Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Have you ever stood beside a river and felt it was alive?
Not just water flowing somewhere, but a presence, maybe even a being of some kind.
How do we draw the line between life and non-life, especially when it comes to something like a river?
We have a hard time imagining awareness on the scale of a forest, or a mountain, or water.
But it's one of the most ancient ways of understanding the world.
The book is a question. It's not a declaration.
Its title ends in a question mark.
Is a river alive?
And in a sense, it's an invitation to see what happens when we reimagine rivers,
Not as stuff, not as brute matter, but as presences, let's say, with lives and with deaths and even with rights.
This is Robert Macfarlane, a celebrated nature writer and explorer, the author of some best-selling and prize-winning books, including Mountains of the Mind and Underland.
We both love his writing. I'm partial to the books about ancient landscapes. But Steve, how would you describe this one?
Well, this is, I think, really the first time he's tackled head-on the concept of animism, the idea that all of nature is alive.
And we're talking about plants and mountains and rivers, that they possess some sort of spirit or consciousness.
And, you know, that's a common belief in a lot of indigenous cultures.
And it's the basis of the emerging rights of nature movement.
Though to most scientists, that's just a lot of mumbo jumbo.
But if you take this idea seriously, I think everything changes about our relationship with
the natural world. I'm curious, was that true for you? And we were in Vermont this summer when you
were reading the book, and you go for a long walk up in the woods pretty much every day.
Did anything shift for you? You know, I don't know. I'm not sure. I tend to have a very rational,
you might say, left-brained way of seeing the world. But every so often when I'm in those woods,
I can slip out of that mindset and feel a kind of life force.
And sometimes I will close my eyes and put my arms around certain favorite trees.
I didn't know you did that.
Oh, yeah.
I'll press my hands into the bark, and it can feel like there's some sort of communication with a tree.
I mean, it could all be in my imagination, but I would like to cultivate that sensibility.
It's really hard for me.
It does not come naturally.
And so I am especially fascinated by the people who grew up in our world of modern science
but have found ways to take animism seriously.
And Robert Macfarlane is one of those people.
He's an adventurer, right, as well as a writer.
How far did he go for this book about rivers?
He went all around the world.
He spent a lot of time in several different river ecosystems.
There was an Ecuadorian cloud forest, a dying river system in India,
and a boreal forest in eastern Canada.
And he had some amazing experiences that really stretched his understanding of how the world works.
And so we had a really interesting conversation.
I'm excited to hear this one.
So your first books were about mountains, drawing on your own experiences as a climber.
Later, you wrote about underground environments.
And now you've written about rivers.
And not just rivers as a different feature of the landscape, but really the question of whether rivers are alive.
What led you to that question?
Well, I've been, I think, moving in that direction over 21 years, I suppose. And this is the sharpest confrontation of the question of life, which is really the spring source of all of this, all of these questions.
I think I was first moved in that direction by the question of rights.
In 2017, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, New Zealand, was recognized as a living being,
a spiritual and physical entity, to use the phrase from the Parliamentary Act.
And when you say recognized, you're talking about you're recognized in a legal sense.
Yeah, this is a parliamentary act passed in Wellington in Parliament House there,
And it recognized the Whanganui River as a spiritual and physical entity, a living being, and as a rights-bearing being.
So this was a kind of global gong strike, and it certainly caught my ears.
So where do you go with that? I mean, how do you sort of explore that question?
Well, in my country, the question of whether rivers are alive is very urgent because many of our rivers are dying.
Dying in part because of a failure of imagination as well as legislation.
So we have told one story about our rivers really successfully, which is that they are a kind of matter to be used.
Their inanimate brute matter is Isaac Newton's phrase from a late 17th century letter.
And so, you know, they fill our glasses, they take our waste away.
We can move them around, we can dam them, we can forget about them broadly as long as they provide our ecosystem services.
But there are other ways of imagining rivers, of relating to rivers.
and I was interested in traveling to places where rivers are being imagined radically
and in some way bringing back that old story to my landscape.
So you, as you say, you travel around the world
and talk to a lot of people who live very close to the natural world
and you say they had a recurring question,
what is the river saying?
Yeah, yeah.
Which is such a provocative question to ask.
It is a, well, so I would ask that
because I really wanted to know the answer.
And there is no one answer.
No river speaks with a single voice.
A river is a gathering.
It's a braiding of tributaries.
A river is a watershed as well as that main channel.
So every river had a different answer.
Every community had a different answer.
Yeah, I traveled with people.
I traveled with rivers for four years or so.
And so, I mean, in modern Western culture,
we have a very sharp distinction between life and non-life.
I mean, animals are alive, plants are alive,
but water would seem to be inanimate.
So what's a different way of thinking about a river?
Well, I think really we have to think what we mean by life
and what we mean by living.
And for some of the people I spent time with,
let's take the example of this extraordinary Inuit poet and activist,
Rita Mestakosho up in northeastern Quebec, or Natasnan, as she would call it. To her,
life is lived fully in relation with the life of rivers. Rivers have flowed through the life of
her and her people for the best part of 8,000 years. They are highway, larder, pharmacy,
laboratory, schoolroom. They are all of these things. Life is unimaginable without rivers.
And that makes intuitive sense to me. My own life has been lived in relation with rivers. I think with them. I remember with them. When I grieve, I go to the banks of the little spring near my house. I lost a friend two weeks ago really fast. And I wanted to be with the water and think about him there.
So, to me, that definition of life, of life-giving, of life-making, of life-shaping, is a form of aliveness.
But my sense is you're not just talking about the water itself.
You're talking about the whole piece of the – I mean, the plants living around it, the animals that come to visit the river, the people who come there.
I mean, that's all the river in a way.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, exactly.
river is a great a great group noun let's say a beautiful group noun we in in english i sort of
realized with a with a dull of a moment we have no verb to river really we don't use river as a
verb in the end i i do use it in the book and as a verb because what could be more of a verb than
a river but we we it our rivers we that and which are rivers but in the i began to think of rivers
who flow and rivers who reach the sea. And I just began in small and large and acute and chronic
ways to try to fall into a neighborliness with rivers. You said to be able to really dive into
the subject, to write this book, there was a lot of unlearning that you had to do, a lot of unlearning
of your assumptions, I guess, sort of this divide between life and non-life. What did you have to
unlearn? Well, the rationalist definition of a river is H2O plus gravity, which I think is for
many of us what it is. I had to think about what agency is, what will might mean. In the little
springs I live near here on the 99 million year old chalk of South Cambridge, they have exerted
an extraordinary agency and will on life around themselves. There is Mesolithic flint scatters
from 8,000 years ago found by these springs, Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, all the
way through to my city of Cambridge, which was in effect irrigated and nourished and kept alive
during the early modern period by this flowing fresh water. But most people would say that
you know, what you're describing are the people who lived along that river for, you know, over
the millennia, not the river itself. It's a different frame of reference.
It is a different frame of reference. And I suppose what I'm doing there is trying to think
about the ways in which grammatically and conceptually we have rendered rivers as passive
presences. I mean, we now have such control over rivers. We can pick up whole watersheds
and reorganize them. We have impounded so much water in the Three Gorges Dam project that we've
measurably slowed the rotation of the earth. So water has, river has become stuff. It has become
thing to be organized. And that organization has brought incredible flourishing, incredible human
benefits, but it has become a form of story about water which removes its life, its life-giving
powers, its life force, its agency, its will, depending on how you want to use these words.
So, yeah, I wanted to turn all of these words around and see what happened when we look
through them from different angles.
So we should talk about some of your travels.
I mean, you've constructed your book around three big trips, and the first one you write about is down to Ecuador, to the Ecuadorian cloud forest.
Yes.
Why did you decide to go there?
Oh, well, because in 2008, Ecuador revised, reimagined its constitution after the election of Rafael Correa there.
And into that new constitution, it inserted these four astonishing articles, which are now generally known as the Rights of Nature articles.
And in so doing, it became the first modern democracy, nation, state to recognize the rights of nature.
And just to be clear about what that means, the first of those articles recognized nature, rivers, mountains, cloud forests, as having the right to exist, to flourish and to persist.
It also recognized the respect, what we might know from human rights, as dignity of and for nature.
And in the final article, it made the state the guarantor of those rights.
And this is pretty extraordinary.
We're used to thinking of human rights, but yeah, in the Constitution, man.
So did that make a difference? Did anything change because of that?
Yeah, such a good question.
And for a long time, I mean, for a long time, relatively little did.
But then in 2017, a mining concession was granted, a gold mining concession was granted
for this extraordinary area of cloud forest called Los Cedros, the cedar forest.
And this is a place of staggering abundance, diversity, and domesticity of life.
Would have been completely eliminated by open pit gold mining.
And a case was brought.
the case asked the court system to recognize that gold mining would violate the rights of
the river and the forest. And that case escalated up the court system and finally reached the
constitutional court at the height of the pandemic in 20 to 2021. And at the end of 21,
this incredible ruling came down and it asserted the rights of the forest and the rivers to exist,
to flourish and to persist.
And it caused the state mining company
and Canadian mining company
to be banished from the area
and save the forest.
Simple as that.
Astonishing.
The mining company's still circle,
I should say.
It's not like a happy ending forever after.
But it was another of these gong strike moments
in what might be called legal moral imagination
around particularly rivers.
So you went there.
I mean, you went to this cloud forest,
the Cedar Forest.
And first of all, what is a cloud forest?
Like what's the difference between a cloud forest and a rain forest?
Yeah, higher.
So they're higher altitude.
They tend to be on steeper ground.
They form on mountains.
So they have faster flowing rivers.
And they are river makers.
River and forest live in this beautiful mutualism in a cloud forest.
So in this case, heavy moisture-laden air comes in off the Pacific, rises.
And as it rises, of course, the moisture condenses into the form of mist.
So it has a heavy kind of year-round mist.
And that mist moves through the forest.
When you walk in a cloud forest, you're in this kind of socket of mist the whole time.
But it also condenses on the immense surface area of this epiphytic forest and then rolls
off in this beautiful process known as continuous fog drop to drip from the end of millions
and millions of leaves.
And that water combined with rain gathers and gathers and gathers in these many watersheds
to create rivers.
And that's just astonishing that actually, like, dripping water from leaves can create a river.
I mean, I just sort of like, wow, I didn't know that was possible.
Yeah, yeah, in that volume.
And it does rain there, but it is more cloud than rain.
I mean, that's one of the differences to the rainforest is a rainfall count.
So you traveled with also some people who live very close to the natural world,
and they see things, they notice things that I would never notice.
And I mean, I was particularly struck by a mycologist named Giuliana, who talks about not just seeing mushrooms, but hearing mushrooms, you know, feeling when they're nearby.
And I'm just trying to think about what that's like.
I mean, what was it like to travel with her?
It was wild, Steve.
It was truly wild.
And I just before anyone thinks I'm, I mean, she is a hardcore field mycologist.
she's the author of the two definitive volumes of Chilean mycology. So she's serious. But whether
we see this as a kind of internalized knowledge that takes the form of instinct, but we were
looking, she was looking for two species of fungi, tiny brown psilocybe species that had had one
collection there many years before. And the finding of those would fortify the protection of the
forest so there was a very this was a purposeful journey but she would say the two times she found
them she found both them she would say and this is after days she would say oh they're near now
i can hear them she calls it a fuzz in the matrix i love that phrase yes me too i want it on a t-shirt
because i don't know what that means to experience but boy was she right we would go around two
corners she would suddenly fall to the ground as though she'd been shot i thought you know a sniper
a howler monkey dropped a nut on her head, flopped down onto her belly, woohoo! And there was this
tiny brown mushroom in this vast brown forest floor. So the mushrooms, these specific mushrooms,
these individual mushrooms were calling to her in some way. In some way. I just said,
don't try and explain to me how you do this. Just tell me what it feels like. And actually,
that's the same answer. Yeah. So yeah, the fuzz in the matrix. What was most surprising to you
about these weeks in the cloud forest in Ecuador?
Did any of your sort of basic assumptions
about how the world works change
because of that experience?
Well, I think I saw what happens
when a society at least attempts
to organize some of its moral imagination
along ecocentric lines, let's say.
That was fascinating.
And then also I just began to understand
and that then intensified with the other journeys,
just the sheer courage and determination that is necessary to protect places like that in the face
of the demands of, let us at best say, global capital. I mean, the spot price of a troy ounce
of gold back then was $1,517. It's way beyond that now. For many reasons, economic volatility,
at times of volatility, money flees to safe places and gold is the safest place of all.
So the pressure on that remarkable forest to be cracked open, to have the marrow, the gold slurped out of its innards by capital, by us, is immense.
But in that valley, the Integg Valley, they have 30 continuous years of holding mining companies at bay.
And it's not glamorous work.
It's hard.
And my sense from the way you write about this is it's often – it's a few individuals.
I mean, it's not like the national government is deploying an army to, you know, stave off the mining company.
It's like it's a few activists who've devoted their lives and, you know, who live there year after year as the guardians of the forest.
That's right. Yeah.
So the Cedar Forest has this mythic counterpart in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written work of world literature we have, at the heart of which is a sacred cedar forest.
This is about 4,400 years old in the Sumerian form, and that story ends with the sacred cedar forest being destroyed by, in effect, extractivist forces. Gilgamesh and Enkidu turn up, they cut down the forest, they take all the timber and they slaughter Humbaba, the guardian of the forest, and take his head out on the raft on the Euphrates.
But here in Ecuador, another story is being told about another sacred cedar forest.
But this one so far ends with the forest's salvation.
So I want to pause here for a short break.
And when we come back, Rob will tell us about an ancient river city in India and a truly wild kayaking experience in Canada.
Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us.
We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and I'm really excited about them.
And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts,
those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
I hope you like it.
this is wonder cabinet i'm steve paulson let's get back to my conversation with robert mcfarland
about his book is a river alive so the next big trip that you took was to india to the city of
chennai where the river is dead i think it's legally been declared dead right yeah well in
the in the press yeah there's three rivers three main rivers the costa stelaya the kum and the
Adyar, they run in through Chennai.
Yeah, and for parts of the year, much of those rivers,
for the length of their city stretches, are functionally dead, biologically dead.
So why did you go there?
Well, the chapter's called Ghosts, Monsters, and Angels.
And the ghosts are the kind of suppressed and dying and vanished rivers of that region.
Chennai was a water city.
You know, the British who began, I think, some poor hydrological literacy in the region, let's say.
kind of dreamed of it as a Venice of India. So there's a sort of romance of water to its past,
but actually the whole city now has been built on marsh over river. And so the rivers have become
ghosts. But during the monsoon and particularly during the cyclone season, which hit every three
or four years, they come back as monsters because rivers remember. That's one thing I learned there,
rivers remember. What do you mean, rivers remember? Well, they remember where they once were,
Where they once ran, so where they have been built over, where they have been culverted, where they have been subdued, they roar back into their memorious places and reoccupy them and they flood the city catastrophically very often.
And so Chennai lives in this double life of drought and flood pretty much every year.
And that alone made it fascinating.
But I went because I have a long-standing friendship with a remarkable young Indian Tamil activist there called Yuvan Aves,
who is a sort of river healer, river dreamer, and who himself has been healed by rivers as well.
How is he healed by rivers?
Well, I mean, when you write a book over many years, you'll know this, Steve,
but you set out with all manner of intentions and ideas, and then places and people surprise
you profoundly. And one of the, I think, central surprises of this book for me was that each place
I went, I found and traveled closely with somebody who had suffered death, who had lost someone.
Giuliana lost her father in terrible circumstances shortly before we went to the forest. Yuvan
and was brought up in a very physically abusive household,
was beaten pretty much daily by his stepfather for years.
He ran away from home.
He lost his younger sister, Jolini, to illness very suddenly.
You know, he has suffered a great deal in his young life,
and he really remade himself out of that oppressive, violent place.
place he moved to a school that was set in in marshland and water and he crystallized himself
there and the creaturely life the people the books the land the water there taught him a different
way of being to the one he had been sort of brutalized into by his stepfather so i mean
rivers for some people i mean they truly are life-giving i mean they don't just give life to
the animals and the plants that live nearby, to the people, and restore purpose, why we want to
live. Totally, totally. There's a line by Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, I think he
says, sometimes when it hurts, we return to the banks of certain rivers. In a way, the book is
nothing a Buddhist couldn't tell you before breakfast. It's a theorization of something
that is in many ways intuitive that water is life rivers are life givers um juliana you know
watching her heel within the embrace of the cloud forest and and the waters watching her powers
of fungal perception come back to her was was a was a second order miracle really so even yeah he
now works as a river activist and he's dealing with some of the yeah some of the deadest stretches
of water that i've ever seen i mean you can barely we can't breathe through your nose around them and
you you don't want to touch them water is certainly undrinkable certainly unswimmable almost
untouchable so but he's trying to imagine a just future for rivers and all those who live with and
on and around rivers very moving the the last river you went to to spend time on is in eastern
Canada, near the border of Quebec and Labrador. Tell me about that place.
Oh, wow. I have known some rivers in my time, but I've never known one like this one. That
section's called the Living River. And yeah, so its name in Inuit is the Mutehekau Shipu.
And that translates as the river who flows between square blocky cliffs. And that gives
you some idea, right? It's a wild, wild river. And we were dropped by float plane about 100,
120 miles up the system. And then we had to paddle out in kayaks over the best part of a couple of
weeks. And it buried me. It pummeled me. It scared the hell out of me. It thrilled me. It made me
cry. It was running big. It was about 275 cubic meters a second at a time of year when the average
is more like 120. We're talking major rapids here. Well, to me, absolutely. I mean, six-foot
but Standing Wave was the biggest we ran, and that buried me good and proper.
But I should just explain that the reason I was drawn there
is because the Mutehekau Shipu became, again in 2021,
the first river in Canada to have its rights declared.
And that happened in this beautiful so-called Mirror Resolution
between a regional council and the Inuit community
at the little township of Equanishd,
led by this extraordinary poet called Rita Mestakosho,
who I have become friends with and who really primes me for that.
I went to see her basically to say,
can I have your permission to travel down the river?
And she just laughed at me and she said,
yeah, you don't need my permission.
You need the river's permission.
I was like, how do I get that?
Do I apply in triplicate?
She said, you'll know, you'll know.
So she set me off on that river journey
with a series of very clear instructions.
And she told me I had one question I could ask the river, one.
And if it was the right one, the river would answer.
and Boyd did it.
What were the instructions she gave you?
Well, so she's very decisive and forceful.
She looked me up and down when we first met
before I went on the river.
She was like, you, you look too much with your eyes.
You live too much in your head.
You don't feel enough with your heart.
When you're on the river,
she wanted me to collect water from a place
where one of her family members had hunted
and he'd recently died, William.
i had to gather labrador tea for her at another place i had to always pitch my tent facing east
so i greeted the sun each morning i had to keep my eyes peeled for a sacred tree she was like
you'll you'll you'll see it there'll be one in the forest you'll know it when you meet it
it absolutely knew it when i met it it was only six inches high but it was it was a tree it was
a tree so she was amazing and and then just this real existential challenge or epistemological
challenge uh about the river knowing something about me that i did not know about about myself
but that it would it would declare to me if i read the river open-hearted steve she told me
one other she gave me one other instruction that chilled me to the bone as well leave your notebooks
behind oh for a writer yeah how would you feel about that if you were told leave my recorder
behind. It struck to the heart. We came to a negotiated settlement, which was that I could
take the notebooks, but I was not to write in them when I was actually on the water. I could
write when I was on land. So fair enough. Well, you have some wonderful descriptions in your book
of the river as alive, I would say. And part of it is because it's like, it sounds really dangerous,
some of your days on the river kayaking.
And I'd love to have you read one passage
that just really brought it to life to me,
and that's the passage that starts at the bottom of page 257.
Yeah, I'd love to.
Yeah, okay.
So one thing that happens over the course of the book
is that language begins to liquefy.
The language gets rivered,
so you'll hear a little bit of that here.
And then I'm into the rapid, hard into it,
the water now vinyl-tight under my boat, and I'm accelerating as the river enters the channel
before the block. The golden rocks on the bed of the river are fleeting beneath me, and time
is stretching in the way it does at certain moments of terror and exhilaration, so that in
the thirty or so century-long seconds it takes to run the rapid, I can see in isolated and shining
detail each water droplet and boiling pool, and I slip nose-first over the sill and skim like a
ball bearing on a metal slide down the slope of the tongue
and bang, straight into that big polar bearish standing wave.
And the nose of my craft crashes into its snowy front face,
which fills it and me with river.
And I must surely be flipped or buried by the wave.
But somehow, perhaps because I've hit it so straight,
the nose of the kayak shakes itself free of the impact.
And the boat bucks beneath me and begins to rise right up and over,
first the point, then the ridge of the big wave.
And surely I must fall backwards out of the boat or be flipped.
and then I am punched full in the face by a fist of water but it is the standing wave's
valediction and I'm through and upright and the elastic curve of the current pulls me around a
hundred and fifty degree bend and I can hear Danny yelling something behind me and Wayne is whooping
great belts of sound that rise over the roars of the rapid and I'm thumping over the smaller green
cream bronze waves and then I'm under the flat-faced rock wall god damn it but this last wave isn't
going to flip me if the biggest one didn't and I plant the paddle as Danny told me and I pull on
it like I'm trying to uproot an iron fence post and the pull boosts me into the last standing wave
the sneak wave right under the rock wall but I don't hit it at the perpendicular as I had the
biggest one and so it shrugs me off its right hand slope and the boat cants sideways and my stomach
lurches and I call out and begin to roll sideways but some amygdala and part of my brain tells me
to lean uphill not down and i rewrite and i'm over the blast wall and into the long black pool below
the rapid where the boss and the bear already wait grins on their faces and shouts of congratulations
and wayne is through it too without flipping and the salmon swims up to us and my heart is
piston block pumping and wayne says something like living right my friend living right with
a manic smile on his face shocked and exhilarated and enlivened we flow on that is so beautiful and
we flow on i mean that's what rivers do they have a purpose and they flow from one place to another
and to sort of bring this back to the political piece of this story or maybe the economic piece
is there are groups that want to damn the river and it's really complicated in an ethical sense
I mean, you know, there are definite benefits that come from damming.
I mean, they supply hydroelectric power.
They give jobs to local people.
How do you sort of weigh that with the wildness of the river?
Yeah, it's, no, dam is a simple question, I think.
And Hydro-Quebec, the state, the regional hydro company, state-owned really enterprise,
has converted the majority or much of Quebec, huge land mass into a machine for the generation
and the storage and the transmission of electricity. And that has brought, as you say,
vast, vast benefits, but it has also drowned rivers. And you can drown a river if you build
a dam wall big enough. A reservoir is the thing that can drown a river. So the Romaine River,
which was the next vast river to the east, had a multi-dam project on it. And now I think eyes,
well, eyes did turn to the Mutehekau Shipu. And that began this resistance campaign,
which was a campaign of the imagination. And here's where we sort of eddy back to the question
of life, because the rights declaration recognized the river as a living entity and as a rights
bearing entity the right to flow so you know i'm i'm a storyteller i'm a writer i'm a as it were a
reporter at some level so i i don't judge in in this chapter but i am fascinated by the way
imagination legislation and river all tangle in that place so what is the legal status then of
this river i mean there are these at least on the books these protections but is that enough to keep
the river wild? No, very fragile, very fragile. I mean, we've talked about the two jurisdictions
where the protection, a rights-based, life-based protection for rivers is powerful. And that's
Aotearoa, New Zealand and Ecuador. But this declaration is in many ways a beautiful
metaphysical fiction, as it were, in the sense that it has no real force and consequence within
existing legislation. And I think what it does is throw an imaginative force field around the
river. So if Hydra-Quebec does come for the Muteshikar ship, they will have to get through
this imagining. And the imagination can be a very, very powerful force and barrier, as we know. So
So I know that I will join Rita and join her community in the defense of that river if the power company comes.
There's a quote you have in the book, and I'm not sure who you were quoting, but I sort of love this, where the person said,
the river is like a person in between who makes connections in time and space.
Oh, yeah. That's Lydia, Lydia Mastikosho Paradis, who is Rita's niece, another member of the Inuit community.
Yeah. I mean, so what that evoked for me is, I mean, the river is movement and, you know, and life is movement. And I mean, in some sense, we're constantly moving between past and present and that, you know, in both the literal sense, I mean, the physical sense of what the natural world does, but also in the, as you would put it, in our imaginations too. I mean, that's how we construct our own lives is we also move between past and present.
yeah yeah rivers relate um that that's what they do they tell and they join and the metaphor of
river as life life as river is is the oldest i think the second oldest is probably life as path
but life as river is is is about the oldest and and i think one of the things that happened to
me over the years of river travel and river thinking is that i i came to understand myself
as always in the flow that time was not something i spectated notebook in hand dry footed on the
bank which is perhaps how one especially when a little younger you think that time has no
no claim on you right and i'm pushing 50 now and my my bones are older they get colder the river
The river beat me up hard.
And, yeah, I think time has changed forever for me now.
It's been rivered.
One final question.
You've been talking about kind of the emergence of this rights of nature movement.
I mean, it's really trying to make this a legal movement.
Are we still in the early stages of this movement?
Or, I mean, do you think there's more to happen?
Will more countries take on this kind of legislation?
Oh, I mean, every year we see more and more examples of this.
The momentum is growing.
The ubiquity is growing.
Here in England, we've just had the first district council champion the charter, a charter for the rights of the River Ouse in the south of England, all across North America.
I mean, North America is an absolute ferment of this stuff.
It's really, really interesting.
So, yeah, I think what we are seeing are necessary challenges to fundamentally anthropocentric ways of organizing the planet.
And they have brought us to the brink of disaster.
And the book is a love letter to rivers, but it's also a celebration of people who are trying to imagine otherwise.
It is a beautiful book. Thank you, Rob. Thank you for this conversation.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks so much.
That's Robert Macfarlane speaking to us from his home in Cambridge, England.
His book is called Is a River Alive?
Wonder Cabinet is produced in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher.
Our digital producer is Mark Riechers.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
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And a quick word about what's ahead.
Wonder Cabinet will take a short break for the next couple of weeks
so we can go record more interviews at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Italy.
The topic this time is rational mysticism, which sounds very exciting.
So you can look forward to those conversations in the coming months.
Until then, be well and thanks for listening.