Streams of Consciousness

Robert Macfarlane believes that “there are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” He is referring, in this context, to the rights-of-nature movement, a global, grassroots campaign, driven largely by Indigenous communities, to grant legal personhood to rivers, forests, mountains, and their multitudinous kin. If a corporation can be considered a person in the eyes of the law, shouldn’t these natural systems have voices too? Rather than treating them as property that’s ripe for exploitation, shouldn’t people value their right to subsist and persist? This idea lies at the heart of the British nature writer’s Is a River Alive?, which takes readers to Ecuador, India, and Quebec, where locals have rallied to defend aquatic landscapes. It also flows through Theory of Water, by the Nishnaabeg scholar, author, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose slim, complex web of a book calls upon readers to radically rethink how they view the relationships among all of the world’s beings. In our present moment of climate catastrophe, cascading genocides, and unbridled racial capitalism, Simpson argues, only a collective emphasis on all of our relations, without assuming humans belong at the top of a hierarchy, can restore the continuous regeneration required by our planetary network of life. And although she might offer a resounding yes to Macfarlane’s titular question, that doesn’t mean it’s a simple answer.

Distilling Theory of Water into a few paragraphs would be impossible. My copy has too many flagged pages, too many underlined passages. Like water, or Nibi, the book doesn’t conform to fixed boundaries. The narrative meanders from academic analysis and essay to Nishnaabeg storytelling, poetry, and a blend of forms, while water “travels the world over, moving easily through land, air, soil, rock and bodies.” In other words, “Nibi always escapes the container.” So, rather than compartmentalize it, what does it mean, Simpson asks, to truly listen to water?

Many Indigenous people not only listen to water, they also talk to it, speaking to rivers and lakes and the sun and the moon, making offerings to animals and praying to spirits. This is a constant dialogue, Simpson writes, “which is saying something, because Anishinaabe are not known as chatty people.” It’s one of the reasons why dams, lift locks, and other industrial installations are anathema: “They close off channels of communication. The sound of rushing water is a kind of portal to another world.”

In this other world, the one that existed before colonization, the one that we may be returning to whether we like it or not, life was tenuous. Our ancestors did not take it for granted. As the elder Doug Williams tells Simpson, relaying one of several Nishnaabeg origin stories, “It could be that life is actually not that easy to keep.” This lesson resonates for Simpson, spawning humility and gratitude. It reminds her that keeping one another and ourselves alive “was understood, from the beginning, to be dependent upon a profound care for each other and all life.” (The line reminds me of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, also from the front lines of the climate apocalypse, in which the author shows how we have become so dependent on cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy that most people cannot imagine an alternative: “What if l have to change my behavior? What if it’s unpleasant? What if it’s somehow . . . less?”)

In this spirit of questioning, what if the alternative is actually somehow more? To Simpson, water is not one thing, it’s everything: Where we grow before we are born. The lifeblood that fills creeks in the spring. On average, 90 percent of a plant. The majority of our bodies and, when we exhale, part of somebody else’s body. Nishnaabeg see the Great Lakes as organs that filter and clean water before sending it to the ocean, and the health of this inland sea as “akin to the health of our own kidneys and liver.” Simpson describes Nibi as a theory: “a mapping of life and affiliation and global connection” or “a form of Indigenous internationalism.” It asks us to embrace uncertainty and decentralization, to think “on a scale that is outside the present moment and our own immediate needs.”

If Theory of Water provides a framework for understanding the urgency of the rights-of-nature movement, Is a River Alive? is like a camera zooming in across a vast sweep of history and geography. Starting in the opening pages, Macfarlane masterfully follows Nibi from ancient times through his own childhood and the imperilled springs near his home in the United Kingdom to our first stop, in the cloud forest of Ecuador.

The Río Los Cedros, which Macfarlane treks up to with a Hollywood-worthy crew (a hard-core mycologist, a social justice lawyer, a musician and field recordist, and a pair of Ecuadorian constitutional court judges), is a beneficiary of Ecuador’s “vast moral imagination.” In 2008, the country ratified a new constitution, drafted by a democratic socialist government that was part of a “pink tide” in Latin America. It includes articles that recognize nature’s right “to integral respect for its existence” and to be restored when damaged. It also obligates the state to restrict actions that could lead to “the destruction of ecosystems and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.” But this phantasmagorical place — thirty-foot ferns, bioluminescent mushrooms, perpetual “fog‑drop,” one of the most diverse biomes on earth — remains under threat from metal mining.

The process of extracting gold and copper in the northern Andes typically involves large-scale deforestation, blasting bedrock, and “cyanidation” to isolate the ore, which leaches toxic solvents into streams. A 2021 court decision, backed by the rights-of-nature articles of the constitution, booted foreign resource companies from the region: a “thunderclap judgment [that] echoed around the world.” Macfarlane leaves the Río Los Cedros optimistic, convinced that life is a process, not a possession; yet it seems that hope is also a commodity that can be bought or sold. (Indeed, in August, the current Ecuadorian government abolished the environment ministry and transferred its functions to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, part of a neo-liberal plan to attract foreign investment and generate economic growth.)

One might assume that hope is rare among the dying, poisoned rivers of Chennai. The city of 6.5 million on the Bay of Bengal in southeastern India, one of the most densely populated places in the country, discharges about 55 million litres of effluent and sewage into its waterways every day. According to a study of one of its three main rivers, the Cooum, the number of extant fish species there declined from forty-nine to twenty-one to zero between 1949 and 2000. There’s a long tradition of water husbandry in the region, with human-made channels and culverts managing the seasonal monsoon inundation alongside natural marshes. However, most of these low-tech buffers have been drained and built over, catalyzing a “brutal cycle of flood and drought,” which disproportionately harms the city’s poorest residents.

Yuvan Aves, Macfarlane’s guide to this waterscape, could also be perceived as a victim. Abused as a child, brutally beaten but not broken, he escaped through education, immersing himself in insects and all existence, eventually becoming a teacher and crusader for ecological justice. His vision manifests as planting trees on the banks of the Cooum, where a tiny woodland now bustles with bees, bats, and butterflies. It’s Aves and other young activists fighting to restore a despoiled creek that has literally been removed by “pollutocrats” from a coastal zone management map. It’s children dreaming about bathing in the river again. It’s impoverished locals convening to dig up and safeguard turtle eggs, so hatchlings have a better chance to make it to the sea. When one man is asked why he’s participating in this nocturnal ritual, the reply is simple: “For life.”

Macfarlane leaves India with a deeper sense of a river’s “aliveness”: that it’s a dynamic process of understanding ourselves “to be extended generously outwards into a vast community of others.” His insight meshes with Simpson’s view of a decentralized, Nibi-infused world. And it sets the tone for his climactic third act, a wild downriver paddle on the mighty Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, in the Innu homelands of eastern Quebec. In 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu became the first river in Canada given legal personhood. There’s a hydroelectric dam near its mouth on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Hydro-Québec has been eyeing it for more megawatts, envisioning a series of installations like those on the Romaine River, the Magpie’s “ghost sister,” about 100 kilometres to the east. So far, a mostly Innu and environmentalist alliance has managed to protect the Mutehekau Shipu from additional development, and Macfarlane assembles a motley group of kayakers to see what’s at stake.

After a blessing from the Innu poet Rita Mestokosho —“It is the river who will speak to you”— and a wondrous float plane ride above bronze waters and ridges beyond number, Macfarlane and his companions push off from shore and become increasingly conjoined with the Mutehekau Shipu. In the 100-odd pages detailing their dozen-day journey, buffeted by strong winds and thunderous whitewater, he settles into a “present-tense state of not-anticipating, of not-knowing,” and then a heretofore unknown serenity, as if being “slowly flooded from within.” The roar of the bigger rapids —“a noise you feel on your skin, in your lungs”— intensifies the relationship, a bond that language struggles to convey, a portal to another world. “Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot,” Macfarlane writes about this “physical sensation of merging.”

At a literary festival not long after the book’s release, Macfarlane was cagey about his thoughts as to whether a river is indeed alive. Perhaps he did not want to spoil the ending. More recently, in a podcast interview, he responded to the question decisively: “Hell, yes.” If Simpson is part of a resistance movement, thinking and writing outside the main channel, then what is Macfarlane? A professor at the University of Cambridge, an author of big books about big ideas, a son of empire. Also now a member of a boundless, thoroughly hydrated global body, somebody who has recognized a profound truth: “Our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.”