Near the end of his new book, Robert Macfarlane has an epiphany. Is a River Alive? takes the writer and ecological activist on a trio of journeys far from his Cambridge home: to the cloud-forests of Ecuador and their “steaming, glowing furnace of green”, to the poisoned streams and lakes of Chennai in India and, at last, to the roiling torrents of the Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie, river in eastern Canada. Next to the spume and thunder of the gorge that sends that river crashing out into the Gulf of St Lawrence, Macfarlane has a rhapsodic revelation of its waters’ non-human power and “incandescent aura”, in a sacred place where “ghost-realms of times past and future overlap”.
For all his now-global renown as an environmental sage, guide and even prophet, Macfarlane retains a day-job as a Cambridge don (at Emmanuel College). Though Is a River Alive? nods rarely to his own academic hinterland, several centuries of English literary hymns to nature’s majesty and mystery course under, or on, the fervent surface of his prose. Yet his awestruck ecstasy beside the divine onrush of the Mutehekau Shipu — “the river’s voices say and sing what I cannot comprehend” — reminded me not so much of Wordsworth’s Prelude, or some other hallowed Romantic favourite, as a rather more humble riparian vision.
The river for Macfarlane becomes an inscrutable god that can be heard, felt, but never fixed by human minds. Curiously, his Canadian rapture sent me back to a little tributary of the Thames. There, in the glimmer of a midsummer dawn, two frail creatures hear a “heavenly music” and apprehend a watery divinity. It leaves one of them “possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp”.
I’m not sure whether Macfarlane, or his publishers, would welcome a comparison between his glimpses of transcendence beside the great menaced watercourses of the world and the cosy adventures of Rat and Mole. Never mind: in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame found a voice for a sort of native riverside pantheism. The great horned god Pan, “Friend and Helper”, briefly appears to the animals in a reverie that has bewitched its readers since the book first appeared in 1908. Shaggy, bearded and piping, the sacred spirit of Nature manifests itself among modest winding brooks, culverts, ditches and runnels in the “silent, silver kingdom” of the Thames. Thanks to that anguished pop visionary Syd Barrett, Grahame’s mystical “song-dream” by the river even gave Pink Floyd the title of their 1967 debut album.
Far away or close to home, rivers run through human dreams, and fears. Home Counties waterside enthusiasts — the human counterparts of Grahame’s Rat, Mole and Badger — may feel their force as acutely as (say) the Innu poet and seer Rita Mestokosho, who blesses Macfarlane’s kayak journey downstream. His book begins at, and returns to, a fragile chalk-stream in woodland near Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, imperilled by development and drought alike. It branches out to other waterways around the world, where mining, damming, pollution and climate change have changed — or threaten to change — the “blue commons” of rivers into “limitless source and limitless sump: that which supplies and that which disposes”. Along the way, he meets campaigners from the “Rights of Nature” movement. They bring improbable court cases to establish the “legal personhood” of rivers, and their right to run free of pollution, damming, diversion and abuse.
So, is a river alive? A landmark judgment in New Zealand, the Te Awa Tupua Act, decided so in 2017. In both Ecuador and Canada, the scientist-activists Macfarlane consults have also enjoyed successful days in court. Even in Chennai, where chemical-blighted tracts of water ooze poisonously through the “sacrifice zones” of unchecked industry, cases to protect the lives of rivers have been filed. Macfarlane’s full immersion in the language and outlook of the eco-radicals, and their militant hostility to the “death-extractivism” of states and companies, may leave some of his former fans stranded. Compared to the eerie subterranean explorations in Underland — for this reader, one of the non-fiction masterpieces of the century so far — Is a River Alive? feels tighter, fiercer, more didactic. Campaigning urgency, and the impulse to punctuate his journeys with heartfelt advocacy for “ecocentric legislation”, pushes Macfarlane’s prose into swifter but narrower channels. He knows from the get-go where these journeys should lead: into the branch of radical conservationism that enlists the ritual pieties of traditional spirituality as it advocates for rivers — or forests, or mountains — as “rights-bearing entities”.
“Far away or close to home, rivers run through human dreams, and fears.”
That means that Is a River Alive? can feel less like a voyage of discovery than the pursuit of an agenda. Which is not to say that it lacks cascading passages of bejewelled prose in Macfarlane’s keynote manner. He notes that “The history of literature is littered with the debris of attempts to utter water”. If that voyage is doomed to failure, then his counts among the more honourable. However far they choose to travel with Macfarlane’s politics, any reader should thrill to his passage down the white waters of the Mutehekau Shipu with a motley bunch of companions. It leaves him “slowly flooded from within” by the churning rapids and pulsing channels his kayak shoots. By the end, “I am rivered.”
It may seem a long way from such heroic escapades to the gloopy business of river contaminations, and clean-ups, close to Wind in the Willows country. The bulk of Macfarlane’s followers may not care for splashy activist stunts. But they do fret that, as he writes, “Clean rivers” on their doorsteps “have become rivers you cannot drink from without falling ill, which in turn have become rivers you cannot swim in without falling ill”. Yet rivers, as he insists, “heal themselves with remarkable speed”. Only a handful of his admirers will find themselves embroiled in courtroom wrangles over the legal personality of waterways or woodlands: such cases date, it turns out, to a 1972 paper by Christopher Stone entitled “Should Trees have Standing?” Many, however, will be the sort of conscientious citizen who may this week be taking part in the Rivers Trust’s annual health survey, the “Big River Watch”.
Sceptics and scoffers will dismiss Macfarlane at their peril. He speaks to and for a broad constituency — more of a meandering delta than a racing torrent — for whom disgust at the reckless degradation of nature matters more than the finer points of green doctrine. In Britain as elsewhere, rivers (and the crimes committed on and in them) run close to the heart of the cause. Let’s return to Kenneth Grahame country. The writer, after all, derived the idyll of The Wind in the Willows from his childhood beside the Thames at Cookham Dean; later, he lived upriver in Pangbourne.
A few miles west of Cookham lies Henley-on-Thames, once the reliably true-blue constituency of a certain Boris Johnson. Since July 2024, however, the Liberal Democrat Freddie van Mierlo has represented Henley with a handy 6,000 majority. Here, and in dozens of other constituencies, the “blue wall” of guaranteed Conservative hegemony has been washed away in a mainly orange — but sometimes red or green — surge. There’s good reason to believe that one non-trivial factor behind this rural vote collapse was what Macfarlane calls the “gradual, desperate calamity” of England’s rivers.
The facts are often recited. Not a single English river is in “good overall condition”. Merely 14% have a healthy ecology; 83% count as “highly polluted”. In 2024 water companies made 450,398 discharges of raw sewage into English rivers: a total of 3,614,428 shit-hours. Thames Water, chronically indebted and keen to raise bills by 59% over the next five years, contributed 300,000 hours to that brown tide. Macfarlane rightly celebrates the chalk-stream: one of the rarest ecologies on the planet, with most located in southern Britain. In the crap vanguard as ever, Thames Water in 2024 managed the equivalent of 154 days of sewage discharge into the chalk-stream of the Misbourne.
Abandoned by Pan, Rat and Mole would now paddle through liquid manure. People notice, and care. The state of the Thames became a crucial doorstep issue in Henley and a score of other places drowned in the filth of a botched privatisation that benefited only rentier parasites with a monopoly stranglehold. Since the transfer of debt-free public bodies into the private sector, water companies have distributed more than £78 billion in dividends.
They have become, in effect, debt-servicing shareholder-return machines that skimp on vital investment while pumping the results of corporate failure into our waterways. True, some factors behind the rivers’ plight lie beyond water managers’ control, from the frequency of extreme weather to the pressures exerted by rash housing development. But institutional dereliction has made every problem worse. Look at our water corporations, mired in a toxic sludge of monopolistic greed and state-backed impunity, and you could almost tweak Gandhi’s famous riposte when he was asked about Western civilisation. British capitalism? It might be a good idea.
For now, the system stinks. Voters know that. Last year they kicked out apologists for the stench. Therese Coffey, the Environment Secretary whose feeble irritation with sewage-dumping companies did nothing to stem the noxious tide, lost her solid Suffolk Coastal seat to Labour. In Chichester, where waterborne fury also swung many votes, a huge Tory plurality crumbled away. The Lib Dem majority there now exceeds 12,000.
North Herefordshire elected a Green MP, as did Waveney Valley in Suffolk. In South Cotswolds, where the Thames rises, the Lib Dems won 44% of the vote. Conservatives lost four out of five seats along the Wye: another storied river choked with sewage. As for Witney, whose quondam member David Cameron blithely sneered at “green crap”, blue-branded ordure helped to bury the Tory candidate. Far from Macfarlane’s Andean streams and Canadian rapids, mucky waters have drowned political careers all along our riverbanks. Innumerable instinctive conservatives, by temperament or principle, have whiffed the dank sludge and fled from the party of polluters with that name. Chesham and Amersham, where the pretty, fragile Misbourne for so long ran Thames Water brown, was of course a Lib Dem gain.
Passions mobilised by wounded rivers have little to do with the contingencies of any governmental drive towards “Net Zero”, or even wrangles over the causes and consequences of climate change. The cherishing of natural goods — and hatred of their defilement — precedes green activism of a more systematic kind. Those headwaters of environmental concern spring from a shared sense of the immeasurable value — if you like, sacredness — of natural life. For growth-seeking politicians of Right or Left to decide that advancement lies in trashing that concern — anti-Net Zero claptrap polemics on one side, a bonfire of planning regulations on the other — would be, will be, a fatal error.
“Innumerable instinctive conservatives, by temperament or principle, have whiffed the dank sludge and fled from the party of polluters with that name.”
Swipes at Nimby selfishness may appeal to short-term vote-fishers. But that stream soon runs dry. Rivers flow, after all. The gunge that runs through my backyard may soon end up in yours. At home or abroad, the “river defenders” Macfarlane lauds can plausibly claim to merge care for their own lands, and waters, with commitment to the common good. His own water-politics plants him firmly on the left bank. From the stream-fed Los Cedros forests in Ecuador to the toxic trickles of the Cooum and Adyar rivers in Chennai, he pays heed to deep-green campaigners with piratical corporations and corrupt governments in their sights. Look elsewhere for accounts of the towns lit, hearths fed and crops raised by prudent hydro projects — although, to be fair, he targets vandalistic depletion, not sustainable stewardship.
In a wider historical frame, however, critiques of what Macfarlane calls the “delusion of resource inexhaustibility” hardly belong to the modern Left alone. No act of the late pope’s pontificate struck a wider or deeper chord than his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si. Francis’s great plea to humanity to hear the divine voice of nature had, by the way, plenty to say both about the pollution of water sources, and their profit-driven transfer from shared to private assets. For Francis, “access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights”.
In Macfarlane’s own catchment area of English literature, the champions and celebrants of rivers, seas and lakes have emerged from diverse families of thought. One especially gifted prose-poet of English rivers, and the animal lives they nurture, was not even a traditional conservative but an outright fascist: Henry Williamson, even if the sad, warped politics that has disfigured the legacy of the author of Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon owed more to personal misery than ideological frenzy. Williamson was a traumatised outlier. Much more common is the reverent respect for ancient liquid powers that flows, for instance, through “The Dry Salvages”, the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “I do not know much about gods,” begins the poet, “but I think that the river/ Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.”
Eliot’s brooding river divinity — “Unhonoured, unpropitiated/ By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting” — occupies a place in the same pantheon as the water-gods sensed by Robert Macfarlane by the raging whitewaters of Canada, or by Kenneth Grahame along a placid backwater of the Edwardian Thames. River-worshippers may sound sentimental, or sanctimonious. But watery deities still roar, or whisper, to millions, and even sway their votes. Those who jeer at “green crap” may find their prospects sunk in the stinking sewers they defend.
