Penguin, 2025-06-14
(Kindle edition) ISBN: 978-0241998205
Reviewed by Alan Dearing
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The idea that a river might be alive lies outside the bounds of well guarded orthodox science, but this book is a careful re-examination of this ancient way of perceiving the natural world. The author says that ‘we will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them‘. He quotes D.H. Lawrence who wrote that the world is ‘not a machine after all, but alive and kicking‘.
If we start reading the book in the expectation that we will be provided with a clear yes or an unequivocal no answer we will have been misled by our cultural baggage. Our language restrictions cannot provide certainty. We are enmeshed in a modern mode of thought and we do not start with a clean slate. Our thoughts run in predictable channels, so we need to escape into other perceptions through the power of creative imagination.
The book starts with the story of springs and rivers throughout the time that they have interacted with humans. It moves quickly from the obvious recognition that water gives life, to its status as a living entity and then to the wilful disregard of modern times.
Now to the present day; and there is hope. I did not realise that the struggle to accept that springs, rivers, mountains, their flora and fauna and many other natural features have rights is moving forward. The argument has been won, in law, in some surprising places, like Ecuador, which also constitutionally banned the privatisation of water resources. The reality of a river – forest – human conscious unity has resulted in native peoples leading the way towards legal status.
The author chose to study three rivers, all under threat, and all of which have been respected as living entities in the past. He travelled with a hardy bunch of adventurers who were sympathetic to the concept of living rivers. One of the party was Giuliana, a prescient mycologist and dowser who was able to sense the presence of an extremely rare specimen and inform her colleagues when they were closing in on the site. The group leaders were advised by a healer and mystic before setting out, and they practised her rituals at the right time. The landscape they travelled through and the people they met are described in colourful detail that engaged my imagination.
I finished the book with an enhanced sense of joy and optimism. I gained strength through the extraordinary power of the human mind as described by this credible source. Science is very slowly evolving to include a wider acceptance of sentient consciousness in apparently dead or instinctively driven Nature.
The author did experience a realisation of the ‘incandescent aura’ of a river, and sensed it’s life force, in the final days of his time on the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River in Canada.
Robert MacFarlane is an internationally respected writer on Nature, people and place. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge.