Is a river alive?

Nature writer Macfarlane (Underland) serves up a lyrical inquiry into the implications of treating rivers as living beings worthy of reverence and legal rights. Recounting his travels along the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, Macfarlane profiles the dogged conservationists defending the river from logging and mining interests, and discusses how their activism secured the inclusion of legal protections for the natural world in the country's most recent constitution, ratified in 2008. He weaves together his recollections of kayaking Canada's Magpie River with an account of how Indigenous resistance to hydroelectric development successfully prevented the river's damming and led a municipal government to recognize it as "a living, rights-bearing being" in 2021. The fate of Ennore Creek--an offshoot of the Kosasthalaiyar River in Chennai, India--serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when rivers aren't protected, Macfarlane suggests, describing how British colonial zoning practices concentrated polluting industries on the city's outskirts where the water still flows "grey-green and sluggish... slick with effluents, sewage and other pollutants." Macfarlane skillfully braids his immersive travel writing with illuminating historical background, all told in lithe prose ("The horizon widens into ocean and the co-motion of sky and water is lost in a white, grainy light, and there the river's last trace is slow-vanishing spirals in the water, shallowing as they slip on"). Nature lovers will be riveted. (May)

The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world. In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing "an idea that changes the world--the idea that a river is alive." In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that "would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago," but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to "shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice." The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane's third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that "even the trout have portage trails," returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river's permanence and power to shape our lives for the better. Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.