travels deep into Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest, a haven of astonishing biodiversity and the site of a groundbreaking legal victory for the Rights of Nature. He’s joined by a small group of defenders: Ecuadorian ecologist Agustín Bravo, biologist and fungal advocate Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, and a local guide named Ramiro. As they reach a hidden waterfall on the Río Los Cedros, joy turns to reflection — and a deeper reckoning with what it means to say a river is alive.

Excerpted from Is a River Alive?. Copyright (c) 2025 by Robert Macfarlane. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

We do not knowingly enter the cloud. It moves up from below us or gathers from around us; I cannot tell which. But we are in it, it is on us.

Fog numbs sound; mist sparkles on skin and cloth.

It is peaceful to be in that cloud of unknowing. I feel ignorant in the first, and at ease with my ignorance. Any questing after facet and reason is overwhelmed by profusion and difference.

The path thins towards nothing. We begin to criss-cross the Río Los Cedros more often, working slowly upbill, following the water’s path back into the higher forest. A white noise becomes audible at the edge of things, then fills the gaps between them, rising slowly to a roar. We turn a corner. Silver surges through green.

A wide white veil of waterfall is above and ahead of us — thirty feet or more high and twenty feet or so across — crashing into the wide pool it has hollowed from the bedrock over thousands of years. This is the biggest waterfall on the Río Los Cedros. Spray-mis floats and dances, rainbowed where the sun finds it.

The invitation is not to be refused. I strip to my shorts and wade in, boulders slippery underfoot, my arms out for balance like a funambulist’s, feeling steel manacles of cold slide up my legs from ankles to knees to thighs — and then I just launch myself, huffing with the shock, and strike out across the pool towards the waterfall.

Others follow me in: first Giuliana and César, then Ramiro, who yells so loudly he sets the forest echoing and startles birds from the trees. Then Agustín, who peers moleishly without his spectacles and is tentative on the greasy rocks.

I swim back across the pool and wade out to help Agustín. He reaches out both hands for support. I take them and guide him in: him stepping forwards and me backwards. We move like eighteenth-century dance partners hesitantly working out a quadrille.

‘This is the river you helped save, in the forest you helped save,’ I shout to him over the sound of the waterfall.

‘I was only one among very many,’ says Agustín. ‘And the forest . . . spoke for itself, spoke to us all.’

We embrace. I am touched. When we reach the deeper water, Agustín releases my hands and leans forwards into the river, feels it take his weight, support him, then he swims in neat breaststroke across to the base of the waterfall.

I watch in surprise as Agustín first stands up, then backs into the white veil of water so that it’s pummeling his head and his shoulders. He lifts his head back, closes his eyes, flings his arms out wide and stands there, cruciform, with an expression on his face partway between joy and agony.

‘Happy birthday, Agustín!’ I shout, but he can’t hear me.

Then I realize that the water pouring over the lip of the waterfall is running rust-red, stained by silt and cyanide from the forest’s felling, from the mountain’s mining, from the river’s poisoning — and that red is pouring over Agustín’s head and shoulders and is filling the pool itself with old blood . . . and then I blink and the mining has not yet happened and may never happen, and the forest is still unfelled, the mountain whole and the river clear.

A few minutes later I swim over to the waterfall. As Agustín had done, I find my footing on the bed of the pool, then lean back into the shifting, turbulent veil of water. A thousand little fists punch my shoulders, a thousand cold wasps sting my skin.

I close my eyes, feel skin and scalp and spirit ringing and singing. It elates me. This river has an aura into which we have passed, I think, and which is changing our being, enlivening us. Would a dying river do this?

It seems clear to me then, in that strange, bright water, that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing — how had George Eliot put it? — ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.

“To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’…”

But then I’m counterstruck by the sheer, incorrigible weirdness of this white water, by the profoundly alien presence of the river — and all that I’ve just thought feels too easy, too pat. Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants — well, where would you even start with that process? Surely all our attempts to bend the law round so that it recognizes the rights of rivers or forests will only end up with human proxies, jockeying for their own positions and speaking in incorrigibly human voices — ventriloquizing ‘river’ and ‘forest’ in a kind of cos-play animism.

We could call it the ‘Solaris Problem’ — the question of how on earth to open a plausible line of communications with a river — after Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 SF novel Solaris, about a planet whose ocean behaves in ways that perplex the usual mechanistic reductions of water to matter. In ways, in fact, which seem to human observers to be intentional, sentient . . . alive. Entire institutes become dedicated to the study of ‘solaristics’: theoretical attempts to comprehend the ocean’s properties and ontology, and practical attempts to establish contact with it. All methodologies, however, prove futile.

Standing there with the water clattering my skull — as I clumsily, hopelessly probe the River of the Cedars for legibility, for utterance — a line from Lem’s novel bounces into my brain: How can you hope to communicate with the ocean if you can’t even understand one another? 

I notice Giuliana has swum to a corner of the pool and is floating there quietly, looking downstream, facing away from the rest of us. 

I think that it’s unlike her not to be whooping, not to be at the centre of the party.

I wonder if she is dreaming or remembering.

Then I see that she is crying, adding her tears to the river’s flow.