Author: Robert Macfarlane. Review by Anthony, NPA Environmental Book Club
I think most of us have a river (or creek) that lies deep within us, in our memories, with sounds, sights and smells to connect us to that past. For me, it is of the creek on the family property, a walk down from the homestead, across paddocks with very large bulls, or skittish sheep, pitted by the billabongs of water courses past, and through barbed wire fences to a creek that had cut its way deep into the soil.
In parts you could cross the creek on ridges of granite, rock that is never far from the surface in that area. In other stretches, the creek slowed and widened into a water hole, lined by casuarinas and their whispering, with water dragons dropping into the creek as you walked by. I can remember many days, but one was particularly musical and memorable. The creek hadn’t run for 20 months because of drought, an unusually long time. After heavy rain in the headwaters, I walked with my mother down a few waterholes, listening to the water infiltrate the gravel beds chinking the rocks together as it slowly filled the hole and flowed down to the next.
Robert Macfarlane, the author of “Is a River Alive”, has his own ur-river in a small brook that arises in a spring near to his home in Cambridge, UK, where he works as a professor. In this book, he charts his travels to three rivers in very different parts of the world – The Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador; the Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, Canada; and the three rivers that flow through Chennai in India. All of these rivers have been subject to determined campaigns to save them from exploitation and in some cases have also been the subject of legal action aimed at giving them a legal existence that allows them to be recognised in the law of their lands. Mr Macfarlane’s book takes us to each of these rivers where we meet extraordinary people determined to defend their river and the life within it. A fight which holds a mystical if not religious dimension for those people, something which Mr Macfarlane clearly edges towards.
Despite being a Cambridge academic, the author has a string of highly readable books in which he frequently finds himself travelling, preferably on foot, across a landscape steeped in history and significance. He is a brave explorer and a curious one, but more for the people who have inhabited the landscape than for the flora and fauna. His rigor is in describing the landscape, using words now frequently forgotten, that had once described the track that he is walking, or in this book, sometimes paddling. There is little scientific nomenclature, and no engagement with the detail of the environments through which he has travelled, but he is in awe of them. In fact, if there was any issue that I have with the book it is the mystical tone that he adopts, that shrouds the rivers and their issues which are of global importance.
At the book club, the book was generally well received, though not universally loved. As the author veered into his “Boy’s own adventure” kayaking down the Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, some thought he had gone too far into his own mystical inclinations. Although I agreed with that, I personally found the book engaging and well worth reading. Certainly a book that I would recommend.