What if a river isn’t just scenery or infrastructure—but a living being with rights, memory, and agency? If a corporation has personhood, then certainly ecological systems can.
That’s from the much-publicized lyrical 2025 book Is a River Alive by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It’s gotten heaps of praise, though I’ll admit I found it an over-stretched poem at times. It felt a bit pompous but I so appreciate the book’s premise.
Below I share notes for my future reference.
My notes:
- Is a river alive, might “a forest might think… Or a mountain remember”
- He says the rivers are his “co-authors”
- Urban planners “day lighting” of the rivers beneath our cities — Seoul did so with the Cheonggyecheon stream. Seattle and San Antonio and Yonkers and Munich and Singapore have too
- Lake Ontario in 1990s, you could develop film by dunking it into a bucket of lake water
- The body of waters that lit on fire like Don River in Toronto
- A funeral was held in 2023 for Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland
- On a dam in Netherlands, there is an inscription: “here the tide is ruled by the wind, the moon and us”
- “Standing reserve” Heidegger said of the Rhine after it was damed — an impounding of a body of water
- Robin Wall Kimmerer: “a grammar of animacy”
- Christopher Stone 1972 paper: should trees have a standing
- M?ori legal scholar Jacinta Ruru co-authored the influential 2010 article “Giving Voice to Rivers” with James Morris, arguing for legal personhood for rivers, aligning with M?ori concepts that view rivers as living ancestors with mana (authority) and mauri (life force).
- Comparisons to the 2010 Citizen United giving corporations personhood?
- Eduardo Galeano: “nature is not mute”
- “As if companies could breathe”
- Rights of nature
- Yuvan Aves: “the river had to be killed for the city to live”