Robert Macfarlane: When I think of how we have to image rivers otherwise away from the pure resource model, I recognize that we can reverse the direction of ‘shifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make it ‘lifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make our rivers touchable, then swimmable, then drinkable again. Drinkable rivers! Imagine that!

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo—

Rachel Donald: and I’m your co-host Rachel Donald—

Mike: bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast we speak with Robert Macfarlane who is well known as an award-winning nature writer, environmental activist, and many more creative endeavors. He joins us to talk about his latest read Is A River Alive, which is said to ask and answer this question. In this conversation with co-host Rachel Donald, Macfarlane details the context in which he asks this question and its thesis, which takes readers to the front lines of some of the most significant battles to save waterways, the cloud forests of Ecuador, southern India, and northeast Quebec. He unpacks not just the importance of rivers for humans, but also their right to exist as living organisms. How this recognition intersects with policy and law, such as rights of nature laws, which are being implemented around the globe. Afterward, Rachel and I reflect on the history of the environmental movement in the United States, which some might say was emboldened by the need to combat pollution in the Cuyahoga River, which used to catch fire in the 20th century. Macfarlane’s book, and I believe this conversation, shed important light on the fragility, beauty and necessity of Earth’s waterways.

Rachel: Robert, welcome to Mongabay’s podcast. It is a delight to speak with you this morning.

Robert: Hi, thanks for having me.

Rachel: Well, we’re absolutely thrilled to be joined by you. You are one of the foremost nature and landscape writers in the UK and worldwide. I would say having read your book, and I have to say, I actually hadn’t read any of your other work before I read Is A River Alive? And then I read it, and I was like, yes, I understand why this is what he is held up as. I mean, it is extraordinary what you do with language.

Robert: Oh, thank you. That’s very, very nice to hear. I will just say Mongabay, long-term reader, long-term fan. Very, very engaged and admiring of the work you do. I reciprocally am very happy to be in conversation.

Rachel: Oh, well thank you very much for that. So, with this book, you decided to look at water. Bodies of water, how we understand bodies of water, how we feel to understand bodies of water. And I suppose, because you sort of vaguely at the beginning, hint at this story, it would be good to understand what brought you to talk about water for this book.

Robert: Well, there are many, many stories. A book has a watershed, like a river has a watershed. It rises in many sources. One, is simply the situation of rivers in England. And we told a young and terrible story about water flowing fresh water in England and Wales, which was that it should be privatized. And that story took hold in 1989, converted water to liquid asset de-territorialized. It made it something that private equity firms could invest in rate dividends from. All of the spiritual connections, the life giving force, the particularities of rivers were lost and have been lost in that process. So, I live in a country surrounded by rivers that are in a grievous state. So, if the work of a writer is defining old stories and tell ’em for new times, or to find new stories and tell ’em for future times that, that was what I set out to do. But this is the profit motive, the liquid asset story is a young story. We have to remember that.

Rachel: Thank you for sort of laying out like that. I love people talking about narratives or imaginaries to kind of reveal almost like this matrix of language that we live in that adds a layer to the world that isn’t necessarily there. And sometimes it’s really wonderful, like the way that stories can bring alive the spirits that run through. I mean, if we think spirits run through us and we are what, 80% water, then they should run through rivers as well. But absolutely the flip side of that is when they get seen as, I mean, I love the term that you used throughout ‘service provider.’ That all of this life and all of these interconnections, all of these nodes of possibility, it could be reduced down into what they provide humans and not even all humans, certain humans, in order to maximize their returns from it. I mean, it is actually mind boggling stupid.

Robert: It’s wild,

Rachel: Haha. Isn’t it?

Robert: It’s so wild. And what was have flowed in the south of England, let’s say for 10 to 12,000 years, right? Since the ice left, that is coeval with the period of human flourishing. The beginning of the Holocene was in many ways the beginning of the hydrocene, the rivercene, let’s say in the north of Europe. So, our cities are built on water. Of course they are. Um, there’s a wonderful line, Henry David Thoreau, says, he says, ‘a river town is a winged town.’ I think he means the river gives it motion, connects it outwards to the wider world. Yes. All our towns and cities are wing towns because we understood that life and water flowed together human life and river life flowed together. So, this forgetting that has beset power, if we want to call it that, structures of control, the deep codes of the imagination as it’s run in a kind of late capital phase. They all young. They’re really young, and we have to daylight to use another wonderful river term daylight, older, richer, more relational ways of feeling and thinking and behaving towards the rivers.

Rachel: It’s incredibly sad, I find to think of the state of Europe at the moment because when you first, when you open the book and you start telling the story of this river 10,000 years ago, and then the people that started to visit it and build relationships with it,

Robert: Yeah!

Rachel: Um…I just assumed that it would be in some other part of the world. I assumed that it would be in South America or Turtle Island, what’s now known as the United States. So, you know, because in Europe we also had all of this. We also had these magnificent languages and these animistic religions and these wonderful diverse cultures that were colonized as well and were taken from us. And you state explicitly how the church came and sort of, you know, hung up people who were shown to be worshiping the river as a way to kind of eradicate this mutual dependence with the Earth and create this, you know, soul relationship with a, this new monotheistic god. And it’s very, very sad for me that in all of the talk of colonization that’s rightly happening around the world today, we have almost forgotten that..us too. It happened to us too. Yeah,

Robert: Us too. It’s fascinating. So that, I mean, the story of Christianity’s an entangled relationship with running water, with living water is so complex and so on the one hand you have the, the Spanish colonization of the so-called New World, South America. And there yeah. Literally flogging, animism, quote unquote water worship, a sense of an in spirited enlivening living landscape out of the new subjects of the colonies there. If you spoke to a stream or a river in the way one might speak to a friend or to a god, then you were sentenced by the commission against idolatry to a hundred lashes in the street. Then in Europe, in Britain, during the Reformation, which of course is a counter Catholic move, not just the altars are stripped, but the land itself, again, is seen as a site of fostering of iconoclasm, i.e. the worship of spirit of nature of place. So, you have these, in the 16th century, you have these amazing kind of vigilante groups banning out across the land and blocking up springs, destroying chapels built at the sites of running water, preventing pilgrimages to clear running streams and rivers. So, this war on anima, this war on river as life has been going on in many different forms for a very long time.

Rachel: There are such parallels with that. The blocking up of the streams due to the reformation and also what’s happening, I think particularly in Gaza right now, the fact that actual life giving sources, be they rivers or hospitals or aid routes are also being deliberately targeted as evidenced by forensic architecture. The not-for-profit sort of a lead investigator into this case, they’re being deliberately targeted.

Robert: An extraordinary body of work by forensic architecture across this and other crises. Absolutely water as a weapon of war is explicitly prohibited. It is a war crime. We see the weaponization of water, of river happening all over the, the globe. We saw India recently in the conflict border conflict with Pakistan cut off the Indus. So if you are upstream, you have power. If you’re downstream, you have vulnerability in this case, we saw, in fact the, I think it’s the Nepro in Ukraine, which ended up slowing the Russian advance at a critical time when it flooded. The land has, there’s been a move to celebrate the Nepro as a war hero and to recognize its rights led by a Ukrainian campaign. Now as a result of it, the heroism of war. So, I mean, all of these ways in which rivers are, are either instrumentalized or recognized as the profoundly agential forces that they are. And yeah, you allude to my little, little chalk stream, fragile chalk stream first started flowing 10 and 12,000 years ago. When you look at it as a historical agent, you see that it is organized life around itself in these enormously consequential ways. And here we end up back at the forgetting again because rivers are now objects and can be whole watersheds can be picked up. The Yangtze, Three Gorges Dam has impounded so much water that it has measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth!

Rachel: Extraordinary!

Robert: Just wild, and it’s unsurprising in a way. We’ve become such terraformers, such hydroformers, such users and manipulators of water that it should have its status as life force, not resource, should have been forgotten.

Mike: Hello, listeners, and thank you as always for tuning in. If you’re enjoying this discussion on the life and rights of rivers, you’ll probably also enjoy episode 218, where co-host Rachel Donald had a discussion with Victoria Kahui in September of 2024 about the rights of nature, legal personhood, and other ways laws can protect the planet. But if you’re really enjoying this episode, we always encourage you to leave a review on the podcast platform you’re tuning in on. We also have an official podcast email, so if you have thoughts, questions, or comments, reach out to us at podcast[at]Mongabay[dot]com. Thank you so much. Now back to the conversation with Robert Macfarlane.

Rachel: Do you wanna tangent with me for a little minute?

Robert: Yeah.

Rachel: Right. Okay. Let’s, maybe let’s get into some kind of like vaguely existential territory around your question ‘is a river alive’? Because for me, reading your book and reading like the history of how rivers have been agential in organizing life around them, as you just said, their role and culture, their role in being literally the wellspring of progress in many ways, and I don’t mean human progress, but the advancement of life. Life just marching on.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel: I think what—and I was thinking, I was sitting with this question, is a river alive? How can I get past, you know, lots of my cultural coding to try and understand that a thing with a brain doesn’t have, you know, a thing without a brain, doesn’t mean it’s dead or whatever. And to me, what became apparent, or what was suggested throughout reading the book was this profound ignorance of human beings today, particularly after 40 years/50 years of neoliberalism, whereby we assume that our agency and our being in the world are very ontology actually comes directly from us as if we are these individual nodes just sort of hanging in space and time, you know, like stars, but not constellated together.

Robert: That’s so well put.

Rachel: Whereas for a river, no, it’s not necessarily that, you know, a river has a brain, but it is acting in such a way with the system around it that it is causing things to happen and it’s causing positive things to happen and all of its action when taken within a wider picture, this bigger picture of life marching forward, it does start to look really, really alive in the same way that we do. And to think that there’s any real difference between what a river is doing and what we do is to forget fundamentally that we are also connected not into just a web of life, but into a culture that tells us how to think or tells us how to be, tells us what to value. We are no more individual than an ant in a colony, quite frankly, but it’s this cognitive dissonance that about our ability to kind of deliberately affect change in a particular place without really asking why we’re affecting change in the first place that seems to have created this divide between objects and humans.

Robert: Exactly, and Ursula Le Guin, who…the great Ursula Le Guin who I quote in a chapter epigraph in the book, she says something like this, ‘one way to stop regarding trees and rivers as objects is to see them as kin folk, as relations.’ And she then ends that paragraph, this amazing paragraph that she wrote really late in her life. She says to—but she says ‘to do so.’ She says, ‘I think I’m trying to subjectify the universe because look at where objectification has got us.’

Rachel: Yeah.

Robert: And she says that ‘to subjectify is not necessarily to colonize, rather’ she says, ‘it may involve a great reach outward of mind and imagination,’ and that great reach I take to be the effort that people like you and me have to make to overcome the regime of perception that rationalism, capitalist realism, however we want to name the invisible water in which we swim cognitively has infused us with, and it’s wonderful to me to hear you say, I sat with this question, is a river alive? Because that—I’ve never written a book with a question in the title before. Although all of my books been animated by questions. But I’ve loved watching this one as a goad, as a spur, as an enticement and people sit, they do sit with it and it seems like an almost innocently, naively simple question, yes or no. And then you enter it and you realize you’re in this great constellation of philosophical, ontological, political questions. And as I say somewhere in the book, even the asking of it is a start. And of course I traveled and met and spoke with people, for example the Innu poet and community leader Rita Mestokosho, for whom the question is a kind of non-question, well, ‘of course the river is alive!’ Of course the river is relative. And Rita became absolutely instrumental in sort of scaring away my inherited metaphysics and opening me to the river and to the idea of river life and river co-life and being a river. But I’m really happy that, I mean, you described that process brilliantly, thinking your way into the question and then we move from is a from river as alive to river is alive and that’s tricky.

Rachel: Mm-hmm. Well, for anyone as well who’s sort of still sitting with it, there are ways of tackling this that are quite rational as well. Even though I don’t think it’s, you know, really, it’s not the most direct route, but it might be a helpful couple of first steps and it’s that, you know, do things that are dead, nourish life? No. You know, things have to still be alive for them to actually. Give life to what is coming. You know, we do not eat rotten meat. We do not eat rotten fruits. We cannot eat rotten anything, can we?

Robert: But we can’t, but fungi can. Right? I’m not sure I agree with that. I think—

Rachel: Oooh, good point.

Robert: I think rot is a—rot is a beautiful and necessary process. And the detritivores of which—one of my amazing—

Rachel: Detritovores!

Robert: Yeah, I know well Yuvan speaks of detritovores. Juliana speaks of rot as the basis of life cycles. So, I’m not sure I agree with that. But we…a rationalist way to think about is a river alive can be to say, can river die? Or can a river be dying? And yes, we know what that looks like and we know what it feels like and it’s all around us. I’m sorry to say, rivers are so rare, they’re so fragile. They carry nought point five (0.5%) of the world’s water in them. And yet we conceive of them within a delusion of infinite capacity. We think they will always supply us with freshwater and they will always take away our waste. And that a broader delusion of infinite growth on a finite planet as we know. But can a river die? Yes. But if you can see in your mind’s eye, hear in your mind’s ear, a dying river, you can, you can imagine the counter case, which is the living river. And a living river has an aura where a dying river has a pall and a living river’s aura radiates life. It enlivens. I mean, you go to a river, you go to a living thrilling river and you feel the lift in your spirit. It’s in a way, it’s so simple. It’s so felt. Um, yeah.

Rachel: And that is what is helping give some weight in the mainstream, even to this rights for nature movement. Which began with an equal, well, actually it began an Ecuador, didn’t it? Ecuador was the first country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. In 2006, right?

Robert: 2008, actually ’08.

Rachel: 2008.

Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel: But I mean, quite some time ago. Quite amazing and really interesting that it happened at the same time as the financial crisis for me, you know, just this sense of like, oh, things are changing and like the west doubled down on the system that had made the problem, and someone else in another country went, eh, maybe we should change this, hahaha!

Robert: Reimagine this. Yeah, exactly. And rights is, as you know, is a kind of, there’s this disjunct between the language of rights, which is the language of a western legal framework, which is actually a profoundly anthropocentric framework. And then very often the kind…because the rights movements, rights, nature movements have almost always grown from below. Grown from communities, from activists, from alliances often, but not exclusively in Indigenous in origin. There is this sort of bad fit between the language of rights and the language of life. And my book is called, Is A River Alive? Not ‘Does a river have rights?’ Because the upstream question, the ontological one is a question of what we imagine life to be. And then what power deems the boundary between that which is alive and rights bearing and that which is dead and or not, rights bearing to be. And there’s a brilliant French theorist, Jacques Rancière. He calls this the distribution, he calls it in French, the distribución du  sensible, uh, so he means the, the partition—distribution of

Rachel: distribution of sensitivity—

Robert: Exactly. And ‘sensible’ in that full French word, not sensible, but that which sense and here, maybe we circle back to Gaza a little, because he says that on the far side of the distribution of the sensible lies that which is deemed by power to be inaudible, invisible insensate and beyond the reach of rights, of life. And, then when you cross that frontier you become, or power deems you to become, audible and visible and living. And it seems to me that in many ways, Gazans have been placed by mainstream media beyond the distri—the boundary that marks the distribución du sensible, and  rivers for a very long time have lived beyond that, beyond that boundary. And I’m not in any way setting up an analogy between the human and the riverine here. Some of the, one of the objections that’s often made to rights of nature ideas is that they’re, in some ways, zero sum. That when we grant rights to a river, we automatically subtract them from humans somewhere. That’s not the case.

Rachel: Nonsense.

Robert: Nonsense. It’s always in the interest of status quo of power to represent rights as a fundamentally conflict based zero-sum game. It is not—it absolutely does not have to be rights. Our negotiations, and at some level declarations of relationships, they are how we organize relationships between ourselves. So, the idea that rivers are, because they do not fit our categories of the audible, the visible and the sensible that they should therefore fall out with the bounds of rights is, um, again, is a very strong story. But the rights movement is complicated. I don’t know what you think about it. Um, what your instinct tells you.

Rachel: Hmm. I understand the critique that trying to find frames within the existing system to enact real change is quite a dangerous sort of illusion, if you will. But I do think that the law…hmm, I mean, I do think that the law is important and I do think that the law has actually, once you drag it into the present, has actually enacted positive change. The civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, you know, which have knock on effects to…you know, state spending, public health spending. And none of these things giving women rights or giving all people rights does not then just do away with violence, but it creates the legal frameworks within which they can then challenge violence against them, which before they couldn’t. And I do think that that is important in such a violent world. And I also think that perhaps what is exciting about giving legal personhood or rights to nature or ecosystems or rivers is that that river or ecosystem or nature cannot represent itself in course in court. And thus, we have to bear witness. We have to represent her, he—

Robert: They—

Rachel: whoever in court. And that means that you’re immediately creating a different relationship between, like it’s, you know, river is no longer, it is no longer inanimate object. Human being is no longer passive bystander to, you know, all the violence that’s going on. You’re creating an avenue whereby people can actually go into bat and go into protect the environment around them and finally sort of feel like part of that ecosystem as something that is suffering and is able. And so, I think it can act as a really wonderful bridge almost between the real world and then our weird human world um, that does need to be dragged into the future.

Robert: Totally. Dragged into the future is such a good way of putting it. And I, let’s condense that. I can give just a couple of examples of—

Rachel: please—

Robert: of the practicality of that. So, Is A River Alive? takes place over three main landscapes in addition to my own home landscape, Ecuador, Chennai in South India, and then Nitassinan, Quebec as others would know it, in northeastern Canada as it might be called Innu territory. And in each of them rivers are under threat and in each of them rivers are being radically reimagined. So, I was drawn to all those places by that tangle of threat and radical reimagination dragged in being rivers, the imagination of rivers being dragged into the future. Ecuador, you’ve already mentioned, 2008 installs, embeds these four rights of nature articles in the Constitution. And the first of those says that nature, forest, rivers has the right to exist, flourish, and persist, and to respect.

Rachel: Yeah

Robert: And here is where we get to that reciprocity question. Two subjects encountering one another as into beings, let’s say, and re respect is, and dignity. And these words are fascinating and flourishing. They’re, they’re active in this language and they challenge us back to that Is A River Alive? You know, can I respect a river? And the fourth of them, and this is to your point, the fourth of those articles says that any citizen can bring a case within the Ecuadorian legal system if they feel that the rights of the river or the forest have been violated. And that is what happened in the late 2010s when Los Cedros, the cloud forest in northwest Ecuador, which has become such a landmark for the rights movement was threatened by deletion, by gold mining interests. What a surprise, a Canadian mining company, and then the state mining company, an army from Ecuador. And a remarkable man called José DeCoux in alliance with Indigenous community leaders from the region and others who have a long history of resistance in the Intag Valley, brilliantly covered by Mongabay, I must say in a series of long pieces that I absolutely recommend listeners to, brought a case on behalf of the cloud forest that its rights and the rights for its forest and rivers would be violated if that mining were to proceed, and it escalated up the court system. Then in late 2021, this amazing constitutional court ruling came down from the e and constitutional court that ruled absolutely that violation of the rights of nature would occur.

Mike: Just a small note for clarification. The community example of Intag Valley’s court ruling was specifically for open-pit copper mining, which Carlos Zorilla highlighted in a previous episode that we published. Copper mining remains a threat. Gold mining, which Robert has mentioned here, is also a threat in Ecuador in the communities that he has mentioned here as well.

Robert: And I was lucky to travel to the cloud forest and its rivers with Augustín Grijalva Jimenez, him and Ramiro Ávila, who were two of the three judges who handed down that judgment in 2021. But they had never met the forest because it all happened in COVID. So, we traveled there and I was able to watch these remarkable thinkers who had drawn on this incredible act of moral imagination in Ecuador meet this forest that would not exist without them. The rivers that would run red with silt and toxins and cyanide from the leaching heaps and the trees that would be raised in the 200 species of orchid that would no longer flourish there. So, we, every step we took in that forest was taken in the, in the real of the living forest and the counterfactual of the vanish forest.

Rachel: It’s such an incredible story what happened. I mean, first of all, for that to even happen in 2008, enshrining he rights of nature. And then also, also for that wonderful man, this incredible character that you speak to the this guy who’s lived there and protected the forest in 50 years, for him to go stomping out of the forest and down to Quito and walk into a law office and say, “No, we have to do something about this.” And then engage in that legal battle. And I think it’s really important when the way that we tell, the way that we tell these stories, obviously counts because it’s not just, you know, a government doing the right thing, it’s also about citizens using the avenues that are available for them to protect their kinfolk, their brethren. I mean, that would’ve been a huge amount of work for him to undertake. And the lawyers. But the result is, I mean, hopefully that will last for as long as Ecuador is alive.

Robert: Well, I have to intervene there and say, it is under enormous pressure, that ruling. And so, though this is a globally resonant story that has become a, rightfully, a landmark of hope, I think for ecocentric law, ecocentric thinking the, you know, the spot price, for a tri ounce of gold when I was in the forest in late ‘22 was about $1,500 a triad and big tariffs. Ukraine.

Rachel: Yeah. Yeah.

Robert: Capital flees to gold when volatility is loose in the market so that forest, the mountains, the gold it holds is now so much more valuable. The pressure is huge. And, listeners who, particularly to this podcast are interested, I remain very involved there part of a, a, it’s sort of concentric circles of guardians of Los Cedros. We have Ecuadorian, obviously Ecuadorians at the heart of it. And then we have an international group. There’s a Los Cedros fund, there’s a management plan. These wonderful lawyers. Cesar Rodriguez Garavito and the Moth Group are all, we’re all involved. We’re working so hard and the people on the ground there. Jose Cueva and […]Vasquez and others are just, it’s a, it’s a life’s work on the ground to keep that forest safe. So it isn’t a fairytale ending, but the forest would not be there without that ruling and with—and the ruling would not have happened without those articles. So, it’s a story of hope, but I guess the concern is how fragile it remains, and also how rare it is.

Rachel: Yes, indeed. And I know that the Ecuadorian president who has just won his second term, I believe is, you know, was in Mar-a-Lago with Trump a couple of days before the election organizing to get, you know, the US military down to do something about drugs. And also, because I was in Ecuador when the last election happened in March, April. And I mean, I was amazed the vote, the result was announced four hours after the polls closed, which is incredible given, you know, that’s incredible. They have to quite literally get into the Amazon and get votes from the very many Indigenous people. They have to be choppered in. But you know, apparently Ecuador can count a lot faster than every other nation in the world. So, they are hugely, hugely under threat. And I think, from what I understand, the new president is also quite deliberately targeting the Amazon and the people within it.

Robert: Absolutely Los Cedros is on the Pacific side of the Andean Ridge, so cloud forest rather than rainforest that, but also absolutely under threat. And I’ll just note that Ecuador and Canada have just signed a free trade agreement, which is designed to absolutely facilitate and streamline these forms of, for the communities involved, often effectively world ending extractivist projects. Yeah. And I’ll just add the thought. You know, we know you and I know this, your listeners know this, but Canada’s soft-power laundering of its own export of atrocity is one of the most successful soft-power campaigns in the world. Three quarters of mining companies are headquartered in Canada. It exports a kind of technical, but also a social expertise in how to divide and rule, how to extract extensively from nation states, which are really vassal states to some of these global mining corporations. So I, yeah, I mean, bringing Canada to recognize it, the extent of its own complicity. And there’s a brilliant Canadian, Indigenous Canadian reporter called Brandi Morin who writes for Ricochet Media, who is just the most on, on it with Canada in this respect. So again, I urge listeners to seek out Brandi Morin on Instagram and for the work she does in online, in print as well. She’s the sharpest and toughest pair of eyes on all of this.

Rachel: Brilliant. Thank you very much. What’s her name and I’ll write it down.

Robert: Brandi Morin. M-O-R-I-N. Yeah. Brandi with an I. And Ricochet Media has run a multi-part series of essays by her on the Canada Ecuador extractive access.

Rachel: Good for her. I was in Columbia before I was in Canada, making sort of, well trying, trying to make these like guerilla style documentaries about the ecocide there. And we were sort of—smuggled is maybe a little bit dramatic—but we weren’t allowed to go on our own sort of you know, half smuggled into this town. And it was one of the most violent things I’ve ever seen. A Canadian mining company has come in, removed essentially the artisanal miners or employed the artisanal miners who had been quite casually mining the mountain for 500 years and could have done it for another 500. Um, has moved. The historic town center has quite literally, you know, sliced open the town and moved it in order to get deeper into the mountain.

Robert: Wow. Wow.

Rachel: There is no green within the town or around the town. And the river runs mud. It is vile. And for people, when you see a really dying river, it’s not that mud. It’s not just brown. It’s also gray. It’s gray and it’s red. Exactly as you say, because there’s things leaching out of the ore into the river. Um, and we were told by neighbors, essentially, you know, people are sick, you can see that they’re sick. Children are being born and they just look a little strange and they’re not growing as tall, and the heat and the violence is increasing amongst the neighbors because their social fabric was totally torn apart. And it was, I mean, I remember it took days to get that sense of the dust out of my lungs and also the heaviness out of my heart. It was the single most violent thing I have ever seen. The violence being enacted against the mountain, against the flora, the fauna, and the people, it was heartbreaking.

Robert: Well, Rob Nixon famously calls this slow violence in his great book, Environmentalism and the Poor, I think it is. But yeah, and of course, slow violence happens fast as well. It moves across different timeframes, but slow violence is the stuff that moves so that it doesn’t, again, fall within the regime of the visible, the reportable. It kind of creeps up as a poor…mining does fast violence and it does slow violence. And, we’re all entangled and it’s especially people like you and me, beneficiaries of it as well. But when you see it on the ground up close and the madness of what is happening, the brutality of what is happening is so raw. And the…when the court case was being heard for the Los Cedro ruling, it went on for a long time and many so-called amicus curiae, friends of the court, spoke on behalf of the forest. So we’re back to, you know, who speaks for the forest, who speaks for the river as well. The best fit we can do was this amazing polyphony of artists, musicians, ecologists, scientists, environmentalists, lawyers, Mónica Feria Tinta, the great British Peruvian barrister for nature, she spoke brilliantly well. And this chorus of voices rose up and eventually. Augustín, the chair of the judging trio there, and I had this amazing interview with him. And then when we were in the forest, he said, “the forest moved the bench, the forest, the voice of the forest spoke.” And it was like something out of a Hayao Miyazaki movie, right? It’s that amazing feeling of watching Princess Mononoke or Totoro that’s both a, an analysis of the present and a dream of the possible future. And, that for me was one of the most touching moments was hearing the thought that the voice of the forest and river might speak to law because the law is a storied thing and it can be re-storied it’s often spoken with a single voice, but of course it should be plural. It should be braided of many, many voices.

Rachel: What a beautiful way of putting it. And I think it also, to me, seems like more of an avenue to encourage people to get involved than science communication or then, you know, pushing for renewable energy, which you and I know has its whole on backstory. But is sort of the main go-to is like, oh, it’s fossil fuels. Let’s just switch people fighting to protect the beings that they live with in their area, be it the few trees that they have on their urban street, or be it the hills behind their house, or be it the chalk stream, just one mile from their front door. I feel that it provides, um, yeah. It’s like a gateway really to this wider picture of how is it that we are treating people with such violence? How is it that we are treating bodies with such violence? How is it that we come together to move past these 10, you know, thousands and thousands years now of violence and laying down your own time or even your own body to protect that which you love. That seems like a very human thing to do.

Robert: It does. It does indeed. And I saw again and again, just, and so often lodged in community, you know, with incredible individuals, but individuals always acting in concert and in relation. And a river is a, a river is a gathering. I sometimes, the best definition I’ve come up with after four and a half years of thinking about rivers is a gathering that seeks the sea, and communities at their best are gatherings. Activism at its best is always a gathering. And I just saw community after community forming around harm. But recognizing that despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline. And that hope is…one part of hope is imagining otherwise the dream of what might be. And rivers encourage those dreams ’cause they heal themselves so fast if you give them a chance. And the other part, the discipline part is having the firm foot on firm ground and recognizing that it will take work to realize that dream on the ground. And there’s the river story that I love telling now, the most hopeful story I think of the last two years apart, Los Cedros prior to it, is the story of the Klamath River in which plays out of Oregon and down through California. And it was damned by four dams beginning of the twenties. And from when the first of those went up for a century, the salmon couldn’t get past that dam. The river was drowned, became a series of, in fact, changed reservoirs. The watershed suffered more widely, the pall radiated outwards. And then the Europe tribe, among a bigger, wider tribal alliance and, and non-tribal alliance of, of NGOs and river people and, and people living in the catchment came together and they said, you know, let’s imagine a de-damned Klamath. And it must have seemed insane when they first imagined it 25 years ago, early 2000s after a massive fish kill, toxic algal bloom, almost certainly caused by stasis of the water due to impoundment. And then, someone was like, no, we can do this. We can imagine this water, this river, otherwise this watershed, this life, otherwise. And it took more than 20 years, but it happened and the first dam was blown, then dismantled. And the last of them was the reservoirs were drawn down and the last dam was fully dismantled in the late August last year ‘24. And life has poured back into that watershed. The salmon have come back, the wild flowers, carpet the ground that was once drowned, sunken land under the reservoirs. The prairies beyond the water, beyond the wetlands are starting to recover. And this life is radiating outwards. And when I think of how we have to imagine rivers otherwise, away from the pure resource model, I recognize that we can reverse the direction of shifting baseline syndrome. We can make it lifting baseline syndrome. We can make our rivers. touchable, then swimmable, then drinkable again. Drinkable rivers. Imagine that.

Rachel: God it just goes to show how lost we are in the world. That that is a rarity.

Robert: It’s a rarity. What Barry Lopez, the great writer. My mentor in many ways, polestar. He says we are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

Rachel: Yeah.

Robert: Yeah.

Rachel: And how lucky we are to still have rivers that would carry us forward if we could build them.

Robert: Yeah. Rivers of ideas, rivers of people, and rivers themselves. They’re still living.

Rachel: Robert, thank you so much for such a beautiful conversation, and thank you for joining us on Mongabay.

Robert: Thank you. I’ve loved it. I feel enlivened by speaking with you today. Thank you.

Rachel: Likewise. Thank you so much.

Mike: So, I first want to just say that I have not had the privilege of reading this book because I was reading another book for another person that we interviewed on the show. So, I’m just caveating that, before we dive into it here, but, there’s so many things and so many threads to pull on here. But I want to highlight something, for your consideration, Rachel, and, and that is that, you know, you, you brought up a really salient point in this conversation with, with Robert, and that’s the, the sort of like privatization of public, of things we consider a public good or in the public sphere and the deleterious impacts of that. And I feel like there perhaps might be no current better example of that for waterways than the United Kingdom. Which has been, you know, privatized. Its waterways and water systems since 1989 after the Thatcher government did so. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts. ’cause you grew up in the United Kingdom. So, I’m, I’m curious to hear your thoughts, Rachel, what do you feel about that situation?

Rachel: I did grow up in the United Kingdom. I grew up in Scotland though, and we have a different relationship to water than in England. Now, I’m not sure if there’s actually a different legal relationship to water, but the water that we drink in Scotland, the water that flows out of our taps is not fluorinated. It is straight from these, you know, great big natural reservoirs. Our lochs, it tastes amazing. I could still remember the first time that I went to England and I had a glass of tap water and was old enough to kind of register it. And I thought there was something wrong with the pipes. And I wouldn’t drink it. And then somebody told me, oh no, you have to drink it through this, like, filtering thing, you know, this like jug that you put in the fridge. And I tried that and it was to me just as disgusting. So, I think that quite automatically, Scots have a bit of a different relationship to water because our country is made of water, it’s made of blue and green, and our coastlines are so close together and we, how do I put this? We can taste that it is protected, whereas for the English, they can taste that it has been polluted. And they have that shifting baseline syndrome, which Robert refers to in the interview, that it’s just sort of normal for your water to be contaminated and for it to not taste fresh. And, and so, it’s now gotten to the stage where these private water companies that abuse our waterways as service providers to use Robert’s language are now actively polluting it with human ex excrement, essentially. So that we cannot swim in our waterways, we cannot drink our waterways. You cannot even go onto many beaches now in the United Kingdom. And these companies are still receiving, you know, bonuses, their boards and their CEOs are still receiving bonuses. There’s been lots of work done by sort of activist campaigners and not-for-profit groups who have shown that it would be much less expensive to actually take these water companies or these water sources back into, state ownership and manage it that way than sort of dealing with dealing with the lawsuits, dealing with the chaos, dealing with, um, yeah. It’s astonishing how bad the situation has gotten. And to think that essentially it came from a place, an attitude of this is ours to use, which very quickly becomes, this is mine to abuse.

Mike: Ugh… I mean, it’s unconscionable, quite honestly. Relating to this myself, if I may. If I may set some context for listeners, and you may already be well aware of this, Rachel, but I come from Northeastern Ohio where famously the Cuyahoga River for actually many decades used to catch fire, because of the oil slicks present on it. And this was a thing that, yeah. This is a really… a lot of people, a lot of historians sort of talk about and speculate about how influential the images of these fires were in the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. And some say, you know, it definitely played a role, wasn’t necessarily the catalyst, but had some influence. But regardless for, you know, since the 1940s, up until 1969 or so, the Cuyahoga River used to catch fire, because of all the pollution in it. And you know, from what I read in the Smithsonian Magazine, that the public used to see the pollution as a bit of a badge of courage, of industrialization,

Rachel: interesting—

Mike: and economy booming and jobs. But over time, over time, over the period of these, you know, decades and decades, people grew real literally and mentally sick of it to the point that they were like, we need to clean this up. And what I’m seeing happen and play out in the UK gives me, um…gives me some, you know, triggers some things in me about what occurred in my home country and in my home county for that matter. And I hope of course, that the UK government, takes some action on this and, you know, makes this commodity that everyone relies on. And not a commodity, but an actual river, waterways. And makes it palatable for both nature and for all the people that rely on it. But yeah, I just wanted to draw that parallel, from what occurred in the us because it was immediately striking to me when I listened to this conversation.

Rachel: I love that you used that word triggered or trigger some in this context, because I’m actually writing about this in my book. Literally. It’s the chapter I was working on this week. Um, how in our culture, we’ve kind of created mechanisms to avoid being triggered. You know, like we have these like trigger warnings. i.e. don’t read this, don’t watch this, don’t experience this unless you are willing to possibly trigger your own memories or lived experiences of trauma. It typically is. And while some safeguards are good, I do think that actually what I’m arguing is that these triggers are a mechanism of our body warning us of like, we have seen this before. We know what this is. You have intimate knowledge of this. And so, whether it’s you watching what’s happening in the UK and finding it triggersome because you really know what that destruction means and what that damage means and what that pollution means, or whether it’s somebody looking from a more general perspective and looking at the willingness with which we’re able to pollute bodies of water when we ourselves are 80% water and being triggered in that way of like, the, the bodies are not safe. Our bodies are not safe in this, in this system. I think it’s actually really, really important. It’s kind of like tuning into this wider web of collective experience, kind of like, you know, a system of waterways itself, how information will travel down, the different estuaries and tributaries, and eventually meet, meet the sea, this like giant pool of information really. And I that I kind of, if I could like wave my magic wand, um, I think that would maybe be something that I would do, and it would be read raw. It would hurt. But for us, for like human beings everywhere as they do in so many cultures already. To see damage being inflicted on other bodies and like feel it in their own because it is the same thing under this system of exploitation and abuse. Like it does eventually reach our bodies.

Mike: It does Rachel. It does indeed. Um, I really appreciate the fact that, Robert chooses to title the book as a question because I think it forces us to examine so many things about what we as humans choose to do. How we choose to treat one another, and again, how we choose to treat our environment. Because as I’ve heard it said by many environmental activists, how we choose to treat nature is how we choose to treat each other.

Rachel: Yeah.

Mike: And so, I think that this book forces that question forces us to examine this and the situation that we see in the UK and the situation we saw in the US in the seventies,  forces us to examine whether or not we’re okay with the costs of this unfettered industrialization, which is a larger question that I feel like we really, really should be examining. And I hope that people do examine that with some care.

Rachel: I agree. I think that that question is being examined in like South America, Central America. It, for me, when I was traveling around there making films, it was what was often reflected back to me of like, we don’t want your progress. We don’t want your industry, like we see what it has done to you and for us, this is not the future that we wish to be sort of enclosed into, but I think in like countries where we come from, it’s really difficult for people to imagine it being any other way.  Which I think is why the conversation has got stuck on like, oh, energy substitution, right? We’ll just use one, a different thing to power all of this stuff that is really difficult to imagine the end of or being slightly different. But I think that conversation is happening elsewhere where people who are like if you wanna look at a chronology, say 10 or 20 years behind in the industrialization process, seeing the effects and going, no, thank you.

Mike: So what you just said is really, really cool because when I was speaking with Carlos Zorrilla about this, and, you know, he like very much was clear like, yes, we are in a climate crisis. We do need to change the way we’re doing things. But he very specifically said, and I’m paraphrasing him slightly here, that it doesn’t make sense to him to see these other technologies being heavily invested in if we’re not investing in things like public health, public transportation first, because those are the things we all need. We don’t need a hydroelectric airplane before we need a train, you know, that can take us from to and fro. And if I could tomorrow give up my car, I would absolutely do it. I would, in fact, if I never had to drive again for the rest of my life, I would be ecstatic.

Rachel: Mm-hmm.

Mike: So, and he asks the audience who’s listening to really examine, do we really need this stuff? And this is a conversation that I had with other people and talking about the circular economy. It’s like, yes, look, technology can be very good and it should be a part of the conversation, but what do we need? Like, what are our needs? And how do we fulfill those needs? Is again, another thing I think that people like Robert are forcing us to examine.

Rachel: I love that conversation with Carlos. I love that you can, you can hear in his voice how weathered he is and how knowledgeable he is. And I think that he pointed to like the different directions of the system, really effectively, like looking at the impact of industry, what they do, how they are set up in order to continue doing that with structures like the internet investor, state dispute, settlement court, which is the shadowy arm of the World Bank that nobody knows about, where corporations get to sue nations, but not the other way around. But also looking at us like, what is it that you need? Like of course this entire crisis is not purely because of consumer demand, like we are also deliberately engineered to quote unquote need more in order to survive. I mean like good luck living today without a smartphone in the Western world, if you want to access your bank or pay for your parking or whatever. But nonetheless, like we do still have a responsibility we have a responsibility to begin not only cutting materially, but imagining how we could live differently. And I loved when he was like, electric cars are to a waste of time. Like, why are we even doing this when we’re not thinking about buses? Like, sure, electrify, but electrify the things that could have the impact. The bus.

Mike: Yeah. I mean like, and there are like electric buses. There are buses in the city I live in. There’s like, you know, that, that roll along electric buses, I’ll take an electric bus before I ever even think about buying another car again. I would just far, far prefer if I could take public transit. Um, and I get that there are use cases where you can’t do that. Obviously. But like on a massive scale, if we aren’t going full bore into getting people like the basic necessities of the things they need, what are we doing?

Rachel: Well, exactly, and I think that people are really coming around to this idea that, oh, maybe the way that this thing that we live in, this economic and political and geographical kind of system wasn’t really designed actually to provide us our needs, but instead designed to sort of maximize the wants of, you know, a very, very small group of people. And what can we do about that? But I mean, of course there are use cases for like individual, how do I put this? Yes, of course. And there I think there will always, or for quite a long time, also be use cases for like fossil fueled vehicles. And I don’t think that there’s necessarily, bad, because if you think about very, very, very rural communities on, um, you know, continents where most of the cities are still coastal, like the huge continent of Africa, probably it might be quite helpful for villages to share or have a shared fossil fueled vehicle occasionally in order to get around or in order to get supplies or whatever. But like, yeah, 4.4 billion people, over half of the world’s population currently live in cities. That is a sign, first of all, of like the, the direction of travel. The UN estimates that 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. Nobody in a city should have individual possession of these high material, high energy machines, like cars. You know, you could just cut the problem directly right there. Ugh.

Mike: I always like to point people to the city of Paris. And I know that the Paris is not perfect, and I know France is not perfect, I get it. But I do think that what they’re doing in terms of like literally ripping up roads and putting in cycleways and Pathways, um, and the results speak for themselves, pollution has massively dropped. And yeah, I think cities in the world could learn a thing or two from Paris. So just wanted to…

Rachel: Agreed. And Barcelona. Who essentially re architectured, I’m not sure if that’s a verb, but re architectured their inner city so that people are living in these sort of, um, penta shapes, meaning that there’s sort of green spaces and parks every, like 50 meters for people to gather in and play in. Which means that your social life can be quite literally sitting at a bench under a tree outside your front door, rather than constantly having to spend money and they deliberately integrate, you know, people from a lower socioeconomic class, higher socioeconomic class. It’s just a phenomenal piece of like, building and social engineering in the modern world. So yes, of course it’s possible.

Mike: Yes, in the housing co-ops in Barcelona, which, uh, you know, yeah, right there a solution for housing crises that we’re experiencing. Like, I will, I would live in a housing co-op, hands down.

Rachel: So there’s lots of reasons to be excited about people’s capacity to answer Robert’s question correctly, you know, yes, a river is alive. Yes, our communities are alive. Yes, earth is alive. Yes, we wanna do it better. And I think that’s really important. And it’s also equally important to, you know, keep tracking the problems that he identifies in the book, such as extraction and violence and abuse and displacement. And recognize that those are the forces that people who answer the question yes to are up against.

Mike: And beautiful conversation, Rachel with Robert. Really, it was, it was great. It was great.

Rachel: He was great. It was great. It was such a great way to start my morning. Absolutely. Lovely.

Mike: I enjoyed speaking with you. I mean, we’ve gone on for a little while, so I’m gonna close it down. I look forward to your next conversation, Rachel.

Rachel: Yeah, me too. Very much so. See you on the next one.

Mike: If you want to read Is A River Alive by Robert Macfarlane. You can find a link to the book in the show notes of this episode. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review. Word of mouth is the best way to help expand our reach. You can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor at our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay. We are a nonprofit news outlet, so when you pledge a dollar per month, it makes a big difference and helps us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. You can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline@mongabay.com, or you can follow us on social media, find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram Threads, Blue sky, Mastodon, Facebook and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @MongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.