Robert Macfarlane on the Lives and Rights of Rivers
57:52 Share

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of Internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go! Learn more at Xfinity.com. Restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Actual speeds vary. From KQED.

From Kikuiti in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. What should our relationship to the non-human world be? It has been extractive and one-dimensional. In California, we don't have a department of rivers, but a department of water resources.

In a new book, celebrated nature writer Robert McFarlane presents a different vision. The book, quote, asks what happens if we take seriously the idea of a river's aliveness. To do so, he daylights our own rationalist assumptions and introduces us to rivers across the world as part of a flowing process of unlearning. He's coming up next right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Robert McFarlane has written books about what we sometimes call nature for more than 20 years. He went underground and under land, up high for Mountains of the Mind, and out onto ancient trail for the old ways. All these books were remarkable and well received. As one Guardian review put it, "Finding a bad word to be said about Robert McFarlane is no easy task," and his new book has drawn bestseller-level attention.

This book is a river alive, recast the world with rivers as the main characters. In our area known more for its saltwater bay, thinking about the riverine in the Bay Area yields some interesting insights. Because we are not mere bay, we are an estuary too. A delta chopped into island pieces and floodplains filled and hardened.

Before the highways, our cities looked in two directions: west to the ocean through the Golden Gate and also northeast up the great rivers of the Central Valley to Sacramento and the Interior Bounty. Sacramento itself exists because it sits at the confluence of the American and the Sacramento rivers. So today we are talking with Rivers and Robert McFarlane. Welcome to Forum, Robert. Thanks, Alexis. Lovely to be here.

I want to start with what might seem like a ridiculous question, but I don't think it is. What is a river?

It's so the best, I think I've spent four and a half years thinking about this or most of my life, I guess the best definition I can come up with is, is a gathering that seeks the sea. And I say that partly because we tend to singularize rivers by which I mean, we imagine them as, as just their main channel, but that's, that's not how a river lives. A river is, is more like a tree.

A river has roots that flow from it where it meets the sea. And up in its watershed, it has branches and leaves, which is the vast extent of land that gathers water and forms and cups and channels that water into the form we call river. So a gathering that seeks the sea. What a good definition. Okay, next question. Okay.

It's kind of a deep query about the world that's in this text, which is what is alive? Okay, we're going to go in two terms, two terms, river and alive. Okay. Well, yeah, I think I began writing a book about life. I jotted down these three questions to myself about five years ago. Can a forest think?

does a mountain remember and is a river alive? And they're all good questions and they're all really of the family of questions that asks the big question, the mother of all questions, which is what is life? For me, life is being and that is being understood as a verb and not a noun. We live in

in relation. We are not sealed units, billiard balls that bounce off one another. We are complexly tangled into the world. And when we imagine the world as a hierarchy in which units of life kind of compete for superiority and altitude, I think we misunderstand the world. We live entangled in a web of being. And we return here to the definition of river. River as tree, river as watershed. And so when we start to think of a river as a life force,

and not just as a resource, then suddenly we begin to recognize how our lives are lived with that and those of rivers. I mean, is what you're exploring here, would you call it

Animism or is it something different? Is it located in some other part of the kind of branching of thought out there in the world? Well, I mean what's well animism is a tricky word. It had a it had a bad 19th century Let's say it was it was misused in anthropology to sort of designate quote-unquote primitive thought systems which of course

Now we are looking at and beginning, I say we, the kind of Western technocratized we are starting to look at and understand the remarkable sort of knowledge forms and systems that are encoded in those worldviews that were dismissed as animist or privative. So I'm always a little bit wary of it. Let us just call it seeing life where power often deems only death. So the world is...

More alive and more complex than many of us think. And that's why this question, is a river alive, becomes a kind of portal, right? It looks narrow and strange, and then you wiggle through the entrance of it, and suddenly you're into this vast valley.

philosophical space, but also one that takes incredible worldly form. I mean, you know, you're in California and the revival of the Klamath River, this story that's unfolded in your state and in Oregon over the past 20 to 25 years, reaching this extraordinary climax last year with the final removal of the final of the four big dams. You know, if you have a difficulty remembering

imagining a river is alive, well, imagine a dead river or a drowned river. We know what they feel like. So watching the life pour back into the Klamath watershed is a beautiful proof on the ground of the idea that a river is alive.

You know, you kind of referenced this a bit, but how did you decide how to approach the different realms of indigenous knowledge about these rivers? Like, you know, no indigenous group is monolithic. So on a reporting level, how did you know or how did you decide who to talk with?

Well, so I don't by any means only talk with indigenous communities. So the book exists across four broad landscapes. There's my own. I live on the chalk of South England and I live surrounded by an incredibly rare riverine ecosystem, chalk streams, chalk rivers, and they're dying. So that's the, I guess it's important just to say that in my country, almost every river dies.

is wounded or dying now. And that's the consequence of a story told about water, the story of privatization, rivers as liquid asset. And that has systematically kind of degraded and wounded our river system. And then I went to three places, Ecuador, Chennai in southeastern India, and then Quebec, Netasinan, the Innu name for the unceded homeland area.

And in each place, there was a river who was under tremendous threat of destruction by mining in Ecuador, destruction by pollution in Chennai, and destruction by damming in Nétis-Nant, Quebec. But in each place also, these incredible radical forms of river thinking, river dreaming, river imagining were happening. So it was...

That was why I went to those three places, particularly in Quebec, Nitesana, and I engaged closely with the Innu community there, led by this extraordinary poet, Rita Mester-Kosher, a community leader. So, I mean, in terms of method, to answer your question very directly, of course, everything that is written here and quoted here has gone back through those communities for consent.

and for agreement. And I'll just end with one last thought, which is no landscape speaks with a single voice. Landscapes are polyphonic and they speak with more than human voices and human voices in many tongues and perspectives. So I wanted to let this book sing with many voices. You know, people may have noticed

a slip away from standard grammar in the way that you describe rivers. And I actually, and I love this. I mean, one section of the book that I just absolutely loved was your sort of explication of Robert Wall, Kimmerer's phrase, you know, kind of grammar of animacy. And talk to me about what you think the power of grammar is in helping us sort of understand this more than human world.

Well, grammar itself feels like a dry word, right? But if you follow it back along its etymological roots, you find that it meets magic. The word grammary gives us grimoire, the book of

spells, of magic spells. So if we think about grammar not as the dry set of rules that we follow, but at some level, the power that casts the world into forms of visibility, enchantment, disenchantment, then it becomes really important. And it is really important. And I think the grammatical slip from the standard you were alluding to is when I

I spoke of a river who flows, not a river that flows or a river which flows. So all the way through these years of river travel, river thinking, I began to try and embed that in my own grammar of animacy. And a lot changes when it's not the river that, but the river who we're addressing an individual. And I think one of the things we have to do is re-recognize the

the characters, the personalities, the memories, the stories of our individual rivers, rather than just thinking of water as the thing that comes out of the tap. But it also, yeah, it recognizes a neighbor, a friend, a citizen, a person, a presence, someone with whom we share landscape. And where I'm from in the north of Europe,

Rivers began flowing when the ice retreated 10,000 to 12,000 years ago and the land softened enough that groundwater aquifers could charge from rainfall and snowmelt. And that was pretty much the time when humans got there too. So the time of human flourishing and river flourishing in northern Europe in my landscapes is absolutely coeval.

I loved some of the ways that you described how people came to worship these rivers as not just co-equals, but gods. Naming them, you know, and Dana, later the Danube, this is reading from your book, Deva the D, Temesa the Tems. I mean, did you end up finding out...

ultimately where sort of your home watershed, like what it ended up meaning to people? Well, in...

in my country, we have made ghosts of our gods, right? So the naming of the old names, as it were, the godly names of our rivers is a symbol clash, a gong strike to remind us of the reverence with which rivers, they were sacred, right? And I will just jump to India and say that, of course, the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers in Northern India are

I mean, they're goddesses, they are divine presences. Fascinatingly and troublingly to me, the recognition of the sacredness of a river in northern India, for example, has almost no relationship to the preservation of its ecological health. So sacredness and ecological health are the Ganga and the Yamuna where they are most important.

worshipped are also some of the most polluted water bodies in the world. But in terms of my own watershed, I can name it for you. You could probably do yours. Ninewells Wood is where the spring rises. It becomes Vickers Brook, Hobsons Brook, the River Cam, the River Great Ooze, and then it reaches the sea at the wash. That's my

That's my watershed. I think everyone should be able to name their watershed and follow it through. I love that. We're talking with nature writer Robert McFarlane about his latest book, Is a River Alive? And we want to hear from you. How do you interact with rivers? Maybe tell us about a river you have a special relationship with. The number is 866-733-6786, forum at kqed.org. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need. The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Welcome back to Forum. We're talking with writer Robert McFarland about his latest book, Is a River Alive?,

And of course we're also going to try and fold you into this conversation. Maybe you've experienced the aliveness of a river in your life. Maybe there's a moment you could tell us about. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email [email protected]. Find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQED Forum.

Casey over on our Discord writes, "I went on a canoe trip to Colorado over Memorial Day weekend. We ended up having a conversation about whether a river is defined by the unique water molecules flowing through it or its entire connective tissue from start to end. Is a river the water flowing through it or is it the space it occupies?" I'm a dialectical thinker, Casey says, so my answer is both and.

That's a great comment. Alexis, can I ask you? It's a question I love asking people. Sure. And the question is, who are your rivers? Who are the rivers that have flowed through your life now, but also in the past that you relate to? It's an interesting question. I mean, I was born in Mexico City, so more of this lake environment. But I actually really spent a lot of my adolescence in a riverine environment I didn't even recognize as such.

on a tributary of the Columbia River, actually called Lake River. I had a creek in my backyard that ran down to the east fork of the Lewis, which then connected to the other Lewis, which then flowed into all these other lakes. And the thing I kept thinking about as I read this book is how my home terrain

Never made sense to me until I started looking at it on Google Earth as a series of interconnected streams and ridges. You know, it's all water where I grew up in some ways. Wow. That's I love that. We could call it like the watershed vision. Right. So where you you pare away the other data layers on a map and you just lay bare the.

the river systems and one of the things you realize if you do that and there's some amazing maps that do this for every state every nation

continents, grasshopper geography are the folk who do this and they just set the river systems glowing. And what you see is that it looks like the human vascular system, right? We talk about rivers as the veins and arteries of the land and it's a metaphor, of course it is, but also it recapitulates that scale

our own branching vascular system, our life system. So I find that affinity very beautiful and very true. Well, and one of the... There's quite a famous map, actually, in part because it's at the Oakland Museum of California, but it's an Oakland Creek map. It shows the creeks of sort of the East Bay, you know, across from San Francisco and...

and where the streams are daylighted you know it is the the lines are connected where they're undergrounded there all the lines are sort of dotted and separated and it felt like almost like two on the nose as a metaphor about what happens when we put these creeks underground you know right well you give you you raise that beautiful term daylighting which i i is such a a

literal act and a powerful metaphor. So we build our cities first on rivers and then over rivers and we bury them and they become ghosts. They become prisoners. They become entombed in culverts and they run under cities. And

The act, the urban planning act of restoring those buried rivers to the surface of cities is sometimes called daylighting. And where it's happened, it's almost always had quite remarkable social effects. And you start to see that, again, the river's life, when it becomes visible and palpable and audible...

enlivens the city's life. And I find that very beautiful. I have this other proposition that I kind of guerrilla version of that, like a budget version of that, which is that wherever a city is built over a river, we should in blue paint, we should trace the course of on the pavement and asphalt and road. So we know when we're driving over a river, we know when we're walking over a river, and we know that our cities are built

on rivers. Yeah, I love that. You know, the bioregional tradition is quite strong here in Northern California. And I was paging through the old Gary Snyder book, The Practice of the Wild. Does that inform your work? Like, did that particular movement inform your work?

And not directly. I mean, I'm very, very aware of it, of course, aware of Snyder. And, you know, one day, one impossible day, I dream or have dreamed of making that pilgrimage up to see Mr. Snyder. But he doesn't need me. So I'll just imagine him in my dreams. And yeah, Watershed. So we...

So watershed thinking is what it's called in broadly in ecological terms. But it does have. So it did inform me because a book has a watershed. I think that's there are so many ways in which books or this book are like like rivers. And one is that they braid. They braid rivers.

I mean, I've always spoken against this phrase nonfiction. I find it such a weird designation. It's like the thing that is not fiction, the thing that can't do the things that fiction can do. For me, nonfiction is this immense space of possibility and opportunity. And I try to bring in, you know, I learn fictional techniques, the book, my books are full of dialogue and so forth. They braid anthropology, cultural history, hydrology, et cetera, et cetera, along with a kind of reportage and a kind of,

of poetry so the book the book gathers from many sources the book braids many sources so watershed thinking is true for writers as it is true for hydrologists and ecologists I think

And the set pieces in this book, you know, the three visits to the different rivers to meet them really are beautiful and have this narrative structure kind of on these quests. And each one has its own kind of flawed travelers and wizards and healers. You're in a, you're going to play the role of all those in some of these. Let's talk a little bit about the trip that you took to the Los Cedros Cuyahoga.

cloud forest in Ecuador. And what could you learn from going to that place that you couldn't learn just from interviewing people or reading histories or legal? Oh, that's such a good question. And this book was written with the rivers.

and the forests. And I say very early on, I say the rivers were my co-authors here. And I mean that non-trivially. I don't just mean I sat by the side of a river and wrote this. I mean that the thinking that was done was so site-specific and kind of motion-sensitive in collaboration, participation with the rivers that it became fundamental to it. So Los Cedros is a cloud forest in northern Ecuador that was profoundly threatened

by mining activity. Out of it run these clear-watered rivers that are some of the most exquisite water bodies I've ever seen, I've ever moved in. And

I was drawn there because of an extraordinary ruling in 2021 that saved Los Cedros from destruction by the mining interests. And that ruling drew upon the so-called rights of nature articles in the Ecuadorian constitution from 2008, which said that the river, the forest, nature, Pachamama, has the right to exist, to flourish and to persist.

And it made those articles also make the state the guarantor of those rights. So a case was escalated in the Ecuadorian court system all the way to constitutional court level in the end to recognize that the rights of the forest and the rivers would be violated by highly destructive mining intervention. So the forest I went to, walked into, met with the judges who had handed down that ruling should not have existed. So that's one answer is that I lived in that forest in a kind of flicker of lightness

Life not life and this cloud forest I want people to sort of get in into the mode of it and one of the ways that you've tried to do this is with this piece of music working with the more-than-human-life Collective right you compose this song with the musician Cosmo Sheldrake and

You went out into the forest and kind of wrote the lyrics and recorded, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. We wrote it with the forest. That's the central claim of the song in various ways. But listeners will be able to hear one of the ways in which the forest participates. Oh, here we come. Here we go. Here we go.

Please, speak in your leaves, please, and streams, tell me your dreams.

Trees, speak in your leaves, Pleas'n streams, tell me your dreams. Birds, sing me your rhymes, Pleas'n stones, teach me your time.

So we were just listening to a song composed with Los Cedros. Talk to me about the composition of this.

Where are you? What would we see if we were with you as you were working on this song? Wow, I've got a huge smile on my face. Thanks for playing it. It just summons me back to absolutely the moment of writing. Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliano Ferchi, my ecologist, and Cesar Rodriguez Garavito and I are in a tiny clearing very high in this cloud forest. We're near the source of where the rivers are born by that cloud forest.

And we are surrounded by life. So some of the sounds that you will have been able to hear, that kind of...

almost like the pitter patter of feet they sounded like feet so that is actually bat that's bat sonar which cosmo has recorded on a on a sonar listening device and then if you listen to that on binaural on on headphones you'll they'll pass through your skull you can hear tucan barbettes you can hear overseas kind of cicadas um chirping you can hear the wind in the leaf so the

The cloud forest at that altitude is the orchestra, is the percussion section, is the vocalist. And then through it and with it weave these human voices. And I wrote those first lines, trees speak in your leaves, please, and streams tell me your dreams. They just...

fell out of my mind. It like fell straight onto the notebook page. Not bad, Robert. Well, don't thank me. Thank the forest. It's like the forest did that, shaped those. And then Cosmo, who's a wizard with...

the world of sound and the world of music making and can play 27 instruments. He, he began to compose that and then used, used his, one of his phone programs to start to layer it and braid it. So it was made like the forge of its making was, was hot in the moment and it was high in the cloud forest. It's gorgeous. Let's bring in Hillary in Castro Valley who wants to talk about a river in her life. Welcome Hillary.

Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead. Hi there. Yeah, I grew up on the Trinity River, way up, way northern California, almost to the Oregon border. Pretty magical place if you've never been. A very rural and literally my backyard. And we were taught as children to respect the river, that it's this...

this forest of nature and it's beautiful and it's, it's alive. That is very much alive. And it changes every year, you know, that the Eddie's and the kind of the current, you really have to know it and feel it. Um, it,

It can be very serious if you don't, but it's also very beautiful if you do. And swimming amongst steelhead and salmon and people living off of those creatures. And I just wanted to share. It's such a wonderful place for me to remember and to now bring my children to. My husband and I feel so connected to that particular river that we named

our son, River, our first child. And people often ask, why, where did River come from? And it's, it's almost too difficult to say that it's just this magical place that you need to know. And, um, it's a, it's a life force, you know, it's just the biggest force that we know. And we wanted him to have that. So thank you for this. This is so, so beautiful and so special to me. So thanks for, thanks for bringing this to everyone. Oh,

Amazing. Yeah, gorgeous. There's, you know, I always think about there's a Richard White book about rivers called The Organic Machine where he talks about how for forever people were able to measure the sort of power of rivers on their bodies, trying to swim them, trying to navigate them, trying to feel them as she was talking about

Hilary was talking about swimming in the river. There's that sense of where you feel this kind of pulsing real power of the river. Oh, yeah. I mean, when we enter water, we surrender part of our agency and our body knows and recognizes the will of water, right? I mean, there are ways of thinking about agency. The resource model of rivers relegates them to a kind of background presence. They're ecosystem service providers. They're not historical agents, but the

water in the 99 million year old chalk that I live on in Southern England, which is dry land because it's highly porous. That spring, the spring I lived near, has organized human life around itself for six to 8,000 years with huge consequence. And it was beautiful hearing Hilary talk about that. And on an individual level, we know well and we know agency when the river's mussels are

have us. They hold us, they bear us, they carry us. And sometimes it's frightening. And other times it's miraculous. Yeah. You know, when we talk about the rivers in this way, and you try and think about the sort of legal and political status that they currently have. I mean, I think you do this very helpful move of describing the way that

a lot of the work on the rights of nature has really been a translation of

of these much older ways of thinking, right? It's new in that it's trying to connect into all these legal infrastructures, but it's also over the top of an older idea. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I mean, in a sense, these are the oldest ideas, what is alive and what is dead, what is life? So I always say there's only one upstream question of that, and that's Leibniz's great question, why is there something and not nothing? So we're starting way up the watershed here.

So they're very old, old growth, old flow questions. But they have been given this sharp and consequential and charismatic new identity in the Western language of rights. And in fact, thinking again about the Klamath River in 2019, the Yurok tribe issued a

a declaration of rights for, that is to say, a recognition of the pre-existing rights of the Klamath River. And among those was the right to flow. And that document, which you can find online, I think it's a very wonderful piece of imagining, moral imagining and writing,

It became part of the imaginative work that was required to free the Klamath. And Shane Anderson, the filmmaker who's been documenting the undamming, the de-damming of the Klamath, he was up in one of the old reservoir sections just a few weeks ago when the wildflowers were all in their spring bloom. And he said, the air smelled sweet and the river felt alive. I just thought, wow, yeah, that's it happening.

Let's stack some of these comments here. One listener writes, my river is the Sacramento River. As a kid, we camped on the river at Sims Flat, and I encountered true hobos during the early 60s sitting around their campfire on my way to fish for trout. It's a delightful memory of my childhood. Eric writes, I live two blocks away from Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, which I believe is the first daylighted creek in America. Ah.

It's one of the most vibrant spots in the entire town. It runs right through Berkeley's campus, actually. The Field of Green near the creek is always filled with people, and the small cafe there is a gathering place for the community. It's not a river, but it is a good example of how people are drawn to flowing water. Yes.

Yes, that's wonderful. I mean, I think of Munich, the city of Munich and the Isar, which was a river that was, because it flooded heavily with snowmelt from the Kandelwell Alps, it was canalized for a long part of the 20th century, just so it kind of rushed through the city but couldn't damage the city. And then this, again, a visionary act of urban redesign, they did.

over the 20-year process, they freed the river and enlarged it, reconnected it to its floodplain and allowed it to wander willfully. And now you go to Munich on a sunny summer's day and that is where the city is drawn. And so we see life being given back and forth, water to people, people to water. Mm-hmm.

We're talking with writer Robert McFarlane about his latest book, Is a River Alive? And we're also taking your comments and your calls about the rivers of your life. If you've experienced the aliveness of a river, maybe there's a moment you can share with us. The number is 866-733-6786. If you can't get through there, try emailing us that story, forum at kqed.org. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together. Xfinity!

Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Texas fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary.

Welcome back to Forum, Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with the writer Robert McFarlane about his latest book, Is a River Alive? Also getting your stories about the living rivers in your life. I want to bring in CG in Sausalito. Welcome.

Hi. Well, I was driving around and hearing this wonderful program this morning, and it struck me that Tresolito is on the San Francisco Bay, as many people know, and we're a maritime village, but the Sacramento area.

and the American River has such an impact on us here because as they flow down, if the tide's coming in and the rivers are full of water, there is this huge effect on safety, on beauty, and it's an alive river, a daylight river,

totally mingling with the bay and its tides. And it affects voters, it affects weather, and it's still a part of our lives, but a lot of people aren't aware that it's the impact of the flowing rivers

and the tide coming in from the Pacific that makes a huge difference on our lives. And also, Sausalito is very funny in that it's very hilly. It's kind of like Portofino in Italy. And we have creeks running down all over the place. Right. And we hear them on our houses. So Sausalito is just a field of rivers without rivers. Yeah. Fascinating. Fascinating.

CG, thank you so much for that comment. I mean, the scale of impact of these rivers coming out of the Central Valley, which are really kind of like draining the Sierras, right? I mean, this is just tremendous. And I think people forget that the San Francisco Bay Area, for a long part of its deep time history, was a river valley, right?

which is always the most fascinating thing to me, to try and imagine the landscape drained of the bay, but with a river running out through what is now the Golden Gate. Right, right. I'm loving it because I obviously don't know your region very well, but I'm loving hearing the imaginings, the reimaginings that are undergoing when you think with rivers, right? When you imagine with rivers, suddenly the landscape shifts, the weather shifts. There's two beautiful descriptions. Was it a field of...

field of rivers without rivers and then I think Hillary described a river I think she called a river a forest of life, which was an amazing amazing description. So yeah, I I just want to say what about death as well. We talked a lot about life but Rivers rivers are very important in the ways we think about and feel and recognize death and

As I've traveled around with this book, I found so many conversations turning to death. And that's partly because the three people in the book, three of the central characters, Juliana in Ecuador, Yuvin in Chennai, and Wayne in Nittasana in Quebec, they'd all, in ways I could never have foreseen, they'd all suffered. They'd all suffered losses recently, a father, a sister, a friend.

And I watched water really flow into and mingle with both their sense of death and their recovery back towards life. And many people have been telling me stories of grief, but also of how water helped heal them, helped them come to terms with, helped them speak through across the boundary that lies between life and death.

I'm glad you mentioned that because it's definitely the most surprising turn or leitmotif in the book is the amount of death that's in it. And also the amount of healing, though, this kind of co-healing between rivers and people. I've actually been to Chennai and I've stayed on the banks of the Adyar River right across from the Theosophical Society, right at the mouth of the Adyar. And it really was both shockingly beautiful and also so obviously troubled.

And part of what I thought a lot about when I was there was these kind of enormous office towers and then fishing enclaves just side by side with the river. And it seemed to really represent two entirely different life ways that were somehow existing simultaneously and maybe even...

I don't know, I guess, competing for a vision of the river. Absolutely. Oh, yeah, I know. I think I know the hotel you were, you were staying in good old Lila palace. Yeah. Lila palace. You were looking across to the broken bridge as it were, which is another symbol, you know, the British built it to try and cross the Adya estuary and then the Adya swept it away. And then the,

Tamil Nadu government tried to rebuild and got swept away again. So it's this sort of water illiteracy in a region in which water literacy is A very ancient and B very crucial. But you're right, the fisher folk as they're sometimes called, who have lived with water and their livelihoods thrive with that of the sea and the freshwater inland, they're really the voiceless ones. And so the

The people I traveled with there, Yuvan and others, were trying to imagine a formidably difficult task of imagining a just future for rivers and for the voiceless, whether they were creatures or, in this case, humans. And wow, that feels like hard work, right? You've seen what the Adya looks like at times, just poisoned, right? Zero percent dissolved oxygen, zero species count at times. Yeah.

Let's bring in Zachary in Vallejo. Welcome, Zachary. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. So this is a great conversation. So I wanted to tell not so much a river story but a creek story. So when I was a kid –

I grew up in Marin. I'm a Zen priest in Marin, in the Bay Area, essentially, these days. But I used to go to Muir Beach, right? And there's two – there's a sort of small watershed that feeds this creek that runs out at Muir Beach. And when I was a kid, it was completely dead. Right.

There was nothing going on, and it was full of garbage. And my least favorite story about it is stepping on a –

a glass bottle in the middle of it while I was crossing it and getting all cut up and all the rest. It was just horrible, right? And it was horrible largely because there were farms and other flood control activities up the creek that totally made a mess of it. And this is a creek that comes out of Muir Woods, so you'd think they might know better, right? But

But in the end, what happened was the Park Service, with the cooperation of one of the largest landowners, which is actually San Francisco's end center in that watershed, decided they were going to try and restore it. And they massaged the banks, and they took out a bunch of flood control projects, and they worked at replanting dams

species that you used to live there and so on. And the transformation is amazing over the course of, I don't know, 10, 15 years or something. I thought you'd go there now. And it feels completely alive and supposedly, from what people are saying, is also full of fish now, which is really great. And there was nothing like it.

So it feels great and it can happen on a sort of surprisingly short time. I so appreciate that.

Yeah, and you note that in the book, Robert. Thank you so much, Zachary, for that story. Right, that the rivers, we only have to meet them halfway, maybe not even halfway. Not even, yeah. Yeah, I mean, easily wounded, but if you give them a chance, their life pours back. It's wonderful. That kind of story that Zachary's just told where people recognize death or dying, right?

status of a river and then work to enable the river itself to come back. So there's a wonderful comment I read by the lead on the Europe Fisheries Department and he said

subsequent to the dams coming down on the Klamath, he said, the river is healing itself. And I think it's important to put it like that, that it's not that we are healing the river. We are helping create the conditions within which the river can heal itself and to recognize that agency as the rivers. And I've seen it happen on the ground. Where we can see ways of being otherwise, imagining otherwise, I sometimes think of these as forming a geography of hope.

And there are some stretches of some of our English rivers, which are geographies of hope. And there's one I can think of, the Naa in Norfolk, beautiful chalk stream river, where again, a lot of work has gone in re-wiggling, as we sometimes call it, re-meandering the channel, allowing the river to connect with its floodplain. And oh boy, has life poured back there. And I walk that river every May.

I can't do it this time because I'm in America, but I use the river as a path, walk upstream in that gin clear water and see Kingfisher and see Otter and see Pike and see Waterville and mayfly, the biomass of mayfly living and dying in the course of 24 hours. It's thrilling.

Amy writes in to say, a few years ago, I took a group of teens down the San Juan River in the Four Corners area. One morning, I took a moment away from the group as the sun rose. As the animals made their way to the water, an enormous indescribable feeling overtook me where I felt completely aware and attached to my tiny place in the matrix of the universe and time.

Wow. What a testament. And I recognize it instantly because...

way, way down the biggest river of all the ones I followed, the Mouteshika Shipu in Quebec, the Magpie River, as it's also known. After 12 days, 10 days, 11 days of getting buried and

and and and worn and rivered by that river i i had some a very very similar experience completely unexpected unbidden and unsought for and and i will i will never ever forget it and somebody said was this was this a human having a river shaped experience or a river having a human shaped experience that's maybe one for the zen for the zen masters out there yeah you

You know, um, you-- on that trip to the Miteshikau-Shipu River, you go with a traveling companion, Wayne, and there is this remarkably arduous trip that you're both being transformed by. And I was hoping that you could read just the scene from towards the end of the book with Wayne that just seems to touch on so many of the key themes of what you're grappling with here.

Yeah, I will do. We're way down the river here. Ten days down, maybe. Perhaps the body knows what the mind cannot. Days on the water have produced in me the intensifying feeling of somehow growing together with the river, not thinking with it, but being thought by it. This physical sensation of merging, almost of capture, has occurred far more powerfully over the past fortnight, I realize, than I've known before, even during longer journeys in the mountains.

Rivers are running through me, I think. I've been flowed through and onwards. When I mention this to Wayne, he nods in recognition. Oh yes, Wayne says. I've also felt something like this. I think it's important to recognize that this kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany. It's a chronic rather than an acute process.

Paddling into those headwinds, the appearance of a pine martin at the first river camp, being slapped and dunked and twisted by the rapids, I've not felt entirely myself, as if I've been somehow and not voluntarily and not entirely pleasantly hybridised with the larger situation in which we have been participating during this journey, which includes, perhaps, and above all, this giant body of moving water with whom we have all been flowing.

Wayne pauses. But as for how the hell you might construct a politics or law out of this kind of apprehension, though, that I just don't know. We scarcely have words full stop to cover even the basic phenomenology of what you're calling growing together with the river, let alone political structures that might accommodate it.

That said, it seems to me that the encounter with these hugely other beings is where the making of a politics with the more than human world has to start. Without any sense of that presence, we can barely articulate our end of the politics, let alone that of the river. That was Robert McFarland reading from his new book,

is a river alive. Just such a beautiful-- I mean, Wayne, what a character. Wayne, Wayne. What a character. Yeah, he feels like he's flipped straight out of a late Graham Greene novel or something. I mean, he's just this wild, brilliant kind of philosopher in a hoodie and he's always testing. That's the-- that's the-- one of the things I love about Wayne, he tests everything. Let's bring in Lily in San Francisco. Welcome, Lily.

Hi, thank you so much for doing this show and for writing about this. This morning I woke up and I thought I've got to get to the river. And I think, you know, I do this often when I'm having some existential dread and I just can't release it from my body. I've got to get to the river. And when I do, I feel this huge relief because it feels like the water is flowing past me and through me and just watching it. Yeah.

But even better, being in it, you can kind of feel it just suck that anxiety, anger, whatever negative emotions you're feeling just right out of you. And I don't know why that happens, but it seems like there's almost nothing else that has...

the same effect. And it was making me think that, you know, it's hard to find anything else that has the same dynamic nature of awe as a river, that spiritual sense, but also that healing sense. For me, it's the Yuba River. That's the one that I always go to. It's so majestic and gives life, also takes away life, but is

is one of the most incredible rivers in Northern California. So just really resonated with that water flowing through you moment in the book. And thanks again for doing the show. Amazing. Lily, what you said...

Remind you have such good callers. They're smart Oh my god, I just want to speak with them all but there's a just briefly There's a line by the Nobel Prize winning poet Chesla Milosh that came straight to mind when Lily began her story then she the line is Sometimes when we hurt we return to the banks of certain rivers and just that that that poor and

pull to the water makes perfect sense. I mean, it's kind of the simplest version of something that's taken me 300 pages to explore. Of course we go to the river.

I also love that, as Lily said, you know, I don't know why this works, right? I mean, part of what I think is so beautiful about this book is it doesn't propose a mechanism, you know, in quite that way. It doesn't say, like, this is the rationalist part of your mind. I've talked to a bunch of scientists about the healing powers of rivers. Right. Well, I realize that language had to do a lot of that work. This isn't about

proof and workings and conclusions, although they are there, but they're felt in the bone and the heart and the spirit. And language is an incredible enlivening medium and power. It can resurrect the dead. It can make us fall in love with people we've never met, who've never existed. So I understood I needed to use as many of language's powers of enlivenment as I could gather or muster to bring the rivers alive for readers.

Stack a few more comments here. Eileen writes, "My husband and I walked the 187 mile long Thames path in England. The mighty river starts as a tiny burbling spring in the Cotswolds and ends past Greenwich at the barrier as it meets the sea. A true example of an all-encompassing life. It serves farmers, fishermen, vacationers, boaters, industry, rowers, royalty, and rats. This walk was a great discovery. The mighty Thames indeed."

Brilliant. Greg writes, "Hearing your interview made me stop in my tracks. I hadn't thought of it before, but I have lived by rivers most of my life, and my memories are deeply linked to my time and experiences with them. The Seine in France, York River in Virginia,

As a young child, the Rhine as a kid, the Sokol in Santa Cruz, Cordenisa's Creek in Berkeley as a young parent, and now a river, narrow river in front of my house in Orinda today. My life, a river runs through it.

These have been, thank you so much to all of our listeners for engaging with this work. All of you are really going to enjoy engaging with this book. Again, it's the newest book from the writer Robert McFarlane. It is called Is a River Alive? Robert, we're going to go out to just one last little bit of the Los Cedros because it's so beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us and all of our listeners this morning. I have loved it. Thank you all.

I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned first for a little bit of the Los Cedros cloud forest from Ecuador, and then another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim. Forum Ahead

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Hey, Forum listeners, it's Alexis. Did you hear that Forum is launching a video podcast? It is true. Each week, we'll drop a video recording of a recent Forum episode on the KQED News YouTube channel. We can't wait to bring you into the studio for our conversations on Bay Area culture, California news, and beyond.

Our first few episodes are out now. Just visit youtube.com slash kqednews to see it all. That's youtube.com slash kqednews.