Who Gets to Be Alive? On Rivers and People

In the second movement of Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming book Is A River Alive?, the author travels to India’s Bay of Bengal, where three rivers (the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum, and the Adlar) reach the sea. He is there to meet with Yuvan Aves—a friend, scientist, and activist who has become a leading environmental advocate for the region and has been deeply involved in a movement to grant legal personhood to the three waterways.

If corporations can have legal personhood, Aves reasons, then rivers, which have run for tens of thousands of years and have given shape to the life around them, certainly ought to. These cases are part of a worldwide campaign known as the Rights of Nature movement.

All the rivers in Macfarlane’s text run through colonized lands, and all the Rights of Nature cases have been brought by groups that are at least in part made up of people Indigenous to that land—all of whom unquestioningly accept rivers as living beings. “We’ve always known the river is alive” says Native poet Rita Mestokosho on the opening page of the section devoted to Canada’s Mutehekau Shipu.

Macfarlane also cites Māori legal scholar Jacinta Ruru, who wrote, “By regarding the river as having its own standing, the mana (authority) and mauri (life force) of the river would be more likely to be regarded as a holistic being, rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, river-bed and river-bank.”

Macfarlane’s consistent engagement with Indigenous wisdom troubles the idea of humans’ separateness from the earth, as well as from one another. It also renders clear the parallels between the capitalistic exploitation of rivers and the oppression of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. Macfarlane could just as well be asking a far broader question: in the context of colonial and capitalist power, can we return the dignity of personhood to all the exploited—be they a river, or they who cross one?

Life Beyond Extraction

Early on Macfarlane concludes that a river’s “aliveness” is more than simply the sum of life it supports. Seeing a river for its fish, Macfarlane cautions, denies the river its autonomy. This utilitarian view is also relatively recent. Long before the machine of capitalism transformed rivers into assets and disposal systems, people recognized springs and streams as not only autonomous, but holy.

From his home in Cambridge, Macfarlane muses on the long life of his local spring, a small water source with a history of Roman worship. Called “Nona” after the Roman goddess of fate, this little spring received petitions for health during the bubonic plague. Although once widely considered to be a numinous, life-giving being, the spring has gradually had the life choked from it: first by the city thirstily pumping its waters away to accommodate growing populations, and then from climate change.

No longer regarded as divine, Macfarlane’s little spring is just as voiceless and vulnerable as the agricultural laborers diverting its water. Both laborers and river were drained to the dregs to maximize production.

What capitalism has done to so many groups of people, so it has done to the wild world. A vast underclass of ecosystems is treated as valuable solely for the profit it can generate and thus exploited to produce more and more. “Our rivers,” says Macfarlane, “are now tightly bound by logics of objectification and extraction.”

Repeatedly in Is A River Alive?, we encounter the lives of Indigenous people, twinned alongside that of their rivers. The people of the cloud forest threaded through by Río los Cedros share a fate with their river as it is eyed hungrily by Western mining companies. The Indigenous tribes of Quebec suffer alongside their rivers as they are dammed and drowned by power stations, their forested banks cleared to house, feed, and entertain workers.

The rivers are being colonized to death.

In the face of this death, Macfarlane and river-defenders seek to awaken others to what they feel in their hearts to be true: the river is still very much alive.

Dreams and Phantoms at Ennore Creek

Reading this book one month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, it felt impossible not to think of the Rio Grande and the plight of immigrants across the United States—many of whom are in fact Indigenous to this land. Far from celebrating its autonomy, the U.S. government has weaponized the Rio Grande as the embodiment of an imagined boundary, a means of keeping those on the other side out. Immigrants seeking safety are criminalized for fording the river. Death and violence are normalized as inevitable and even patriotic, to such a level that we have difficulty dreaming our way out of it.

Macfarlane encounters how normalized violence drowns dreams in the district of Blacktown near the Bay of Bengal in India, a place made into a wasteland by the pollution of Ennore Creek. Radioactive ash from the North Chennai Thermal Power Plant drifts through the air. When mixed with water, it creates a congealed substance so solid that local children use it as a trampoline.

Walking through the district, Macfarlane asks a group of activists what they hope to achieve. There is a silence before one replies, “To change a landscape for the better you must first have the ability to dream—to dream a good dream.”

Dreams are essential to activism, politics, and lawmaking. As Anglo-South African activist, anti-imperialist, and author Olive Schreiner wrote, “Our fathers had their dream; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.”

In Blacktown, it is the phantoms that keep the flicker of hope alive. When asked by the activists about their dreams for the future, the fishermen of Ennore Creek say, “It was too difficult here to dream.” One woman’s dream for the future was that she and her neighbors would get asthma rather than cancer. Faced by this dearth of dreams, the activists adjusted their terminology and asked villagers about their ghosts—”the things they have lost, which they would want alive again, like the river.” With this reframing, villagers spoke of clean water and children swimming in it.

The survival of the people of Ennore Creek depends on dreams—both their ability to dream of a more just life as well as the dream of personhood for the creek that once fed it. These dreams are tightly linked. For a marginalized community poisoned by the exploitation of their main water source, conferring personhood to the water reaffirms the personhood of the people who live there.

Imagining Natural Autonomy

On the banks of the Mutehekau Shipu, one of Macfarlane’s co-seekers asks a central question: how do we know what the river wants? Without knowing, he surmises, the Rights of Nature campaign is at great risk of becoming “a proxy in an asymmetrical power situation.” The two agree that finding the answer might take simply protecting the river until a vast majority—shareholders as well as activists—believe in the river’s personhood enough to commence a kind of deep listening, an imagining beyond narrow, Euro-Westerner understandings of life and desire. Their hope is that rivers are as capable of cutting through ideologies as they are earth and stone.

Alongside Euro-Western difficulty in conceiving of other-than-human personhood, we might consider how colonizers othered, devalued, and sought to wipe out Indigenous culture. Global society has rendered immigrant and Indigenous workers vulnerable to predatory work conditions and unstable living situations, especially to maintain low grocery bills. When costs nevertheless rise despite this exploitation, these people serve as useful scapegoats.

Colonizers do not readily recognize themselves in languages they don’t understand, differing skin tones, and unfamiliar food and music. As Sylvia Wynter describes, these differences allow the Western colonial mind to assign the status of “the Human Other.” When the colonizer is always their own standard for personhood, the immigrant worker falls short, and unfamiliar lands whose aliveness had been unquestioned become things to plunder.

As history shows, such a lack of imagination is deadly, for it helps reject self-referential notions of personhood. Those who scoff at the question of whether a river, or a forest, or a mountain is alive would do well to consider that imagination and dreams are the foundation of politics.

A Dream of Mutual Personhood

When I reflect on Macfarlane’s arduous dream-quests following rivers from source to sea, I am reminded of another story from another dreamer, the previously-mentioned Schreiner. In her collection of utopian visions titled Dreams, “The Hunter” follows the life quest of a man who sees the “bird of Truth” reflected in water in a flash so brief that she is gone when he turns his eyes to the sky. The flash, however, is long enough to light a fire in his heart, and he spends the rest of his life on an increasingly arduous allegorical journey to discover her once more.

The Hunter is mocked. People throw stones and mud at him, screaming that Truth produces nothing for them to use. He is also warned that one man cannot ever possess Truth: each of her seekers will obtain only one of her feathers, if that. The Hunter withstands the naysaying, throws away his own wishes, and takes his Imagination to his breast.

Before departing, he receives a piece of wisdom that illuminates not only his quest, but that of Macfarlane and the entire Rights of Nature movement: “It shall come to pass, that, when enough of these silver feathers have been gathered by the hands of men, and shall have been woven into a cord, and the cord into a net, that in that net Truth may be captured. Nothing but Truth can hold Truth.”

We might think of each legal case for the Rights of Nature as a single feather. As more and more rivers are granted rights, we might come to grasp the truth of their aliveness. In other words, it is the accumulation of rights that will make nature’s personhood recognizable, not the other way around.

Macfarlane and his compatriots are, slowly, revealing the truth of nature’s personhood to the world. So too are those who continue to fight for human rights, for safety, freedom, and fair labor for immigrants, even in the face of what feels like gathering darkness.

I can see Macfarlane as the Hunter in his text—one that he calls his “most personal and most political to date.”  In his pursuit of truth, Macfarlane and other advocates are overturning normalized ideological estrangement from the natural world and revitalizing inclusive political ethics on the precipice of authoritarianism.

In granting nature personhood, we not only obtain legal protections for it, but knit ourselves back together with it. We are not in nature, but of nature. Recognizing the personhood of each other—and especially Indigenous and immigrant peoples—is perhaps our greatest tool for undermining authoritarian power. It is to this ultimate end that I encourage the reader to open their minds to Macfarlane’s call for an enlarged mentality, and to allow themselves to begin to dream.

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Featured image: Bridge over the rushing Río Los Cedros river in Ecuador. Photo by Andreas Kay, 2013.

Anna Christensen Spydell is an MA graduate in Literature from Sewanee: The University of the South. Her thesis focuses on Emily Brontë, “home,” and landscape. While completing her MA, Spydell co-edited a new edition of Olive Schreiner’s Dreams for Broadview Press with Dr. Barbara Black and Carly Nations. Website. Instagram. Contact.