Rivers Are People, Too

By Noah Rothman

Monday, May 12, 2025

 

Well, they’re not. Not yet, that is.

 

If Cambridge University’s professor of literature and environmental humanities, Robert Macfarlane, had his way, a little clever legal maneuvering may yet undo this injustice.

 

The Economist recently reviewed Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive?, in which the author posits an answer to the question he poses: “yes.” With that premise fully established, he proposes the only policy that should follow such a revelation: recognition of “rivers as living beings, as indigenous cultures so often have,” which “is a useful step towards providing them with personhood and rights.”

 

I have not read Macfarlane’s book and don’t want to mischaracterize it. The banal reconceptualization of rivers as thriving, vital links in the ecological latticework does not, however, seem to have been the foundation on which the author’s conclusion rests. I am willing to be surprised by his findings — perhaps the extent to which rivers appear to respond to their own changing environmental circumstances or the variety of life that inhabits them. How that amounts to consciousness, existential self-awareness, and, thus, personhood eludes me, but there are certainly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

 

And yet, the argument to which the Economist’s readers were privy was far more metaphysical than that. To make his case, the approvingly author cites the extension of legal rights to Ecuador’s Río Los Cedros — a rather theatrical effort to block mining projects along the river, but has since resulted in a variety of surreal scandals including the dispute over whether the river is the “co-creator of a musical composition” and should, therefore, recoup royalties. In sum, he’s serious.

 

“Rivers cannot read books,” the Economist continues. “But Dr. Macfarlane believes they can write them.” Once again, this is not intended to be symbolic. Indeed, Macfarlane is “explicitly treating them as his co-authors,” which seems like a bad business decision. If the author got his way, Macfarlane would soon have to kick a portion of his advance to every tributary, estuary, and delta on Earth.

 

Whatever the author’s thesis lacks in comprehensibility, it apparently makes up for in tortured prose that nevertheless possesses the trite lyrical quality that never fails to impress those who believe they must be impressed by beat poetry. The hagiographical description of Macfarlane’s literary invention is sufficient to convince any skeptic that they’re being sold a bill of goods:

 

Assuredly deployed assonance and an ear for metre make the flow of individual sentences a joy; the occasional deployment of neologism and esoteric but apt vocabulary, along with a taste for anthimeria, punctuate that flow with ripples and reverses. Scales shift to sublime effect: some passages reveal the book as a whole in microcosm; others echo out to encompass vast reaches of time and space.

 

Again, I have not read the book. Even if we allow for the unlikely possibility that the professor wields his pen masterfully with talents rivaling the Bard’s, the thesis his “sublime” composition is meant to popularize is rubbish. No one can gainsay the Economist’s reviewer’s assumption that Macfarlane is sincere and his prescriptions “heartfelt.” But passion and verse do not alone make for a sound legal theory, much less policy.

 

“Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book,” the Economist concludes. One wonders who this doesn’t describe. Rivers are lovely, calming, majestic spectacles, and the biodiversity they shelter beneath their depths is of inestimable aesthetic and utilitarian value. That doesn’t make them people with standing in courtrooms. Extending that to them doesn’t empower rivers; it empowers lawyers.

 

The Economist might have been entranced by a metaphor in which rivers are anthropomorphized to the degree that deriving any benefit from their labors, including using their currents to propel turbines and generate power, amounts to slavery. It is still morally vacuous and intellectually bankrupt to extend the rights reserved for human beings to anything and everything, thereby diluting the concept of personhood to the point of insignificance.

 

It may lack the divine wisdom and compositional flawlessness that ensorcelled this reviewer, but we can nevertheless dispense with the author’s conclusion monosyllabically. Streams are good, but they do not live or think and don’t have rights. What that sentence lacks in sprightly vivacity, it has the value of being undeniably, obviously, self-evidently true.