In Is a River Alive? the nature writer makes a heartfelt case for treating rivers as living, rights-bearing beings.
How do you conceptualize humanity’s relationship with rivers?
Everyone lives in a watershed. That simple fact strikes with the force of a revelation, but it shouldn’t. Water carries many things—memory, language, people, goods, capital flows. Rivers are, in a way, the oldest metaphor we have for life. They give us means of orienting ourselves and telling our stories. I think there is an immense latency of love for rivers and all they do for us, which is a great counterflow to the instrumentalizing impulse to exploit, bury, and forget our waterways.
Can you speak to how you settled on the book’s title?
I want readers to encounter rivers as beings with lives, deaths, and even rights, and to see what flows from that reimagining. The title question is a confrontation and invitation. I want to provoke people into exploring what it might mean to think of a river as alive, and then I want them to take the journey from the mountain summits where rivers are born to the seas where rivers die. In the course of that, I want to bring readers into the experience of this idea that rivers can be imagined—maybe have to be imagined—as living beings.
You pair accounts of your travels along three rivers with profiles of people affected by those waterways.
Rivers run through individuals as surely as they run through places, so I couldn’t have written this book without including the people. There is one strong character in each of the three journeys. They all had been moved close to death by something that happened to them before they were, in some profound way, brought back to life by rivers. Watching that happen was one of the many astonishing surprises of the book. The idea that a river is not a resource but a life force absolutely declared itself in ways that were far beyond my management or prediction.
Recounting your kayaking trip down Canada’s Magpie River, you report sensing its “presence.” What do you mean by that?
One of the currents of the book is how far the human mind might be able to accommodate the ideas and expressions of being that a river possesses. Presence is one of the words that I settle on, but the word that emerges at the very end of the book, force, is perhaps the closest I’ve come to capturing it. That force of water is what I believe the book recognizes at some level, what rises up to meet me completely unexpectedly in the book’s final pages, and what takes hold of my words and begins to make them behave in ways that are as close to liquid as language can get.
