Ideas - What does it mean for a river to be ‘alive’?

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Renowned natural history writer Robert Macfarlane traveled to Ecuador, India and Quebec, pondering the question of whether rivers are living beings -- the premise behind much of the movement to legally recognize the rights of nature. He found that the answer to that question is more complicated and wondrous -- and more life-altering and world-changing -- than he could have imagined.

All right, look, I am not going to lie to you. I love when an album drops, and it just, I know it's going to define my entire summer. And that is how I'm feeling about this new Lord album. My name is Alameen Abdul-Mahmood. I host a show called Commotion. And that is where we talk about the biggest stories in entertainment and pop culture, like this new Lord album or the Haim album or whatever great new music is defining our soundtrack for the summer. Come hang with us.

Follow Commotion wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Malah Ayyed. We're walking under a poplar now, beautiful. And then, oh, he's burst. Wow. That's a real game show buzzer. After weeks of damp, dreary spring weather, finally, a warm sunny day.

The award-winning British national. history writer Robert McFarlane took full advantage strolling along the Humber River in Toronto. This river, well, it's not as otherworldly as the river of the cedars, it's not as degraded as the rivers of Chennai, and it's not as wild as what you experienced in Quebec, but when you see a river like this, what do you see? Well, what I did is I went immediately down to it right to the shore. drew me straight to it. I mean, we're in this, we're in sunshine, which I understand is how it is all year round in Toronto, right? Constantly. Constant sunshine. It's pretty boring, I think.

An apt setting to talk about the ideas, stories, and rivers in his latest book, Is a River Alive? The book is a question. Is a river alive? Question mark. And in its form, it is an exploration and not a declaration. This is a hard question, right? A question that's also an invitation to consider what constitutes a living being and to reconsider utilitarian views of water and rivers as simply resources. When McFarlane encounters a healthy river, he sees and feels a life force, one that brings forth life, sustains life, and draws life to it, insects, plants, birds, amphibians, and people.

The idea of rivers as being alive has animated the rights of nature movement. Around the world, the movement is fighting for and winning the legal rights of rivers to flow unimpeded and unpolluted. Rivers like Los Sedros, or River of the Cedars in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador, and Mutashka Shippoo, or the Magpie River in Quebec.

I called it a new old idea. I mean, I travelled to countries and places and cultures and people where this old idea was, in many ways, self-evident, where rivers are being imagined and have been imagined in what seemed to the rationalist state radical ways. So in Ecuador, in India, and then in Quebec, in Natasana, there, in each of those places rivers are under threat of death from mining, pollution, and damming, respectively. But there are also places where rivers are being, or have forever been imagined in radically different ways to the ways that are in the ascendancy.

Ideas producer Chris Wadskow met with Robert McFarlane on the banks of the Humber River. But it just thrilled me to meet your river straight away. And I'm just watching the life that, the aura, this river casts around itself. The birdsong, which is, I can't understand because it's not in my British idioms of the bird songs I know, but it's so busy.

And the sound of the river itself, the songs and stories that it's telling, and people, people just pour drawn to the river. So a river is alive when it enlivens, that's one of the things a living, healthy river does. So to that question, is a river alive? How do you answer it? Or what considerations do you take in coming to your answer?

My son, early on Will, he's nine at the time. He says, what's the title of the book you're writing, Dad? And I say, is a river alive? And he's like, well, duh, that's going to be a short book then, because the answer is yes. I would love the answer to be that simple, but it's not. Is a river alive in ways that exceed the sum of the lives it contains and enables? well yes if we change our understanding of what life is and what living means it took me four years

of traveling with rivers meeting river people feeling river ideas and I wanted to take myself and the reader through these journeys to ask well what flows from us reimagining rivers as having lives and deaths and rights. And the answer is an enormous amount. The world changes depending on that answer. You know, it is interesting that the question when it is posed, yes. You get two types of responses along the lines of how absurd it is. And it tends to come from people who, that question doesn't even make sense to, like your son. Why you even asking? Isn't it obvious? Exactly. Exactly. As it were, there. the rationalist and the intuitive answer.

The intuitive answer is, of course a river's alive. Its life flows with ours, always has. We are continuous with rivers. And historically, there's an incredibly strong basis for that. And once we start to reimagine rivers as the active agents, they are historically shaping the movement of language, the settlement of people, songs, stories, when we think of them as life forces,

then suddenly they spring into another kind of being. But the rationalist answer, which is no, a river is H2O plus gravity, is another kind of story, right? It's a story about a regime of perception about how we see the world. And in my country, England, our rivers are fully privatised. So water rivers, they're just liquid assets. And that story came into the ascendancy in 1989.

Our rivers have been privatised since then, and all of our rivers, every single one in England, now fall short of being in good overall health, according to our environment agency. So that story, the story of river as resource, has resulted in a dying river network in England. The rich and varied natures of running waters have been simpler into an understanding of river as limitless source and limitless sum,

that which supplies and that which disposes. For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water. Rivers have been systematically stripped of their spirits

and reduced to what Isaac Newton called inanimate brute matter. I guess my question then is, what is a river? Because we all know, river is a body of water that flows from the source to the mouth and water travels along it, but it's more complicated enough. Yeah, it is more common. I spent whatever it is four and a half years following rivers. And the best definition of a river I've come up with is a gathering that seeks the sea.

When we singularize river, we misunderstand river. It's like calling a tree a trunk. A river has a vast watershed. A river rises from countless springs, areas of rainfall. And then all of these tributaries braid and braid and gather and gather and gather. that becomes the main current that then reaches the sea. So when you start to imagine a river as alive, then exactly the question you ask is, well, where does the river stop?

And in many ways the river doesn't stop, and I think that's one of the things I came to terms with in a series of journeys that caused me, in fact, to reimagine self and time in very consequential ways. We're water bodies, right? And even beyond that, I mean, the term for this kind of environment is riparian, which you know you think of as the actual banks that we're standing on. Right. How far beyond the bank does a river extend? Well, I like to think of this idea of aura and paul. So a living river casts an aura, and that aura is one of enlivenment,

and that might be of the spirit as we feel it. I feel lifted to be close to this river. and it might be also just biologically in the life that it enabled willow trees that we can see behind us the poplars they're all drinking of that river partaking of its life being enlivened by it you flip that and you get the pool and the pool is what a dying river casts and when you step into the pool of a sick river you know it right you feel it it's you smell it you see your heart knows it and I live in Cambridge and my river is sick. It's sick as a dog and it pains me to see it. We have a declaration of the rights of the river cam every 21st of June. We stand on its banks on riparian cam and we declare its rights, the right to be free from pollution, the right to flow, unobstructed to the sea and sometimes it feels utterly, utterly hopeless. So a river radiates Paul and aura depending on its health. So you just alluded to the movement to acknowledge the rights of rivers.

Yeah. And to codify the personhood of rivers and the whole rights of nature movement. Yeah. This is a movement to recognize in law and in imagination. The rights of natural entities. So rivers have become the most common focus. So a river has and has always had inalienable rights. This is law playing catch up, right?

It's law that's getting pluralized by often indigenous perceptions of river or community guardianship perceptions of river that are coursing into the arid terrain of Western legal structures and saying, stop being so anthropocentric, recognize that rivers can have rights as well.

There are a couple of landmarks in this movement that is both young and old again. It's really the 21st century and it's gathering enormous momentum globally. In 2007 8, Ecuador, in this remarkable act of moral imagination, revised its constitution and into the heart of its constitution it placed four articles recognising the rights of nature. And the first of those recognised the rights of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist, and the fourth of those made the state the guarantor of those rights.

And then in 2017, very famously, the Fonganui River, Tayawatapua in Atero, New Zealand, had its rights, and legal person had recognized in a parliamentary act. And that is a kind of an amazing moment in perception and recognition of rivers as alive, then taking legal form at a very high level in a nation state. So I traveled to Ecuador in 2022, and I went there because in late 2021, an astonishing ruling was handed down by the Ecuador

in Constitutional Court. And if you never thought jurisprudence could be poetry, I commend this ruling to you. It's a beautiful conceptual and textual document. So this ruling upheld the rights of the cloud forest of Los Cedros, the cedar forest and the rivers that flow from that cloud forest, among them Rio Los Cedros, to exist, to flourish and to persist. And it did so in the face of the threat of the absolute annihilation of that cloud forest and its rivers by a Canadian mining company. You will not be amazed to hear

in conjunction with the state, Ecuador and state mining company, Anami, and they had come for gold. And they wanted to crack that mountain open and slurp out the gold. The interior of a cloud forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green. To be inside a cloud forest

is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized, Their life thrives upon life, upon life, upon life in a seemingly endless mizona beam that bewilders the imagination and opens a scale slide of wonder into which the mind might plummet. Here, life is in constant hyperdrive, splicing and splitting, folding and tangling symbiotically, epithetically. A cloud forest is full of epithetic life, so epiphytes are plants that grow in other plants, grows on other life. And so one of the reasons a cloud forest is a river maker is that moisture laden air rises up, in this case from the Pacific, up to about 8,000,000 feet, and then it condenses

on the immense surface area of leaf and flower and moss and trunk that the cloud forest, with all its epiphytic abundance, provides. And then those droplets gather, again, a river is a gathering that seeks the sea, they gather and gather and then they roll off the leaf tips in a beautiful process known as continuous fog drop, which I think should be a bad name. And that means that the rivers are sustained not by rain primarily, but by this amazing rolling of single droplets of water. And the rivers there are so clear watered, the bird life is insane, mind-blowing, the howler monkeys, the six to eight species of cat that prowl this forest. the spectacle bears, it goes on and on.

So this is a place where life has flourished in abundance for a million and a half years, potentially, and mining would eradicate it. So this astonishing judgment came down at the last minute, really. And it came down with such power that it compelled mining companies to evacuate the area, make good, the small amounts of damage they'd been able to make by that point.

And so this is often taken as the great sort of gong strike proof of concept of the rights of nature because it was all on the basis that nature's rights would be violated by the mining. So an alliance of local people, indigenous communities who were essential to getting the rights for nature articles embedded in the constitution in the first place. And then in Canada, in also 2021, the Mutesa Kaushipu, or Magpie River, became the first Canadian river to have its rights declared. And this was in a joint declaration by the Mingani Regional Council. Council at Equaniche, the township of Equanisht. I mentioned how Canadian companies are implicated, how assets around the world hedge and funds,

etc. are all implicated in these efforts to mine and inevitably might not be the intent, but to kill rivers. I guess that's another way of looking at how everything is connected. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's 70% of global mining companies have their HQ in Canada. I mean, Canada is deeply implicated in river death worldwide, and in this case, the case of Los Cedros specifically, and I'm interested in how global capital implicates all of us. I mean, the laptop I predominantly wrote this book on has gold as part of its vital structures. So I'm implicated in it as well, of course. So as a writer, I began to try and find ways of nesting and recognizing what was happening in that tiny astonishing forest and this beautiful

clear-watered river within these bigger structures of pressure. And I will just say, obviously we're speaking now when gold prices, I think, are at an all-time historical high because of the war in Ukraine, because of the volatility of the tariff wars, capital-like, safe places, and so it's rushed to gold. So the pressure on Los Cedros is now even greater than it was in 2021. And I've remain very, very involved with the, and part of this circle of Ecuadorian and international guardians of that forest. But it's not a fairy tale ending to that story. The fight goes on to protect that forest and its rivers.

There are three aspects to this. There's the recognition of a river as alive. There's the recognition of a river as bearing rights. And there is the recognition of a river as having legal personhood, which means the ability to have standing in court, i.e. the ability to bring suit in court. One can recognize the rights of a river without recognizing it as a living being, though I'm most interested in those forms of the movement which do conjoin rights and life. But actually, I am very skeptical about the legal personhood side of things. I think that making a river a person, a legal person, in many ways

just re-subordinates it, the river, to the interests of power and capital. So corporations have rights. You know this. I think in a weird way we have naturalized this idea. The company has legal personhood. In the UK and the US and North America, I think it has a whole suite of rights. In the UK, the company has a right to privacy, has a right to a fair trial. We think nothing of that.

It's a non-human entity with a whole suite of rights. That doesn't bother us. But when someone says, can a river have rights? that's flowed for 10,000 years, 12,000 in the case of the Humber, suddenly there's a kind of uproar and surprise at this idea. So I'm interested in that discrepancy of imagination. Why is it so confronting to us to think of a river as alive and of a river as being a rights-bearing entity? Right. And would a river think of itself as a person? Or another question of, what does a river want?

Oh, well, what a river wants is to reach the sea. That is one thing a river wants. and gravity is not intent, but I think we can agree on that point. And then who speaks for the river, who interprets what the river wants. My own feeling is that there are clearly people who are much closer to and with the lives of the river, and there are those who are very distant from it indeed. And broadly, again, looking at my country, one reason our rivers are suffering is because they were juiced by private equity companies who came and invested extremely heavily in our river system, then extracted huge dividends, did very little in the way of investment

in infrastructure, and the result is a dying river network. And I will say that a whole bunch of that money came across to Canadian pension companies and also fed my pension company, the university's scheme. So we see a kind of capital flight, we see rivers being absolutely kind of forgotten. The ascotization of everything is the story that I am interested in contesting. because when we think of things such as rivers only in asset value, we forget so much about living. One thing you said early on in the book when you were introducing the rivers that you met.

Yeah. You said that your rivers were your co-authors. Yes. What do you mean by that? And how were they your co-authors? I mean it very seriously. I don't mean it flippantly at all. I mean, they shaped the way I thought

and one of the things that happens over the book's course is that language itself begins to shift under the pressure and presence of rivers. But then towards the end of the book, in fact, after I descended the majority of the Miteshkaa should be the Magpie River in Quebec, Tessnan, I mean, language just loses almost all its mooring. So, I mean, there are sort of two-page sentences in the book

where flow has become so, powerful a presence, that it's actually just shaped the way my thought was moving and the way my languages are writer moved. So yeah, fundamentally they co-authored this book. Who, not which. These lands, who are alive. Words make worlds. In English, we it rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals, a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff and distinguishes them from human persons. In English, pronouns for natural features are which or that, not who. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow. In English we speak of a river in the singular, but river is one of the great group nouns containing

multitudes. In English there is no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river? George Eliot has this beautiful phrase. She says, we must seek to expand the range self has to move in. And I think that's one of things that rivers do to us, and especially when we think of them as persons. But I think the best terms I came up with were sort of presences or forces in English, actually in British English, we speak of rivers as forces. They shape, they emanate, they radiate, they're highly and beautifully, often beautifully, and sometimes tragically consequential, presences, forces. Rivers are gatherings and they gather. They expand the possibilities of community. Robert McFarlane is the award-winning author of books like

The Old Ways, The Lost Words, Underland, and his latest book is a river. alive. I'm Nala Ayyed, and you're listening to Ideas. Poetry has the power to connect our inner universe in the outer world. I'm Maggie Smith, poet and host of The Slowdown, a podcast from American Public Media. Each weekday, find time to take a breather from your to-do list, or doom-scrolling for that matter, and take in a moment of reflection with a hand-picked poem. to The Slowdown, Wherever You Get Podcasts. Hello, John.

Hi. Ideas producer Chris Wadskow spoke with Robert McFarlane as they walked along the Humber River in Toronto. And as McFarlane writes in, is a river alive, rivers have a gravitational effect on people. So it wasn't long before they're. had company. It's a good day for a meeting along the river. It really is. John Johnson, a historian at the University of Toronto. And my research has focused on indigenous land-based history,

knowledge, particularly in Toronto. I'm also working within Toronto's indigenous community through an organization called First Story Toronto, which is an organization that's grassroots community-led and focuses on researching and sharing Toronto's indigenous history. The idea is to get people out onto the land and to story Toronto as an indigenous territory because there really isn't any place you can go in Toronto where you're not in some way in relationship with that history I love hearing story used as a verb I do that a lot as well it's story this land and I mean I sometimes say rivers are among the first storytellers themselves the first singers but do you find that the rivers

help you story re-story Toronto yeah in so many ways water is so found not only for landscape, but for livingness and life itself. It's like a seed for all of life, but it's also a seed for story. And of course people have always been attracted to water, to riverways. And it's certainly true of the riverways of Toronto. For as long as any of us know, those rivers have been traveled by indigenous peoples, either by canoe or simply just walked along. All of these rivers in Toronto, the Credit, the Don River, the Rouge,

and of course here the Humber, they're all Portage routes. And so really, really important sort of routes to get from northern Ontario into northern United States, and they were all around along the rivers. And indigenous peoples have traveled along these rivers and storied them and made use of them and done ceremony along them for all of that time. It's lovely to hear you say with such kind of clarity and confidence, water is livingness, rivers are livingness and life. Could you unpack that lovely word livingness a little more?

Well, a livingness to me, it's like, it's an idea to suggest that, you know, waters are, of course, not only a progenitor of life, but in fact are living themselves. Yes. So they create the possibilities for life, but they themselves are their own intentional, agentic beings with their own set of possibilities, even ethics, right? And this is something that I think a lot of indigenous peoples understand implicitly when you come out of a philosophy of land-based education where, you know, land is teacher. If you understand that as true, then you understand that these are beings that have knowledge to offer. And if you approach them with humility and you develop relationships with them, they will teach you. And out of those lessons will coalesce in ethics for what it means to be in relationship with a river or the lands that it crosses and all of the beings that compose those ecologies. You might learn what it means to be a good visitor within these lands.

A good neighbor, a good person who is in relationship with more than human beings. And I think that's what rivers, along with so many other entities in the world, can teach us. It's such a beautiful articulation of this idea of water as teacher, water is theoretician, water as opener of possibilities, shape-shifter, yeah, break a down of boundaries and binaries, right? Water is named, you know, like this water has so many different names. There's, of course, the Humber River, which we all often know it as, but I often think back to First Nations names. And there's a plaque right here that talks about Humba River as Kbeginon, this overnight stopping place, right? Talking about that history of movement, that history of camping.

There's another plaque that talks about this, the Houghton Nishone, name for this river. Niwa'a Onega'a gai'i, little thundering waters. You know, that describes spirits. It describes possibly thunderbirds, living along and being encountered in these areas. So a very spiritual place as well, right? living in multiple senses of that word.

Absolutely. And a very material and practical place in the day-to-day lives. Yes. Indigenous peoples for millennia. Could you talk about the significance of where we are right now on the banks of what is now called the Hubbard River? If you understand the archaeology of this river, kind of close to Lake Ontario,

you know that there are villages that have been located along here for millennia. The Wendat have, for a thousand years before Europeans ever came. here, occupied the upper reaches of the Humber River profoundly, you know, dozens and dozens of villages and burial mounds and sacred sites all along these waterways. And then in the 1600s, mid to late 1600s, this place was all Houghtnashone territory. There was a lot of, like, movement across these rivers and sometimes even fighting over these rivers because of the possibilities they offered. And when the Hottnashone occupied these lands, they built villages in Toronto, both along the riverways, one along the Humber here.

and the other one along the Rouge River at a place that was called Ganajaguaygon among the birches. The village here along the Humber River was called Daegon. And it means maybe like it cuts the river or it cuts the river too and it kind of looks like the bluff does that a little bit from the top-down view.

But all of this floodplain along the river, this was all corn, beans, and squash at that time. It was the agricultural fields that sustained thousands of people who lived at that village in the surrounding territory. And then beyond the immediate environs of that village, it was all savannah, oak savannah and that's significant because that's an indigenous ecology that's

only created through controlled burns and maintained that way right so this was like a profoundly profoundly settled area because of the landscape and because of the water because of the breadth of possibility that it always offered for indigenous life and so when Europeans came to these territories indigenous peoples already made it a good place it was already known that way a strategic place a place of meeting a place of wealth and abundance and so of course Europeans wanted access to that. The very first treaties are for the lands

along the Humber River. It's not an over-exaggeration to say that the whole reason why Toronto is here today is because of how the Humber River and the other rivers and the paths that ran alongside them, they absolutely do organize life. They represent that seed, right? That initial set of possibilities.

Ursula Liguin, the great Ursula Liguin, very late in her life actually. She said one way to stop seeing, she says rivers and forests as objects, is to see them as kin. That's right. But she also says that that will take, and this phrase has always stayed with me, that will take, for many people, a great reach outwards of mind and imagination.

Absolutely. And of course, your expertise, the indigenous communities that you're speaking of, it doesn't require that great reach outwards. But for those to whom the idea of life as possibility and relation, it isn't intuitive, It's hard, right? Very much so, yeah. I mean, when we're doing the work that we do, we're always working against what you're talking about there,

that sort of mindset, which, you know, really is a mindset that has evolved and taken shape and proliferated over, you know, millennia within the Western world. And, you know, at some point, we separated spirituality from the natural world. And we looked for that elsewhere. Yes. And as soon as we did that, we stopped recognizing life around us

as spiritual, as agentic, as alive, the possibilities for being taught by teachers that are all around us, these natural, more than human beings. Everything about modernity teaches us not to do that. Absolutely. But as I sat there and I looked at all of the life and the possibility around the river, it came back to me pretty quick. There's the river as teacher, right? And the river as something we think with. Yeah. We write with, we think with, we imagine with, with, it becomes a certain side an important preposition and somebody else said you know nice to see you hi Chris hey great day for it yeah Robert John and Chris are joined by another chronicler of river history so happy to see you again I'm Jennifer Bonell and I guess I describe myself as a historian of environmental change

and I look at that experience of environmental change that people have encountered and created over the last two centuries. I'm the author of a book called Reclaiming the Dawn, an environmental history of Toronto's Don River Valley. What is the urban experience done to heart rivers, the dawn, the hubber, rid of her. I'm a historian mainly of the Don River, but certainly rivers in cities in North America and Toronto is not unusual in this respect were in the 19th century at least viewed as convenient places to get rid of wastes, to generate energy, but I think in Toronto's experience

especially, it's that industrialization on the banks of the Lower Dawn and being able to dump your waste into the river and have them float down to be someone else's problem is the story of our rivers here, at least the 19th century history, a history of really awful pollution to the point that, you know, in the 1890s, Toronto is facing a caller threat because of the level of organic waste that are going into the dawn from everything from municipal sewage

to industry on the banks of the dawn tanneries and slaughterhouses, etc. All of the stuff that people didn't want to see or didn't want to smell or experience went into our river valleys. And I think, you know, this city is one where our valleys they have that convenience of being a place where you can tip waste. That's part of the story of our relationship with our rivers here.

In terms of how we think of that as the way the city imagines itself and imagines rivers, that's based upon an imagining of rivers as having a basically infinite carrying capacity, right? That they will continue to supply fresh water upstream and they will continue to dispose of waste downstream. Is that a very 19th century form of, as it was, ecological imagination? Yeah, I think that that catchphrase, dilution is the solution to pollution, was something that I think a lot of 19th century engineers found extremely convenient. And when you're looking at a tiny river like the Don, which was the much more industrialized river of Toronto's two

main rivers, you know, it never had the capacity to absorb a lot of waste. You know, but both the Don and the city's waterfront became places to drag your dead animal carcasses. and dump your sewage. And we're only now in some of the work that's happening along the Toronto waterfronts that are beginning to turn ourselves back to these water spaces and recognize that we're a water city, we're a river city, we're a lake city,

but only by making those spaces more desirable and more safe have people been turning their attention to them again. Now, Rob, the second part of the book is about the city of Chennai. I guess it would qualify as a mega city. yes in southeastern India yeah can you talk about the rivers there and what's become of them yes so jennifer describing Toronto as a water city Chennai fundamentally a water city is a city of

complex water bodies a lot of wetland a lot of marsh but then these three great rivers moving north to south the cost of stalaya the kum and the adya and these are rivers which in many ways have become ghosts in the city they've become built over they've become buried, they've become suppressed. The rapid expansion of the city into a kind of maximum city, water has been forgotten. But they return as monsters, these ghosts, when the monsoon comes, but particularly then when the cyclone strikes. So Chennai lives, despite being set in an area where water husbandry and hydrological

literacy runs back, certainly tens of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands of years, is now struggles with this desperate double identity as a city of drought and a city of flood. I was drawn there partly, and here I thought often of Jennifer's work on the Don, partly because the waterways there are many ways the deadest I've ever met. So zero percent dissolved oxygen in parts of them, zero species count at times. They get flushed by the monsoon, but then they kind of revert. And again, tanneries, high crows. levels, raw sewage, no sewage infrastructure, everything goes into the rivers there. In fact, you asked the question, can a river be murdered?

Yeah, this remarkable water activist called Bridge Candleval. After the Ganga and the Yamuno were recognized as spiritual living entities, he called the police station at Agra and said, I want to report a murder. And the police said, who's been murdered? And he said, a river. And, of course, they laughed him out of town. But it was a very interesting moment. And I thought of our conversation a few years ago, Jennifer,

and the work you've done on ways of commemorating river death. So the funeral that was held for the dawn. Yeah. In 1969, pollution probe staged, you know, what is now an iconic event in Toronto's history, at least in Toronto's river history, of declaring the dawn dead. And they staged a funeral procession to the banks of the river.

They had someone dressed as Elizabeth Simcoe, who was here with John Grave Simcoe, you know, when the town of York was founded in 1793, reading. And she was someone who enjoyed moving up river for picnics. And so she was an important figure in its early history. Anyway, they staged this funeral procession complete, I believe, with a sousaphone. I believe so. But this was advertised in that sort of late 60s, beginning of. of Greenpeace, really theatrical activism time. And so Pollution Probe was picking up

and working with those kind of methods to awaken Torontoians to both the state of Toronto's River and its potential for rebirth, I think. So that funeral was combined with a series of very savvy ads in the newspapers at the time, inviting Toronto politicians to sample a drinking water glass full of Don River water which looked like more silt and sediment than water. Got a lot of people's attention and I think was part of the real resurgence of citizen interest in the Don River

and in trying to come up with a different vision for what it might be to our city. And one thing it asks one to do is to flip the image. So if a river can die and a river can have a funeral, what does a living river look like? And I love the fact that as you were describing the funeral, of the don, we heard this wonderful chorus of shouts and laughter from children under the bridge who are down there on the shingle bank, throwing stones. They're just so joyful to be by that water, right? And the dawn did not make that possible because it was a dying river. And now, how is it now? There is some great, exciting things to report about, especially the lower dawn right now.

So certainly conditions are much better than they were in the 50s, but it's still one of Canada. most urbanized watersheds. I think 90% of the watershed is, you know, non-porous surfaces, which means that water runs fast into the waterways. It runs hot and it runs salty in the winter when all the salt from the city streets runs into the water, all of the dog feces and everything else the rest of the years. So we get, because of that high level of urbanization, we don't have the wider watershed absorbing that water as it should. So there are some intractable problems, I would say, in the dawn, but we're seeing, you know, phosphorus levels have come down, which is good for aquatic life. But the really big development over the past 10 years has been the work to reimagine the mouth of the Don River in relationship with the city.

They have created really wonderful and quite viable wetland spaces that are doing kind of triple purpose. their main function is flood protection. So it's this heavily armored landscape. And like now when you look at it, it looks like a natural wetland after it's been constructed. But while they were building it, it's like the bottom of a swimming pool. You know, it's so heavily constructed

in order to channel the floodwater if we do face a major flood event. So it's dealing with that flood protection problem. It's creating wetlands around that area to provide for wildlife, but also sequester carbon and absorb some of those waters. And it's creating a recreation space for Torontoans, which, I mean, I sound like a tourism promoter,

but I'm kind of excited about it. It's been a long time and amazing. And it just proves this idea of life in this rich sense of the word as being drawn to an opening out of healthy, fresh, flowing water. Thanks so much for coming out. It's a part of his. Yeah. It's great to meet you.

Yeah, I could have listened to you both all day. Thank you. My pleasure. I think of the 11-year-old Yuven, helping to grow this riverland back into life, even as his own emergence was being contaminated by violence at home. I think of both land and boy finding ways to transform themselves, to cleanse themselves of poisons that have settled deep down over a long period of time. of time. I have learned a new kind of water literacy from Yuvan, a terraqueous one, in which the opposition between river and land is undone, replaced with a metamorphic vision of river as a shape-shifting being, never only itself, and always in conversation and interanimation with both earth and

human body. Robert McFarland speaks of Yuvan Aves, a young man in Chennai, India, from whom he takes great inspiration. At the heart of all three of the main sections of the book are three people who have been moved close to death by life, and then who have also then been in some way revived by their relationship with rivers. I couldn't have foreseen that. In a way, it became the purest proof of the book's argument.

that the rivers are life forces. And one of those is this young Indian naturalist and activist called Yuvan Avez, who I'd been friends with for five years before I traveled out to Chennai to meet him. And if the rivers are the ghosts and monsters of that section of the book, Yuvan is one of the angels. And he suffered a really brutal childhood. And so he's known a lot of harm in his life. But he has remade himself astonishingly.

a child with Yuven and I learned so much about resilience and I came to understand through Yuvan that despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline and by that I think I mean that watching him try to bring rivers and all that lives with rivers back to life in Chennai against these astonishing forces that were hostile to the life of rivers It's political and chemical and industrial. And I thought, well, compared to this, what right do I have to feel despair?

And then hope is a discipline, because I saw that although he was imagining a better future for rivers and people, he recognized that that couldn't just be a fantasy. He had to step firmly towards it, organize, gather, work for change. He's utterly inspirational. The biggest part of the book is in Quebec. And it's simply titled The Living River. Yeah, this third section of the book, the longest, but also the fastest running, without a doubt. The bit I wrote fastest and lived fastest, I suppose, is where it all comes together.

All the tributaries of thought and people and story and river, they all converge there on this river called the Muteshka ship with the magpie. And we were dropped by floatplane about 110 miles up the system. and then we we kayaked out over 10, 11 days and before I kayaked that river I went to see Rita Mastikosho this poet and community leader in the Inu township of Equanisht near the mouth of the river

and I asked her permission to travel down this river of course and she just laughed at me she was like yeah you can have my permission but the permission you really need is the river's permission I was like what Rita how do I get that And she gave me this extraordinary set of instructions. I had to pitch my tent every morning facing east. I had to gather her water from a certain place, Labrador Tea from another place.

I was not to take my notebooks on the river, and that struck fear into my writer's heart. And we eventually came to a negotiated settlement where I could take my notebooks, but I couldn't write while I was on the water. I could only write at night or in the mornings on the banks of the river, so that's what I did. but she also said to me you can ask one question of the river that will be answered by the river but it's got to be the right one and I was like how will I know she was like you work it out

just don't look too much with your eyes don't think too much with your head feel more with your heart yeah it was an amazing set of kind of preparations for that journey so she prepared me to be I think open to that river in ways I wouldn't otherwise have been My first sight of the Muteshakao Shippu itself catches my breath. A world snake in the green, cliffs dropping near sheer to water, house-sized boulders on the banks, time falls from the rock faces above. Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs. Peat brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids,

churning green, golden cream in the rapids and falls. this is a big river a wild river and it's not dammed until there's one small dam near its mouth and when we descended it it was a big river in a big mood everything about it was huge forceful muscular as soon as we were on it in many ways my my will was sort of surrendered to this force this presence it was also utterly beautiful and it travels through trackless forest you don't cross a road or any infrastructure until you reach the sea so we we fished as we went. We portaged hard and every day we were descending that river. We were capsized. We swam. We were buried in it. We negotiated big, big rapids. And I know this is an

experience that many people in Canada have growing up. You have an extraordinary river system here, but it's like nothing I'd ever done. I grew up as a mountaineer and I've been on big mountain trips that have lasted weeks at a time, but nothing prepared me for this river and what it did to me, and basically it wore me away. It wore away so many things that I took for granted I took as orthodoxies. Then, faintly, I feel it, a current, the slightest of pulls. Follow me, please, come this way, and long before I can see the mouth of the Muteshaka Ashipu, I can sense it, for I am suddenly now in the threshold where flow takes over from flat. And I call back to Wayne with a whoop. Can you feel it too? Can you feel it? And an involuntary

shudder of force moves through me. And the current's pull becomes stronger, less negotiable. You will come with me now. And then it is as if the lake has somehow tilted, such that I am now sliding down its slope, and the water ahead is behaving strangely. A funny piece of water that, for it looks deckle-edged and cockled, forming a tangle of movement and shallow turbulence, but then amid that turbulence I see a huge arc of silver-smooth water, a flat fallen slice of moon over which lines and coils of foam are sliding seemingly without friction in perfect laminar flow.

And my boat bumps over the stipple line that marks the boundary of that shining moon slice, and I know I have crossed the event horizon and the frontier beyond which all things tend towards the river. So we've had this incredible force, and yet you say in that chapter that seems counterintuitive, but a river can be drowned. The only thing that can drown a river is a reservoir, a dam.

Hydro-Cubeck, of course, have done this immense job of conversion of so many of Quebec's rivers into hydro systems, and the Romaine River just to the east of the Mutashkar Shibu has just concluded its multi-dam project there and that has brought jobs, it's brought power, of course, has brought money to the region, but it has also drowned a lot of ancestral lands. It has also really drowned the river.

So the magpie, the Mutashkaaashipu, is next in line. and Rita and others at the Equanish community, along with the Mingani Regional Council, drafted this extraordinary mirror resolution declaring the river to be a rights-bearing being. And in the inner version of that, the river is recognised as alive. And so far, it has worked. It's thrown this sort of imaginative force field around the river. But we shall see what happens if, when Hydro-Quebeck do decide to dam the Muteshka Shippu, but I know Rita and I and others will be

very active in its defense. Yeah, she said that the river would reveal to you the reason you came, the true reason we came to the river, and she also said that you would, as you mentioned, come to have a question for the river. So what did you find that question to be, and what did you find that purpose was? In an odd way I don't want to try and paraphrase it because what happens at the end of this book, what happened at the end of the river, there are two endings to the book and both of them were complete surprises to me.

They astonished me and I wrote them down more or less as they happened to me. And I've never had a stronger sense of being written by, thought by a force, a surrounding an environment external to me. but at a day short of the sea on the Muteshikao shippu we came to this place called the gorge and gorge of course is what we call the throat as well it's the throat of the river and we we approached the edge of the gorge that day where millions of tons of water a day are crashing through this immense bottleneck and in ways i can't account for and do my best to describe in the book, but in a way where

language really starts to run and liquefied. So many things that I had taken as certainties fell away were dissolved, vanished really. And yeah, I had something like a mystical, religious, ecstatic

experience. It's just that the god was a river. And my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense of the shatter belt of my awareness, of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels, but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming. And in that moment,

it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river being. Why should a god make choices we recognize as choices? And the coast of my mind senses this force. And I know that this is no Pepper's ghost, no projection or illusion or trick, and that the question Rita wanted me to ask of the river is nothing to do with fear or age, but is after all, and of course, the question of life, which is not a question at all, but a world. Find the current, follow the flow. And the river's voices say and sing what I cannot comprehend, and each time I lean my mind out to listen, they retreat in the measure I approach them. And for those few seconds, beckoned on and shivered by that hourglass-shaped and silvered force

that is a mouth and has a tongue and utters, after miles and minutes and years on the flow and in it, I am rivored. What does it mean to be riveted? I think it means to be opened. I think it means to move away from a small self, to use Yuvan's phrase. It means to understand that life, this world we live in, time is composed of flow and of relations. It's not composed of units and boundaries. That is easy to say, but it's not so easy to feel if you've grown up in the kinds of philosophical traditions I have.

But the river opened me to that understanding to those ideas. and I have very little of what I understood of time is left by what I went through over those three to four years on the rivers and particularly on the Muteshakar Shepu and the very ending of the book, this very short epilogue, where the river becomes time and flows forwards into the future. Again, I thought the book was finished with I Am Rivered. Of course, that's the ending of this book, full stop.

But then I walked up to the little spring near my house and a sort of scene played itself out in my imagination absolutely spontaneously and yeah time had flowed on in that scene and I was no longer present in the world and I wrote that down but really the spring waters they told that story and the river the big river made the seeing and the hearing of that story possible yeah that is how the rivers were my co-authors utterly and fundamentally So we've talked about how human activity, human behavior, our worst impulses can kill rivers. And we've also talked about how humans' better instincts can restore rivers.

How do rivers restore people? A beautiful question. How do rivers restore people? rivers revive themselves with our help or without our help but when they heal themselves they heal us too I believe that very profoundly and America has a miraculous recent example of this in the story of the Klamath River which flows down out of Oregon and into California

which was the site of the biggest de-damming project in US history the campaign for the de-damming of the Klamath was led in large part by the Europe tribe and the last of the big four dams that were put up beginning in the 1920s through to the 1960s came down last year and within days of the final big dam coming down salmon were back this river had the third biggest Pacific salmon run on the on the west coast but salmon had been unable to reach the headwaters to spawn and the speed with which salmon returns knew or had been knocking on the door of that dam

all of those years unable to pass. They rushed up and with them came life to the wider watershed but also cultural identity to the Europe people, a salmon people. Food security, food sovereignty, a sense of pride, the return of story that itself had been bled, locked in many ways by the dams. And I saw a photo just three weeks ago because Europe re-vegetation crews

had seeded the banks where the old reservoirs had been the drowned land with a mix of drought-resistant wildflower seeds back in February after the drawdown of the waters. And those flowers had bloomed just this late spring, early summer. And there was Lupine and there was California poppy

and the whole land was just blazing with this yellow and orange flame. And to me, it just looked like hope. Thanks so much for this, Rob. I feel almost vicariously rivered. I've been looking forward to this since I knew it was going to happen. And I knew the sun would be shining. Yeah, like I said, took a Brit to bring the sun to this. Who'd have thought it?

From the islands of rain. but, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. On that bright sunny day, that was Robert McFarland, a renowned British natural history writer and the author of Is a River Alive. Special thanks to John Johnson, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, and Jennifer Bonnell, an environmental historian at York University

and the author of Reclaiming the Dawn. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.cai.cae. And you can find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Emily Kiervezio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayas. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.