Latest news with #RobertMacfarlane
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Book Festival: Non-fiction Highlights
The theme of repair is explored from many different angles in the non-fiction strand of this year's EIBF, writes Susan Mansfield Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A broad, deep river of fascinating non-fiction runs through the Book Festival programme from day to day, which seems an appropriate metaphor because one of the highly anticipated visitors is Robert Macfarlane, with his new book, Is A River Alive? (9 August). In addition to this solo event, he will join Louise Welsh, who has campaigned for the Clyde to be granted personhood, and barrister Monica Feria-Tinta, to talk about how seeing landscape differently might help to preserve it (10 August). Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth These events are part of the strand of the programme responding to the theme of repair, which is explored from many angles. William Dalrymple and his fellow podcaster Anita Anand look at looted artefacts, the journeys they have taken and the possibilities of repatriation (13 August). Philippe Sands QC talks about working on the prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (10, 11 August). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Naga Munchetty calls out at misogyny in the health service, and the struggles women face accessing treatment (23 August), Poppy Oktcha and Kathy Slack explore the reparative powers of gardening (10 August) and Hanif Kureishi tells a very personal story of repair following the catastrophic fall which left him paralysed (15 August). Hanif Kureshi He is just one of a rich crop of writers bringing their memoirs to the Book Festival. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will unveil her hotly anticipated book (14 August), and fellow politicians Diane Abbott (21 August) and Chris Bryant (20 August) lift the veil on Westminster and their own lives. Veteran activist, journalist and filmmaker Tariq Ali talks about his memoir, You Can't Please All (13 August), tracing some of the key moments in recent history which he has witnessed in his 81 years. Yulia Navalnaya visits the festival to speak about her late husband Alexei Navalny, Russia's opposition leader, whose prison memoir was published after his death in a Russian jail in 2024 (22 August). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yulia Navalnaya Leading Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov details the experience of living in a country at war in his memoir, Our Daily War (19 August), and leading Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li brings a grief memoir like no other, a book in which she processes the suicides of her two teenage sons (10 August). The festival offers many opportunities to pick up insights on world events. Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum joins Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, to discuss reporting from the frontline of Donald Trump's second term (17 August). Leading commentator on race, Ta-Nehisi Coates, talks about his new book, The Message, which explores race relations around the world and questions the messages we tell ourselves (16 August). Closer to home, former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish and James Mitchell, director of the Academy of Government at the University of Edinburgh, reflect on the years since devolution, the achievements and challenges (18 August), and Alistair Moffat presents his new book, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland since 1950, rich with personal recollections (19 August).
Globe and Mail
09-06-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Robert Macfarlane's new book asks a question he couldn't ignore: Is a river alive?
When I mention to Robert Macfarlane that I live next to a buried river – Garrison Creek, which runs unseen, but is frequently smelled, through Toronto's west end – his eyes visibly brighten. He leans closer to his computer screen. 'Are they going to daylight it?' Click on the blue underlined text for photos, audio and text annotations He's referring to the practice – executed with socially transformative results in cities such as Seoul, Seattle, Singapore and Munich – of exhuming such 'ghost rivers' from their concrete tombs. I tell him that the idea has been proposed by local and environmental groups, but has yet to gain real traction. 'It's such a powerful metaphor, isn't it?' he says. 'But daylighting is also a literal act: returning a river to the sun. A river we cannot see or hear or name becomes a river that is redundant to the imagination and resource to the system only.' Robert Macfarlane near the River Cam which flows through Cambridge, England, where he lives. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail Macfarlane, 48, speaks almost as lyrically as he writes. Over the past two decades, the Cambridge professor of literature and environmental humanities has emerged as one of the world's pre-eminent nature writers – an inheritor of the mantle of authors such as Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies, Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez (a friend of Macfarlane's until his death in 2020). Macfarlane approaches his subjects with the soul of the logophilic poet he once aspired to be (a body of water is described as having 'lacustrine calm') and an unerring eye for great narratives. He's covered much of the world's topography in award-winning books such as Mountains of the Mind (mountains), The Wild Places and The Old Ways (pathways), and Underland (subterranean landscapes). His book Landmarks, meanwhile, was a celebration of the often endangered words people have used to describe the natural world. So turning to rivers, as he has done in his latest book, bears a certain logic. But while Is a River Alive? aligns stylistically with Macfarlane's previous work – overflowing (all water metaphors to be forgiven in advance), as it is, with gorgeous, vivid prose – it is far more political than its predecessors. 'Across 10 previous books and more than 20 years of writing,' he writes in the introduction, 'I have never before known a subject with the urgency of this one.' Although he didn't write while he was on the river, Macfarlane filled his notebooks with his impressions of what he saw and experienced when he came ashore. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail He didn't originally plan to write about rivers per se; he was interested, rather, in what we mean by 'life.' He began by jotting down three questions: Can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? And is a river alive? 'They were all good questions to spend time with, but it was that third one that just plucked at my sleeve and wouldn't let me go.' This was in 2020, just a few years after the Rights of Nature movement was given a major boost by the granting of legal personhood to New Zealand's Whanganui River after sustained pressure from Maori campaigners. What's your favourite river in the world? Share your story with The Globe At the same time, rivers in England, Macfarlane's home country, were facing a deepening crisis. Overwhelmed and instrumentalized into invisibility and incapacity, the majority were effectively dead. And the problem, Macfarlane soon realized, was global in scope. 'That's where it felt like a writer could step into the space and begin to tackle the stories we tell about rivers and the ways we imagine them.' That writer, clearly, would have to be him. His research for Is a River Alive? took Macfarlane to three places where local river protectors have used imaginative techniques to cope with existential threats: mining, in the case of Ecuador's Los Cedros River; industrial pollution, for the rivers and estuaries of Chennai, India; and megadamming for the Mutehekau Shipu, also known as the Magpie River, which runs through Innu territory in northeastern Quebec. In 2023, Macfarlane travelled to eastern Quebec in order to follow the course of a river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as (among other names) the Mutehekau Shipu. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied The book also takes us to the psychic and intellectual spaces where Macfarlane ventured as he attempted to answer the question in the book's title. While he came out on the pro-rivers-are-alive side (he uses the pronoun 'who' when referring to rivers), he readily acknowledges how difficult and counterintuitive the concept can be for those, like himself, raised on rationalism (his parents and brother are doctors). Conferring rivers with personhood, he writes, isn't the same as anthropomorphism. 'To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of 'life', and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.'' Those who still find the notion a tad flaky might consider the fact that corporate personhood has been naturalized in many countries for years. The idea reached its most extreme form in the U.S. after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, but even in Canada, corporations have many of the same Charter rights as human Canadians, including freedom of expression. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give nature formal rights in its constitution. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied Macfarlane approached each of his planned three river journeys differently, and with different companions. In Ecuador, he hikes and clambers through one of the most biodiverse regions of the world, the high cloud forest around the Rio Los Cedros, in search of the river's source. With him are a mycologist, an environmental-rights lawyer and a musician. In Chennai, he gets a tour of the city's toxic, sludgy rivers – victims of the area's unregulated heavy and chemical industries – by a young, self-taught naturalist who, along with a small group of fellow activists, is taking brave steps toward their resurrection. (The 2017 granting of legal personhood to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, theologically considered deities, was inspired by New Zealand's Whanganui River ruling.) Amid the depressing carnage are moments of wonder. In a lake sanctuary reeking of nail polish, Macfarlane sees what he calls an 'avian Venice' – a floating city of birds. Where Chennai's rivers meet the Indian Ocean, he helps a local patrol move sea-turtle eggs to a place where hatchlings are less likely to get confused by the city's bright lights during their seaward scramble. After a patrol moves the nest from a polluted river, a baby sea turtle makes its way to the Indian ocean. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied The book's transcendent third section describes the 160-kilometre kayak trip Macfarlane took down the lower Mutehekau Shipu toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This time his entourage consists of his polymathic eccentric friend, Wayne, two francophone backcountry guides, Raph and Danny, and a local fisherman named Ilya. Here, Macfarlane's writing takes on a flow and intensity verging on the spiritual. (He isn't religious, but has admitted to falling back on the language of religion when trying to capture nature's sublimity). A thrilling, harrowing account of his journey down the river's rapids is told, appropriately enough, in what amounts to full stream-of-consciousness. 'I am still very far from being able to take that in, let alone comprehend it. I think perhaps I will always be coming to terms with it,' Macfarlane writes of his experience in Quebec. I ask him to expand on those cryptic lines. 'Words were just pouring through me. It was very, very strange and powerful and for a writer to feel that they were being written by a force utterly alien to them was perplexing and thrilling.' Before embarking on that final trip, Macfarlane had consulted with Governor-General's Award-winning Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho, who'd been instrumental in having the Mutehekau Shipu declared, in February, 2021, 'a person with a right to live' – the first river in Canada to be so recognized. After offering guidance for his river journey, she'd tied a bracelet of red cloth around Macfarlane's wrist. 'The other bracelet you must leave on your wrist. Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it,' said Rita Mestokosho. Macfarlane still has the red thread bracelet. Tom Oliver Lucas /The Globe and Mail When I ask if he still has it, he pulls back his sleeve. 'It's here, over my pulse, next to the only tattoo I have, and will ever have': the cuneiform symbols for river from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Literature's oldest written story means a lot to Macfarlane. He's studied it in multiple translations, made an album based on it with musician Johnny Flynn and is currently working on a graphic novelization of it. At the heart of Gilgamesh is a sacred cedar forest that gets destroyed by extractive interests, so when Macfarlane realized that the Ecuadorian cloud forest he'd be travelling to, Los Cedros, literally translated to 'the cedar forest,' he got chills. It's testament to the impact writing the book has had on him that Macfarlane has gotten involved with several related causes (in addition to the many he's already involved with). He joined the board of the Los Cedros Fund and continues to follow the fate of the Mutehekau Shipu – which could yet be dammed – through Mestokosho, with whom he has developed a close friendship. Is a River Alive? also inspired three 'water-songs,' one of which, he says, will be sung at springs and rivers at risk. Macfarlane was drawn to the Mutehekau after it became the first Canadian river to be recognized as a 'legal person' in 2021. Robert Macfarlane/Supplied 'I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty,' Macfarlane writes. So in what frame of mind, I ask, did he end them? 'I ended unsure of what I'd seen and sensed, unsure of what power would make of such ideas, which are at once the strongest forces that we can muster and profoundly vulnerable to the sharp teeth and heavy blows of power.' He pauses. 'I couldn't have known that I would be publishing this book into a British context in which our rivers are all dying, and a North American context in which the war on life is accelerating to calamity pace. In which clean air and water regulations are being rolled back with greater speed and scale than by any administration before. 'And so the ideas at the heart of the book – of life as a web of relations, of the ancient compact of life that flows between humans and freshwater – feel at once more fragile and more crucial than at any point in my life. I don't mean that in a grandiose sense: that the book has some great conversional power to it. I mean that although the ideas and the places and the rivers I've spent time with have been ancient on the one hand, they have felt very urgent on the other. As a writer, that feels like the right place to be.'
Globe and Mail
07-06-2025
- Globe and Mail
What's your favourite river in the world? Share your story with The Globe
Is a river a living thing? In his latest book, author Robert Macfarlane sought to find the answer to this question. After hiking with experts and locals to three rivers, he concluded that rivers were, in fact, alive, and deserving of the same protections as a person. Agree with him or not, it's no question that the rivers that run through – or under – our homes, communities or favourite vacation destinations around the world are vital to their landscapes. The Globe wants to know: What is your favourite river in the world? Which river holds the most memories for you? It could be one that runs through your community, one you kayaked for days on a camping trip or one that took your breath away on a vacation far from home. Share your thoughts in the form below. Share your favourite river and why it has such an impact on you in the form below. If you'd like to send a photo alongside your submission, send us an e-mail at audience@
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Irish Times
If waterways are neglected, they become undrinkable, unswimmable and then untouchable
A visitor from England at Lough Owel in Mullingar expressed surprise to me recently that locals were swimming in the lake. She could not understand how they would take such a risk. I assured her they had no reason to worry; the most recent rating for Lough Owel from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classed its water quality as excellent. It is also gratifying to be able to tell visitors that 96 per cent of beaches across this country are deemed to be of 'sufficient' quality to swim at, while there are 89 Blue Flag Irish beaches. England only has 76 Blue Flag beaches. As for rivers, the English have become accustomed to seeing them as a filthy threat. It is a theme elaborated on by celebrated nature writer Robert Macfarlane in his recent book Is a River Alive? . It documents a 'gradual, desperate calamity' that has afflicted English rivers; such has been the extent that a younger generation have no experience of what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wrote in April that he 'recently saw a Southern Water riverbank sign badged with a bright blue logo that read 'Water for Life'. The sign instructed passersby to 'avoid contact with the water. If you have had contact with the water, please wash your hands before eating'. In parts of this septic isle, fresh water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable.' Privatisation, lack of regulation and poor monitoring have all contributed to the sorry plight of the rivers as they are polluted with nitrates, chemicals and waste. READ MORE Macfarlane's focus on the rivers is not all bleak. 'Rivers are easily wounded. But given a chance, they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life pours back.' Veteran ocean chronicler David Attenborough has enunciated a similar message despite the gravity of what he has uncovered: 'We know already that the ocean can recover.' Restoration, he suggests, can be achieved by applying advances in scientific knowledge, while Macfarlane points to legislative initiatives in Ecuador and New Zealand to protect water. He highlights the importance, in England, of increasingly vocal 'citizen science and community groups' demanding action to prevent rivers being primarily seen as drains, channels or dumps. Ireland, Macfarlane has suggested, is 'to the forefront' of raising consciousness of these issues Macfarlane spoke about his river odysseys on RTÉ radio recently, noting that in England 'we have not a single river in good overall health' according to environment agency standards. The situation is not as dire in Ireland, but it is striking how quickly overall Irish river quality has declined in recent decades. According to the EPA's report Water Quality in Ireland 2016-2021, 'half of our rivers and two-thirds of our estuaries are not in good ecological health'. Only about 20 Irish rivers are in 'pristine condition' now, compared to 500 in the 1980s. Ireland, Macfarlane has suggested, is 'to the forefront' of raising consciousness of these issues because of the Citizens' Assembly on biodiversity loss chaired by Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin. The first assembly of its kind anywhere in the world, it recommended a referendum to amend the Constitution in order to protect biodiversity. Dr Bernadette White, from the Local Authority Waters Programme, told the assembly members that 'the majority of our high-status waters are not in good condition' and highlighted that 43 per cent of rivers have high nitrates. It was also noted that 92 per cent of problems relating to water quality are due to agriculture. It is a theme sprinkled on the current programme for government, with references to public bodies being required to integrate biodiversity 'into their plans and policies' and the need to 'commit to clear targets within the National Biodiversity Action Plan'. [ What is the water quality like at your local beach? Use our table to check Opens in new window ] [ Blue flags: Record number of Irish beaches and marinas win award for 2025 Opens in new window ] That plan, covering the years 2023 to 2030, declares a target: 'By 2030, 300km of rivers are restored to a free-flowing state.' But in relation to 'action', it more underwhelmingly states: 'Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Inland Fisheries Ireland, Office of Public Works and other relevant bodies will explore the restoration of 300km or rivers to a free-flowing state'. There is little indication that a referendum on biodiversity is a political priority for the Government. This is a pity, because a referendum would allow for sustained attention on this pivotal question and a focus on remedies as well as failings and the important work of the Rivers Trust, established in 1994. The assembly's report was clear about the State's failure to properly fund, implement and enforce existing policies, despite the declaration of a biodiversity crisis in the Dáil in 2019. Taking that further can also involve positivity about the future; as pointed out by Ní Shúilleabháin, a key message underpinning the work of the assembly was that 'we should be good ancestors in considering those coming after us'.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rob Macfarlane : ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me'
Robert Macfarlane has been called the 'great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive?, was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written. Q: Your book is poignant and inspiring, but one part that made me laugh is where you first tell your son the title and he replies, 'Duh, of course it's alive. That's going to be a really short book.' So, I should first congratulate you on stringing it out for more than 350 pages! A: Ha! Well there were times I dreamed of writing the haiku version, let's say. But much as I would long for the answer to the question of the title to be as simple as [my son] Will found it, of course it is a profoundly difficult one. That's why the title is a question not a declaration: by means of travel, encounter and immersion, the book explores the tributaries and watershed of this vastly complex question of how we imagine rivers – and indeed how we imagine life itself. So I suppose you could say that answering the question of the title couldn't have taken any less time than it did, and couldn't have been written in any fewer pages than it was, much as Will would have encouraged me to be more precise. Q: The idea of a river being alive is quite heretical these days, isn't it? A: I love that description: 'heretical'. Yes! I'm already finding that I'm getting people online who are, on the one hand, saying: 'You idiot, of course a river is alive. Why bother even with the question mark?' And then on the other, I'm getting the rationalists who are like: 'You idiot, of course a river isn't alive. It's just H2O plus gravity. What kind of hippy nonsense are you spouting?' Q: As you point out in the book, even listening to a river was once punished by the lash. Separating people and nature needed violent enforcement … A: Absolutely. The history of the rise of rationalism required the extirpation of 'idolatry', as the New World conquistadors and colonists called it, a version of which was also carried out across the British landscape during the Reformation, when a purging fury was visited upon water in particular as a site of supposedly iconoclastic belief. I'm fascinated by the ways in which the drive to eliminate the dissenting autonomy of water – of running water, of rivers, of springs – has marched often in lockstep with power that seeks to eliminate all forms of spiritual relationships with land and water, replacing the sacred with the fiscal. We are seeing this accelerated now in America, where Doug Burgum, the secretary of state for the interior, at his Senate confirmation hearing, described America's public lands as America's 'balance sheet'. The assetisation of everything is under way. Everywhere now we see a war continuing to be waged between 'anima', between life, and a power that seeks to mortify that life because it knows that the imaginative 'deadening' of land and water is the best step towards maximum extraction. Q: Of all the books you've written so far, you state that none has felt as urgent as this one. Why? A: The world's ecological precarity, I suppose, is the plainest answer to that, and especially the precarity of the world's rivers and freshwater bodies. Q: Although much of the subject matter is quite grim in terms of the despoliation of ecosystems, what comes across is courage, intelligence, love and a desire to do right by future generations and other species. How did it evolve? A: This was initially imagined as a book about 'life'. That was ridiculous hubris, of course, but that was really the source: what are the stories we tell about what is alive and what is dead, and how does that compare to the stories that power tells about what is alive and what is dead? Rationalism and instrumentalism tell a presently dominant story about rivers as 'inanimate brute matter', to quote Isaac Newton; about rivers as nothing more than 'service providers'. But the total dominance of that story is perilous. I guess that, as a writer, one's job is to seek other, better, new-old stories about rivers and our relations with them. Q: You dive into the lives and deaths of rivers on four continents. But it is also very much about human activism – the defenders who are trying to prevent ecocide on the ground, and the Nature Rights advocates who are trying to change the law at a national or global level. What started you off on this? A: I wanted to immerse myself in the sheer tumbling vigour of the young rights-of-nature movement, which is one of the running currents in the book. I would wake up every morning, and there would be a new email, a new story, a new contact, a new case about rights of nature. It feels as if that movement is presently stepping forwards very consequentially in terms of re-imagining and re-storying the law in order to strike at some of the deeply anthropocentric foundations of almost all nation-state jurisdictions. Q: Despite the global reach, the different elements seem to be brought together by relationships? A: Absolutely. Other than that of the river, if there is a motif that weaves through the book, it's that of the mycelium. It's the mycelium that sets the night-forest alight in the first pages of the Ecuadorian section, and I hope it is the mycelium that is what might be called the visible 'ethos' of the book. All that emerges in the book emerges as a function of cooperation, of collaboration, of working together. I wanted to try to find a literary form and a kind of polyphonic texture, in order to reflect the many voices and agencies involved in river-thought and river-guardianship. Q: The book calls for revolution. How did you reflect this in the style? A: The revolution it calls for is a revolution of the imagination. The book's language is intended to speak to, and of, a changed relationship with rivers – an animated relationship. To give a simple example of this, I write throughout about rivers who flow, not rivers that or which flow. Now that feels totally normal to me. I'd love that usage to spread. Of course, it is already like that in other languages. In French, for instance, it's la rivière qui coule, le fleuve qui coule. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion In English, we have no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river? At the level of form and pattern, I sought to give the whole book the shape of the water cycle. So we begin at the springs who rise near my home, and we end back at the springs. In between, the book travels up to the mountains and from there descends eventually to reach the sea at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. By the final pages, language has entered a sort of liquid state. Language has been rivered, as well as me. I strongly felt at times that I was writing with the river, or even being written by it. Q: How does that co-authorship with a river work? A: It is glaringly obvious to me that all thought is intersubjective. This book could not have been written by sitting still. It could not have been written from the archive. A great deal of it was written in its first form either on rivers, by the banks of rivers, or within earshot of rivers; having spent days following rivers, being buried within rivers, spat out by rivers. I find it bizarre that copyright law rejects the notion of nature or a natural entity as possessing the capacity to be recognised as a 'moral author' (to use the term of art from copyright law). As I think you know, [the Earth rights scholar] César [Rodríguez-Garavito], [the mycologist] Giuliana [Furci] and [the musician] Cosmo [Sheldrake] and I, as well as, of course, the Los Cedros cloud forest, have brought a case in the Ecuador court system to recognise the moral authorship of the cloud forest in the song that was written in the course of the book's research [called Song of the Cedars]. If you listen to the song, you can hear the voices of the forest (the howler monkeys, the bats, the wind, the rivers, the trees). They're performers of, as well as the co-thinkers of, that song. Q: The book starts and finishes in the little chalk streams of Cambridge. Do you feel people here have the same passion to defend rivers as those you met in India, Ecuador and Quebec/Nitassinan? A: I'm lucky to live on the chalk of southern England. We have around 85% of the world's chalk streams here in England. You could liken it to the Great Barrier Reef, perhaps; a super-rare, remarkable ecosystem. It has brought life to the landscape here, but now we have largely forgotten its marvellousness, its fragility and its rarity. Nevertheless, amazing things are happening in England in terms of what we might call the river guardianship movement: communities rising up to take water companies to court, hold government to account, train a small army of citizen scientists to monitor and test river health. This community response is born of the same impulses, it seems to me, which animate those communities I travelled with and spent time with in other countries. That is to say: born of a belief in water as life, and a belief that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. Q: One of the people in your book, the Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, says humanity has never been in more urgent need of powerful storytellers to address the environmental crisis. But I've also heard friends say the time for stories is over, we now need action. How do you respond to that? A: Storytelling remains, to me, central and vital in its powers. I reject the notion that storytelling is a fundamentally passive posture. Rather, it can crucially catalyse the conversion of passion into action. It has ways of reaching both heart and mind that argument or polemic can't. Of course, there are bad stories told well by bad people, as well as good ones told well by good people. In terms of powerful storytellers for the good, as it were, I might take the example of the Innu poet, storyteller and community leader, Rita Mestokosho, who is an important character in the final third of the book. Rita is a lifelong activist for the Innu language, Innu people and Innu land. She sees no distinction between her work as a writer and as an activist. During the years of river research, I saw new-old stories being told again and again around the world, thrillingly and with consequence. Q: What would you like readers to take away from this book? A: I want readers to imagine rivers as having lives, having deaths and even having rights – and to see what flows from that re-imagining in terms of law, culture and politics. And I would like them to take the full downriver journey of the book, from mountain to sea. Q: And where do you go next? A: This book has taken a long time, but among its surprises is that it continues to flow; the stories, rivers and people who run through its pages continue to run through my life very consequentially. I remain closely involved with the ongoing guardianship of Los Cedros in Ecuador, and the need to support and maintain the implementation of the protective ruling there. Oh – and we've just completed a big cleanup fundraiser and organisation to airlift out a whole bunch of heavy-duty junk we found high up in the watershed of the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. Yes, Is A River Alive? just won't stop flowing!
