Riverrun…The Rivers are Alive
Is a river alive? And if the rivers are alive, what is Ireland doing to protect them?
If you are going to write a book, especially if the chances are that after a long and distinguished career it will prove to be your last book, then start it like this:
“Everything, literally everything, moves. Nothing, literally nothing, is stationary.”
Boom!
That is pure James C. Scott, dragging you out of your head right from the get-go as he kicks off In Praise of Floods. Throughout his career, and in his landmark book, Seeing Like a State in particular, Scott has always asked us to think differently:
“Apprehending the universality of movement is almost entirely a matter of widening the temporal lens of our perception to encompass massive movements that are invisible on a shorter time scale.”
The movement Scott is focused on in his book is the movement of water, and of rivers: “Rivers, on a long view, are alive” he writes in the book’s opening line, a typically on-the-nose provocation from one of the best contemporary thinkers.
Scott, who passed away late in 2024, has left us with this important meditation on the natural life of rivers, and how our homo-centric relationship with flowing water is increasingly catastrophic.
Of course, as humans who have only been around for about 300,000 years, we find it difficult to imagine more than one human life span, and struggle to even accommodate maybe three generations.
But if we want to understand the natural world of rivers, mountains, or forests, we have to get out of our own heads. We think of rivers as static lines on a map, but they are no such thing: they are alive. And what rivers want to do, whether we like it or not, is to flood.
And, of course, we do not like it, so we have done all we can over thousands of years to stop the flooding, and to master the rivers for our own benefit, ignoring all the other elements that comprise and live in the watershed. Scott takes the example of Burma’s Iyeyarwady River, and explores all of the things that successive generations and governments have done to navigate, capture, exploit and pollute this great waterscape.
Maxim Gorky described the interventionist process as making “mad rivers sane”, a memorable phrase that only shows how the rivers are sane, and the men are mad. James C. Scott has described that madness brilliantly, and In Praise of Floods is a book to read and re-read.
Rob MacFarlane has enjoyed great success with Is a River Alive?, with the book reaching Number 1 in the best seller lists, an extraordinary achievement for a writer who can lyrically write that “Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea” when his poetic idiom is upon him, and who can then pivot to a legalistic analysis of the Rights of Nature movement, bringing us all the way back to Christopher Stone’s jurisprudential landmark when Stone authored the paper, Should Trees Have Rights? in 1972.
MacFarlane anchors the Rights of Nature legal frameworks and challenges in the context of three journeys he makes. Firstly to the Los Cedros cloud forest of Ecuador, the first country in the world to include Rights of Nature in its written constitution.
He then tacks to the east coast of India, to Chennai and its three rivers – the Adyar, the Cooum and the Kosasthalaiyar – before the book concludes with a swashbuckling river ride down the Magpie River in the Mutehakau Basin, which runs into the Gulf of St Lawrence in eastern Canada.
If you were to tell us that the movie rights to Is a River Alive? have already been auctioned, we would not be one bit surprised. MacFarlane’s three tales are epic, his travelling companions are beyond vivid, and for $150 million bucks you could make one hell of an adventure movie out of the book.
It’s a ripping yarn, even if it doesn’t reach the heights of MacFarlane’s last, most brilliant work, Underland, where his poetic and analytic streams flowed flawlessly together.
The book’s importance, however, is likely to lie less with its status as a work of art, and more with its status as a polemic on behalf of the Rights of Nature. The book will introduce thousands of readers to an abstruse concept which continues to provoke derision and scorn, and will imbed these ideas into a new generation who have seen their rivers polluted, corrupted and selfishly destroyed. MacFarlane has done us some service indeed.
These books might seem to be about issues in other lands that are faraway and of no concern to us, but their relevance actually strikes close to home. Last June 7th, in her fine column in The Irish Times, Ella McSweeney reported that: “According to a proposal from the Department of Housing, certain iconic stretches of waters on the likes of the Shannon, Boyne and Blackwater rivers will no longer be viewed as needing restoration. Instead, they will face a future as engineered channels.”
Despite the EU Water Framework Directive which seeks to safeguard waterways, our Government plans to increase the number of “heavily modified water bodies” by more than 1,312 per cent, exempting these waterscapes from the strictures of the EU Directive.
Ella McSweeney writes that: “Across Ireland, communities are volunteering to revive the life in their local waters. If this legal loophole is allowed, their efforts will be in vain. In effect, the State would be like a doctor unfit to practice – turning its back on the patient instead of providing care. As a result, many of our most treasured rivers and lakes will, without question, slip beyond recovery.”
Will our Irish rivers be alive? No. They will be dead. How’s that for home-grown, short-term thinking. The rivers are sane. The men are mad.
