Is a River Alive?

Robert Macfarlane has recently completed a three-year, Leverhulme-funded book called Is A River Alive?, which takes as its focus the dynamic and global ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, that argues for the bestowing of juristic personhood and attendant rights upon rivers, forests, mountains and even individual species.

The book focuses upon the chalk streams of southern England; the cloud-forests and rivers of Ecuador; the waterways of Chennai, in southern India; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River, which flows through the Innu homeland of Nitassinan (in what is also known as north-eastern Quebec).