What if a river were more than water flowing through a landscape? What if it could live, suffer, recover—and even have rights?
In Is a River Alive?, acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane follows that question across three extraordinary landscapes: Ecuador’s threatened cloud forests, India’s polluted waterways, and Canada’s wild Mutehekau Shipu.
Along the way, he meets Indigenous leaders, activists, scientists, lawyers, and conservationists who challenge the idea that rivers are simply resources for humans to use. Some communities have gone even further, winning legal recognition for rivers as living entities with rights of their own.
But this is more than an environmental argument. Macfarlane asks readers to reconsider where human life ends and the natural world begins—and whether that boundary ever truly existed.
Can changing the way we see rivers change the way we protect them?
Read the Instaread summary of Is a River Alive? to explore a remarkable new way of seeing the living world.
