Is a River Alive?

Transcript

Emmanuel Vaughan-LeeRobert, welcome to the show. It’s wonderful to be in conversation with you again after what feels like too long.

Robert MacfarlaneOh, you too, Emmanuel.

EVLSo, your relationship with the living world is a long and storied one, writing of mountains, underlands, the language of place, to name a few. And I’ve loved reading your books over the years and was very moved by Is a River Alive? and what you share in it. And you’ve written that out of your ten previous books and decades of writing, you’ve never known a subject with the urgency of the one in this one. Why is this?

RMWell, the last book—a big book—I wrote was about rock and stone, and that bides its time and is patient. And it took eight years, which felt like a bit of a rush for five billion years of Earth-universe history. But water, water is always moving. And there was an ancientness to this question, the question that gives the book its title and animates its pages. And there was an urgency to it as well. I mean, just very boldly stating it: in my country, all our rivers are dying. It is the way it is. In England and Wales, we have not a single river in good overall health. We have fourteen percent in good ecological health, zero percent in good chemical health. And we look around— I live on the chalk as you know, Emmanuel, and we have the chalk stream network here in the south of England. There’re about two hundred to three hundred chalk rivers in the world; eighty percent of them are in England. They are as fragile and rare as coral reefs, and they are dying. And that strikes the heart. But extraordinary things are happening in response to that crisis. So that’s the urgency.

And also, as you know, since rivers run through everyone, when you begin a subject like this, everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has a river to speak of and sing of. And that’s wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. It is torrenting.

EVLYou know, something that’s made clear from the beginning of the book is that we’re suffering a collective forgetfulness of our deep primordial entwinement with rivers; that in the immense growth of our human spaces and our cities, we’ve lost sight of the fact that many of the places we’ve embedded ourselves in was because there was first a river there. I wonder if you could speak about this and what’s at stake if we continue to forget this, this origin.

RMWell, I mean, it’s the title of one of the most perfect pieces of English prose of the twentieth century, I think: A River Runs Through It. Well, a river runs through each of us, and a river runs through human history. The first cities grew on the banks of rivers. I think of Uruk in Mesopotamia, which literally means “the land between two rivers,” between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Rivers run through almost all of our major cities. In many cases, they’re buried. You could walk the streets of London for years and not know that it had rivers other than the Thames. And there’s this beautiful word that I mentioned earlier in the book—it just rings as a metaphor as well as a practice—which is “daylighting,” which is where you bring buried rivers in cities back to the surface. You re-expose them to the sun, to the communities who live with them unknowingly up to that point and then begin to form back around them.

And I think what’s often called a public health crisis in our country, where the rivers are in such a desperate state, is also a crisis of the imagination. And it’s a crisis of culture and community. Because an ill river forecloses so many kinds of life-making and life-joining, and we’ve seen that shutdown happening here. Our rivers have gone from being undrinkable to being unswimmable and often now to being untouchable. And the costs radiate in many, many directions. It doesn’t have to be this way, and we can do something about it.

EVLYou kind of got to the next question I was going to ask in some way, which was, part of this forgetfulness also seems to be because a river is no longer seen as a living powerful being to be revered, but a resource that can be harnessed and sold. And you’re right, it’s become an identity contained by “structures of the imagination as well as of the land.” And that we’ve sealed ourselves against the various relations we have with rivers, “even as they continue to irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs, and stories.”

RMYeah, yeah. Stories. I’ve come to realize in just the last few days that we need new stories for rivers and some of those new stories are very old stories. And there are places in the world where they have never stopped being told. But I guess a writer’s work— I’m not a policymaker, I’m not a politician. I don’t have the direct ear of government. But a writer’s job is to tell stories and in that way to reimagine relations with, in this case, rivers. And I wanted to ask myself, and I did so by speaking with rivers and with river people, what happens when you reimagine a river as alive? As having a life, having a death, and even having rights? And it’s a hard work. It’s hard work, that reimagining. Right? It’s unlearning, I think. That’s because we are— I mean, you are different in this respect, Emmanuel. I think you’ve thought your way around these thought structures, these dams of, these conceptual dams, better than I have. But we are creatures of rationalism in many ways. And rationalism sees a river as what Isaac Newton calls “inanimate brute matter.”

EVLYeah. And it creates a desolation. And there was something that struck me about this in your book, and you point to this with this name for an epoch that perhaps is more relevant than “the Anthropocene.” You use the word the “Eremocene,” which means an isolated place.

RMYeah. It’s E.O. Wilson’s phrase. And I think, in a way, “the Anthropocene” is problematic in all the ways we know and have discussed. And it’s also sort of numbed now as a word, I think.

EVLVery much so.

RMBut something, yeah, something about the Eremocene. The age of loneliness. The epoch of loneliness. The loneliness that comes not from isolating oneself in a busy world and seeking temporary refuge, but actually from silencing the whole of the rest of the world. And the terrible solitude that will strike us, that is striking at us. Now, I was actually, just today— I’m working on a big orchestral piece called The Silent Planet. In fact, it’s a re-imagining of Holst’s, The Planets suite. And if you know that suite, one of the surprising things, which I hadn’t realized, is that Earth is not one of Holst’s planets. And so this wonderful pair of musicians, Delia Stevens and Will Pound, are reimagining the whole of The Planets suite for today but also writing a new symphony for the Earth, and I’m writing a sort of libretto for it. And it is all about what happens in the Eremocene when the Great Animal Orchestra falls silent.

EVLOn the Mutehekau Shipu, which is one of the three main rivers you spend time with in the book, you’re joined by a friend of yours named Wayne. And in response to the silencing of the more-than-human, he quotes Tacitus: “They created a desolation and called it peace.” And [in response, you] urge for “new ways of being that will leave us less alone in the world, less the desolate lords of Tacitus’ victory field,” for “our aliveness, as well as all life that lies beyond the human, is at stake.” Tell me about these new ways of being.

RMWell, I can feel the kind of, sort of, shivers running through me just hearing you read that Tacitus line, which speaks to us across the best part of two thousand years as we stand in the Ozymandian pose of the King of Kings, surrounded by, in fact, our own kind of shattered statues of ourselves. But we’ve struck a series of bleak and grim notes, and it’s important that we do so, that we stay with the trouble and recognize the crisis. But there’s a great deal of hope here. And I mean, you know, you’ve just lived through and watched the extraordinary story of the Klamath, the de-damming of the Klamath River…

EVLYeah.

RM…obviously—which flows down out of Oregon and into California—and the removal of the Iron Gate Dam, eventually, after a century. And then this astonishing moment last October when the first Chinook salmon was caught on scientists’ sonar going up where the Iron Gate Dam stood, two weeks after the dam had come down—270 miles up the river, up to the upper watershed! And life pours back. We can wound our rivers easily, but given the right circumstances, they heal themselves astonishingly fast, and they heal us too. And I saw that again and again in these river years, these river journeys, watching people brought back to life by rivers, as well as rivers being brought back to life by people.

Have you watched the Klamath story, Emmanuel? Have you been close to it?

EVLNot physically, but I’ve been reading about it and hearing about it as it came to, you know, first light about the potential that it would really result in the removal of this dam, and then the impact it had when it did. And, you know, what struck me about that unfolding was also the voices of the people of the Klamath River being given a lot of space to share a deeper understanding of what a river holds, which, you know, really is a challenge to what you just described earlier about our rationalist way of thinking. And in the book, you suggest that rivers themselves can guide us towards a way of thinking with them, that in their unruliness and fluidness, they offer us metaphors for which to imagine water differently from inanimate matter, which is itself inherently hopeful.

RMYeah, it is. And you’ll have seen that I take the opportunity to who rivers all the way through: “the river who flows; the river who runs; the river who reaches the sea”—not which. And English is a language of “it”-ing, of objectifying. In French, as you’ll know very well, it’s la rivière or la fluve qui coule—who—so they have the “who” present, but we don’t. And I also kind of scratched my head very early on: I suddenly realized that “to river” is not a verb in English. But what could be more of a verb than a river? And in a sense, the whole book is, in my own perception, watching “river” change from noun to verb across its course. And almost the final words of the book are “I am rivered,” after what happened to me on the Mutehekau Shipu, which we might come back to.

But yeah, there’s thinking about this idea of thinking with rivers. There’s that famous Levi Strauss line: animaux sont bien à penser, “animals are good to think with.” But rivers are even better to think with, I think partly because they’re even less ruly, less house-trained, than animals. There’s a wonderful kind of community leader and legal pioneer in Australia called Anne Poelina. She’s a Nyikina Warrwa scholar activist, and she’s really led the recognition of the rights of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River in Australia. And she has a wonderful line I quote in the book: she says, “The law is being used creatively to train human beings to listen, pay attention to, and learn from, rivers.” And that idea of rivers as lawmakers, as well as imagination shapers, as well as co-authors of the book that I wrote—absolutely they were my co-authors—is incredibly exciting to me. Because if we can allow rivers to make power, then we have a glimpse of an alternative possible future, a way of imagining both water and law otherwise.

EVLI want to get to the law piece of this, but first I want to introduce the voice of one of the many people you spoke to and spoke with on your journeys. And there were a lot of very inspiring people that you spent time with. But I perhaps was most moved by this young river defender in Chennai, which is in India, named Yuvan Aves, if I’m pronouncing it correctly.

RMAves, but yeah.

EVLAves. A very wise, very wise man.

RMSo wise.

EVLAnd he spoke about how, to be we have to be related, and that before we can know a river to be alive, we must first widen our understanding of the ways we are connected with it; because a river doesn’t exist in isolation.

RMYeah, Yuvan is extraordinary. If people read the book for only one reason, it would be to make his acquaintance, and that of Giuliana, Cosmo, César, Rita, Wayne. Those are these key figures whose lives are absolutely braided with water in all of these complex ways that water moves through world and through us. And, I mean, just bodily speaking, the notion of the water body is fully literalized for Yuvan. He lives in a very, very hot part of the world and a part of the world that is getting hotter with climate change, with global heating. And two brief consequences that literalized the consequences of climate change: One I mention is that turtle eggs are sexed by the temperature of the sand that they hatch in. And as temperatures have raised on that coastline, so the eggs of the sea turtles—the olive ridley sea turtles, who come each February to nest there—are being, their sexing switch is being flipped by the raise in temperature. At about thirty-three degrees Celsius in the sand, almost all of the eggs hatch as female.

So that’s one way in which the climate is entering the body and the system of an entire species. Even himself: his kidneys are tremendously vulnerable—he won’t mind me saying, he writes about it openly himself—precisely because the heat is sort of squeezing the hydration out of him. It’s sweating the water body that is him. And so he gets a lot of difficulties with that. And he wrote this beautiful poem recognizing his kidney as a marsh, really, and himself as this water body among water bodies. We know this; we know we’re so watery; we know we’re made of water, our brains, our skulls, our bones, our lungs, as well as our blood, as well as the obviously watery parts of us. And he even lives in a water city, Chennai, that alternatively suppresses and forgets and then suffers at the hands of its watery origins. And the work of Yuvan is to widen the circle of life, to bring water bodies, creeks, lagoons, back to life and bring the life of those who have been marginalized by the death of that water back to life with them as well. And then relatedness—absolutely. His entire vision is profoundly democratically inclusive across species boundaries. And that’s hard. That’s hard political work, especially in Modi’s India.

EVLLike you’ve already pointed out, the concept of a river being a living being can feel very foreign, even incomprehensible within a modern Western rationalist worldview. A way of being in which lands and rivers are alive is present, and very central, in many Indigenous cultures. And you point in particular to the Sarayaku people in the Ecuadorian Amazon and how “the water, trees, humans, and creatures of the forest” there form “a living thinking being,” and that this is less Indigenous belief or animism, which only locates it inside structures—like religious faith and anthropology—and more just is.

RMYeah. Yeah. It’s very— I mean, much of what you’ve just quoted, I should say, are the words of the Sarayaku themselves and not mine. So they form part of this extraordinary document called “The Living Forest.” And it was a recognition born of repeated extractive violations of their land and water, that they had to find a way to translate that which was absolutely self-evident to them, that needed no explanation, translation, export in terms of communication. It was, it just was, it just is. They needed to find a way of communicating that to power effectively. And so the community generated this extraordinary account, or a translation really, into terms that were just about comprehensible to what we might call a rational imagination: that a forest is an interconnected, conscious, sentient spirited system full of emergent properties, full of being, full of life.

And we can glimpse that. It turns out that nation states and modern conservation discourse can’t really. It has to translate it out of that state and across into categories that then fundamentally distort it. And that’s why when I was writing in conversation with Patricia Gualinga and other leaders from that community, it was very important to retain the intactness and the autonomy of that concept. And they say at the end, we will not allow this to be assimilated into conventional categories of conservation, which come to see it as, you know, biota or ecosystem. There are properties here which fully exceed that. And I find it a beautiful and a rigorous vision. And they’ve taken it to power in ways that are enormously inspiring and, let us hope, consequential.

EVLIn this sort of arena of talking about the beinghood or agency of the non-human, those advocating for widening our definitions are often accused of anthropomorphizing. But you deny this, and rather you write, “A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life,’ and in so doing—how had George Eliot put it?— ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.’” I wonder if you could speak to this a little.

RMYeah, I will try. It’s very hard, because, necessarily, we lack the language for it. And I find that that lack, that fundamental eventual ultimate futility of articulation, not a reason to desist, but a reason to keep trying. Once one dispenses with the idea that one will be able to generate a correspondence theory of language, which allows us to articulate the life of water, in any sense, in its fullness, and instead thinks, well, let us do the best we can, let us do the best we can, then you start to move into possibility. And actually that’s when artifice, when metaphor, when rhythm, when sound pattern of language become your kind of collaborators in this attempt to speak with water, to think with water.

But to return to the question of widening the category of person, I sometimes say a word for anthropomorphism, because I think it has understandably received a slightly dirty reputation in anthology particularly, and in natural history, for being seen as a kind of projective mutation of the creaturely. But I think the reason to speak for it is that when one recognizes what is human in the creaturely, one is also recognizing what is creaturely in the human. Anthropomorphism does not have to be a one-way channel. And so I think it has the power to mutate us back and actually, in its best forms, to summon rhyme and echo and relation and make them visible to us in ways that would not otherwise be available.

So when I began work on this book, I took a very clear vow, which was that I would not try to ventriloquize the river. I would not try to write pages of the book as if the river were speaking. I realized this would be a terrible sort of derogation and a mutilation, in fact, of the core philosophical ideas. And the history of art and literature and song are littered with the debris of attempts to do so. And actually, I think where we end up is what in theology is called “apophasis,” which is definition by negation—as you know very well—and a trope of the mystical tradition, in which recognizing that which cannot be articulated, one ends up shaping its absence by speaking around it. And you create a kind of shatter-belt, an Oort cloud of linguistic debris. And that, in fact, makes visible the shape of the thing which is unspeakable. And I find that very exciting. And this is another version, I suppose, of that idea that the attempt is one that fundamentally changes the way one thinks about language and self. So keep trying even in the knowledge of failure, even in the knowledge of the absent center. Does that make sense?

EVLYeah, completely.

RMSort of a theology of utterance.

EVLYou do point to someone who really does know how to speak with the grammar of animacy throughout the book, which is Robin Wall Kimmerer, of course, and her remarkable contributions. And something I truly loved were the three beautiful passages where you imagine or articulate an animate grammar for each riverscape you spent time with. And you point to how grammar not only helps order the relations between things, but that a good grammar of animacy opens new possibilities of encounter and can, in turn, help “re-enchant existence.”

RMYes. Well that word “re-enchantment” can feel very fragile, can’t it?

EVLYeah.

RMAnd it can feel particularly fragile at a moment like this, where an entire political machine in your country is dedicated to the opposite of anima, to the opposite of life, to the flattening of forms of utterance and relation that exceed the fiscal, the instrumental. And in many ways, it seems to me that this is precisely when enchantment is at once vulnerable and powerful, that disposing of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the “rotten diction” and replacing it with structures, forms, rhythms of expression, which open and are open, which relate, and which make possible forms of imagination that replenish precisely that which is under assault. So I find Robin’s formulation, as so many people do, such a valuable bracing of possible space.

And yeah, there were, as you say, in each— I came to realize that to impose a kind of unitary grammar of animacy, unilateral grammar of animacy, upon all of these waterscapes, these water worlds, would be precisely to deny the plurality and the fluidity of the subject and would be a dismal dead end. So instead of trying to understand what each landscape—the branching, reticulating hypotaxis of the cloud forest, for example, where every flow leads to other flows. And then the circulatory economies, in the best sense of that word, of Chennai, where water is moving through bodies, inhabiting them, shifting them. And then the extraordinary flow and current of the power of this immense Mutehekau Shipu, which I was sort of, I guess, taught to see differently, told to see differently by this extraordinary Innu poet activist, Rita Mestokosho.

EVLI want to return to that part of the story a little later—because it’s a powerful ending point for the book, but maybe also for this conversation in many ways—and instead return to a central thread that’s intertwined with the stories of these three rivers in the book as a whole, which is that of the rights of nature movement. And you explore throughout the book this movement in relation to these rivers and rights of water, rights of nature, but also how working in this space, in this legal world, there is a potential for a legal grammar of animacy present within all of this.

RMWell, maybe we should row back upstream a little bit and just sort of— I mean, I think the idea of the rights of nature is now—I think particularly to your audience, to the Emergence audience—probably quite a familiar one. It is a young legal version of a very old set of ideas. That’s the first important thing to say, is that these are formalizations within predominantly Western legal structures that recapitulate, in their best, ideas of relationality and cohabitation and coevolution that are central to longstanding cultures of great age, particularly those we call Indigenous.

And I’m happy to say, Emmanuel, that we speak only, what, two days after the Goldman Prize—the great Nobel Prize for environmental activism, effectively—has just gone for the second year to a female water defender working within a rights of nature frame for water. So last year for work on the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain, and this year, Mari Murayari of Peru. And she has lived and worked her whole life on the Marañón River, a desperately wounded river currently, in Peru, in a country that has a really hostile state in many ways to what we might call environmentalism. And she brought a lawsuit with her community to recognize the rights of the river and to protect it. And it resulted in ridicule, threats, personal risk, personal cost. She wanted it to have those rights to flow, to exist, and to be free from pollution to be recognized. And three years after they filed suit, in March ’24, a trial court recognized the rights and ruled that the Indigenous organizations and other government agencies could be the river’s guardians and speak on behalf of the river. And that ruling was affirmed on appeal.

So it’s wonderful to see the Goldman Prize recognizing that work. It’s really interesting to me to see rights of nature rulings starting to take shape, to drop in. But I have to follow it up by saying two kind of bleak postscripts: One is that the ruling is one thing, the implementation is another.

EVLRight.

RMAnd Mari Murayari and colleagues are now seeking funding and leverage to actually implement change in that river. And the second is that, shortly afterwards, the Peruvian government introduced a brutal law cracking down on NGO involvement in that country. And it’s hard not to see it, in part, as a direct response to this case. So they are really seeking, in ways that are visible in India, in Ecuador, indeed, and many other jurisdictions, to actually prevent NGO involvement, alliance-making, support, external money coming in to help this kind of movement. So in some ways that’s a good thing. Power sees trouble coming, good trouble as we would see it. But in another, they’re really moving to shut it down.

So it’s an exciting, busy, turbulent time for the rights of nature movement. It’s no silver bullet, it’s full of pitfalls and traps and philosophical and political problems, but, at its best, it is a kind of legal grammar of animacy that tries to make power rhyme with perceptions of a world that is far more alive than we usually allow.

EVLHow we currently legally define entities and how the law bestows rights doesn’t particularly lend itself to something without clear borders or boundaries, or something that is connected to a wider ecosystem. And yet a big question that you contemplate is: how can we generate an ethics or a politics that recognizes the continuity of life between ecosystems, between us and river?

RMYeah. I mean, a big side, a big question, a vital dream. I mean, bio-regionalism, as you know, was a key concept in early modern American environmental thought: Gary Snyder, among others, big, big proponent of watershed thinking. And I still think that is a beautiful phrase, a really, really helpful phrase. What would the world look like if it was divided into watersheds? Everyone lives in a watershed, even me here in flat Cambridge; even the Dutch in seemingly purely horizontal Netherlands. Everyone lives in a watershed.

And the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand, this now legendary kind of twin pillar of the modern rights of nature movement with the Ecuadorian Constitutions, inclusion of four rights of nature articles in 2008, and then the 2017 Te Awa Tupua Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act that was passed in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2017. Central to that—and it is a problematic act in some ways that I might return to briefly—is the recognition of the river not as its central channel, but as its full watershed. And there, river becomes tree with all of its leaves, branches, trunk, and roots, as opposed to just river as trunk, river as main channel. And it’s a beautiful vision, again, hard to implement, and I think slightly problematically confused in the Whanganui Act by the legal personhood attribution. So I’m increasingly thinking that the power of this movement becomes truest and best when, actually, we hive off the question of legal personhood, the right of the river to have standing in court, and instead focus on the inalienable rights of, for example, the river to flow freely, to exist without pollution, to flourish. I think legal personhood in its clear analogy with the possession that corporations as non-human entities, as you know, have the right to represent and be represented in court is undesirable for all manner of ways, not least the analogy that it draws between corporations and rivers, which I don’t think is one we should pursue.

EVLYeah. It’s frequently pointed out that the law is storied—it’s a malleable reflection of our beliefs and ethics—and as such, it can be re-storied. Considering the stories we tell about rivers currently, that their waters are resources, that they are inanimate matter, how could the imagining of a different story be a basis for reciprocity in law?

RMIn law? Well, first of all, I’ll mention César Rodríguez-Garavito, who of course has been a guest on the Emergence podcast before, when we discussed Song of the Cedars. He’s an important part of the first third of this book, and really a sort of guiding spirit to much of it. He’s a brilliant human rights and rights of nature lawyer, Colombian-born, now at NYU. And I remember him saying to me quite early on, we think of the law as kind of building itself into certainty as it goes along behind itself, almost like the Charlie Chaplin films, where you’re laying track ahead of yourself, and as soon as you’re past it, there it is forever and ever. But no, precedent is created, but it can also be over overwritten. And as soon as I saw and understood the law not to be a self-generating sort of monolith that merely extended its own power, but actually something which could be discussed, dreamed, sung into different form and different shape—the work is hard, but it’s possible. And some of these rights of nature rulings that I’ve read, including the Whanganui Act and the legal ruling handed down by Augustin Grijalva Jiménez, which preserved the Los Cedros cloud forest that I write about so much in the book, they’re beautiful documents. Their law is poetry, and they fill me with excitement and passion for a sort of quiet literary form almost, which often folds poetry into itself, but has an elegance of jurisprudential thinking and a hopefulness of ecological vision that I find comparably exciting to a great short story, let’s say. But with power.

EVLTowards the end of the book, the question of how do we know what a river wants comes up. And to you, the crux that needs solving within this question is not who speaks for the river, but what does the river say? Which of course is no small inquiry.

RMIt’s no small inquiry. Well, there are moments throughout the book, as you may have noticed, little moments where I kind of try to talk to rivers. I make long journeys to meet them, and I greet them when I meet them. And, but answer comes there none. There’s a C.W. Bryan poem where exactly this happens. I found it after I’d finished writing the book. And he says, “but I ask away, if only / to remind myself that the river / is just alive as I claim to be.” And I find that funny as well as beautiful, because I think what it’s saying is that, the fact that the river won’t answer back is a kind of—we’re back to anthropomorphism; sometimes we don’t want to answer back either—but yeah, illegible, alien, in fascinating ways. Who speaks for the river is a vital question, because that answers the question of who or what is the ligament between phenomenon and power.

And so the role of the river guardian, as it’s becoming increasingly known—the book is dedicated to the river guardians—is an absolutely crucial one. And it seems to me self-evident that we should be devolving and devising new democratic structures which allow the representation of river, of river voice, of river—well of river good—to be represented by, in effect, citizens’ assemblies of riparian dwellers, of those who truly know the river. And we see that happening. So the Innu community at Ekuanitshit, led in part by Rita Mestokosho, they co-devised the rights bill for that river—the first river in Canada, or Nitassinan, as Rita and her people would call it—to have its rights recognized in law. But, my goodness—

Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of This Planet), he calls water “the life that is living, that should not be living.” It’s this sort of shutteringly, blasphemous shatter-force. And I find that absolutely exhilarating, but yeah, I never met it with more consequence—or power—than on that big river in the north.

EVLOne of the conclusions you reach with your peers as you journey between and with these three rivers is that direct experiences, encounters, that bring one into an understanding of their presence—which is, as we just said, so otherly to us—must be the starting point of making a politics with the more-than-human world. It can’t be purely philosophical or intellectual, or rhetoric. It has to be grounded in real experience.

RMWell, I guess in some ways I would say this, wouldn’t I? I mean, I’ve spent twenty years putting my body in the way of places. And when I finished writing Underland, lots of people would come up and say, “Oh God, I could never do, you know … and you were crawling through this catacomb chamber.” And I felt like getting a business card that said, I do these things so you don’t have to. But I mean, to speak philosophically of it, I do believe that primary encounter generates metaphysics much in the way that a river generates mist as it meets atmosphere. That there are forms of aura, very literally put, of conversation, of sensation that are simply unavailable at distance. Remote sensing technologies, let’s say, will never pick them up, will never gather them and braid them. And I have also absolutely consistently found that going to a place, being in a place, particularly for a time, somewhat chronically, will result in surprise.

EVLYeah.

RMEven in our culture of absolute premeditation, pre-envisagement, where we can download route plans and flick through countless photographs of the place to which we are going, almost however remote; we can do our Google Earth flyovers—still, ground-truthing, as landscape architects call it, throws up amazement and astonishment, from people, from water, from creatures, from air, from song—all of it, right there. And that just happened over and again with this book, perhaps more so than any other.

EVLFor me, one of the primary underlying questions in the book is how we can truly honor rivers. And you point out that they’ve long existed at the threshold between geology and theology, and we’ve a long history of revering and worshiping rivers. And you write, “Each river is differently spirited and differently tongued—and so must be differently honoured.” Which just echoes what you just mentioned about the importance of being in relationship to place where these rivers flow and the experience of that then informing how you listen to and potentially respond. It’s like developing a love language for rivers, which is a different language for each river.

RMRight.

EVLAnd a different language for each place.

RMYeah. That’s such a good way of putting it. And I came to realize that one of the consequences of, let’s say, the rise of rationalism in our relationship with water is that—I paraphrase Herbert Marcuse—we now live with one-dimensional water. Water is service provider, in effect. And in so doing we have deterritorialized, homogenized, and flowed all waters together, such that they have no source, they have no origin. They merely exist insofar as they meet our needs. And the meeting of our needs is vital. The damming of rivers has led to the flourishing of millions, the slaking of the thirst of millions; has led to vast amounts of theoretically renewable power. These are not easy accounts of bad tech, good-natured dreams of purity. We know the way those dreams go. They’re bad dreams. Everything is complex, everything is turbid, the water is turbid.

But to me, a step towards a return to a political honoring of rivers, which may be something as simple as allowing them to flow, restoring them to cleanliness, restoring them to swimmability. Let’s just start with that easy baseline. If all the rivers in England could be swam in without falling sick, we would be in a transformed landscape. Let alone drink—let’s make drinkability the goal thereafter. We’ll make them swimmable, then we’ll make them drinkable again. That sounds amazing. And to do that, we recognize rivers as interflowing collaborators with one another, but we also recognize them as having their own distinct personalities, cultures, watersheds, regions, biotas, and this—we are a long way from one-dimensional water if we can do that.

And that’s where story comes back in. It flows back in at a great, great rate. The crisis is one of imagination as well as legislation. And that’s why I feel great hope, actually. I feel we know what we need to do.

We’ve not talked numbers, and it’s been good not to talk numbers, but just very briefly for American listeners: Our entire water system in England was privatized in 1989. We’re still privatized. In that time, around £74 billion has been paid out to shareholders. Around £62 billion of debt has been taken on by the water companies. And the result of basically asset sweating and capital flight has been a profound underinvestment in the physical infrastructure of rivers and sewage in this country. And this is what has brought us to where we are, but we have also underinvested in emotional infrastructure. There has been a— It has been in the interests of monetization to flatten and delete those forms of good relation with rivers that are reciprocal, that recognize individuality, the voice of particular rivers, the names, the identities of particular rivers. Because once they’ve been deterritorialized and homogenized, it’s much easier to extract from them, and harm them, to be short. So a reinvestment in an emotional infrastructure is what is beginning to happen in this country in really thrilling community-based ways and in ways that are changing power as well.

EVLI want to bring the voice back of Yuvan, the Chennai-based river defender, again. Another of his many wise sayings that stayed with me was: “My own spiritual observation has been that a small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering, that a love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities and whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious thing.” I wonder if you could speak a little bit about this and how it ties into your own shifting understanding of selfhood, and also holding of love of land and of rivers, which I sense grew and deepened as you wrote this book and traveled with and journeyed into these rivers.

RMYeah. Thank you for reading that. Isn’t Yuvan just astonishing?

EVLOh, gosh. Gosh.

RMAnd I should say, to place this small self that causes harm in context for the reader who hasn’t read the book, Yuvan—and this is breaking no confidence—suffered a terrible, violent upbringing at the hands of a consistently brutal stepfather. He eventually fled. And so he was heavily damaged physically and emotionally. And then, really, he fled and he kind of crystallized himself. That’s the way he figures it to himself, and it makes beautiful sense. He sort of—at an innovative, experimental pedagogical school called Pathashaala, inland of Chennai—he learned with creatures, with water, with snakes. He has a very good relationship with snakes. He’s the guy you go to if you want a snake safely taken out of wherever you live. And the expansion of his self from the tiny prison of pain that the cruelty had placed him within happened coevally with his encounters with relations, with kind people, and remarkable beings, and with land and with water.

And many people who are harmed don’t get to break the cycle of harm. And he did. And he has this beautiful fidelity to the category of creatures that he calls detritivores. So he is talking about the ghost crabs and the wood lice, the cleaner-uppers, the earthworms. The ones who take what we think is waste matter, what’s been “excreted,” and then they process it and they turn it to energy, as it were. And he was a detritivore with his own pain. And it’s astonishingly moving. And, you know, he wears all this so lightly. He’s very open about it. I’m not breaching any confidences. I found him and continue to find him, just seven years into our friendship, just profoundly inspiring—as you say, wise. But he’s not even thirty. It’s just an amazing story. So yeah.

And, yeah, he constellates; let’s put it like that, to use that phrase beloved of, or that verb, beloved of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. He places things in relation, and he helps me to do that a little better.

EVLReading this book and maybe comparing it to some of your others, it seems that you went through some profound changes, as you journeyed into these rivers with the people, like Yuvan, that you met, that was perhaps—maybe I’m reading into this—but it felt like it was perhaps more expansive than your previous books.

RMYeah, sure.

EVLThere was a different dimension there. And as you travel down the Mutehekau Shipu, you start to experience what you described as being slowly flooded from within, where the body knew something that the mind could not. And you likened this experience to merging: that you were “flowed through,” which is a simple yet profound pair of words. Can you share a little bit about this more kind of personal deepening through these journeys?

RMYeah. It was— Yes. I mean, in a sense it became not a personal deepening, precisely because the person that I thought I was, was made porous, became kind of collaborative and constellated, let’s say. So, I suppose I say that in order to move it away from the familiar sort of bildungsroman vision of the story of the individual self, who is kind of changed to the betterment only of the individual self. And I think that the change that overtook me, the rivering that happened to me, if we want to put it like that, was absolutely to do with constellation and with expansion and with relation. And those are easy things to dream in the moment, harder things to hold on to in the long term. But I don’t think this book will ever stop moving through me.

Underland took me eight years, but when I stopped writing it, I stopped writing it. And I haven’t been underground much since then. It’s a hard and challenging place. But this book, I think, will probably never, never end. And it’s changed my sense of time—that absolutely is the case. And I suppose very, very simpl— I mean, we’ve always used rivers to think about time, of course. But very simply, I came to think of, I came to see that we—as I say at the very end—we are never dry-footed on the bank. We’re never standing there watching the current move past us, even with notebook in hand. We’re always moving. And what that understanding does is both induce a contentment with change, but also a pristination of the given moment, because it will be upstream of you within seconds. And if Underland was about deep time, this is in a way about quick time, this is about flow, as the persistent, utter state that we—if we want to call ourselves “we”—inhabit. And that’s a truism. And you’ll have reached that point and many of your listeners will have reached that point so long ago, and you’ll be sort of shouting at the speaker and saying, Well, obviously man! Come on!

EVL[laughs] You speak about this, or write about this kind of interrogation of mystery that emerges in you, this desire to interrogate, that the flow kind of brings you into in a very deep way. And then you wrote about something which I think is also so important to bear in mind—that if you’re going to interrogate a mystery, don’t expect answers in a language you understand.

RMYeah.

EVLWhich I absolutely loved, because maybe the most moving thing about where this journey took me, as I read your account of this flow downstream, was into this just absolute unknown. And the hubris that we might have a language to understand it is also woven into the restoring of the law and this notion of expansion of the self and what a being is. And so, to me, it all kind of wove together in this most beautiful sense of what can never be captured.

RMYou’ve gathered up the braids of our conversation, the currents of our conversation, brilliantly there. And I haven’t seen it as clearly as that myself before, but thank you for helping me see that the book moves into mystery. It doesn’t resolve mystery. It moves into mystery. And that is absolutely consistent with what I experienced. But that move into mystery is not an abandonment of perception into a cloud of unknowing. It’s a move into a different form of knowing. And that becomes just the first step, the very first step; but the step that could not be taken within the regime of perception that was previously inhabited. So if I, yeah— I think I got to the very first step by the very end, the long way round.

EVLOh. Well, maybe that’s a good segue into a final question, which is what happens when the book does end, which is where you share an encounter with a river aura: the aura of the Mutehekau Shipu. You describe being right at the “shatter-belt,” which is a set of words you’ve used throughout this conversation, of your awareness and understanding: heart “full of flow” and sensing something made of “bears and angels,” “something that is always transforming.” And for a few seconds, you are rivered. And I found this account deeply beautiful and profound. And, of course, I was left wondering where it has left you.

RMWell, thank you. It’s such a special time after, you know, four and a half years writing this book, finally speaking with people who’ve made the journey through it, all the way from spring, which is where it opens, to sea, which is where it closes. And I’m moved that you were moved. Well, I will say that to my surprise, and perhaps to yours as a reader, that’s not where the book ends. I thought it was. It was the obvious place for it to end: the river aura speaking to me and rivering me and writing—really, I mean absolutely co-writing those final pages, in which full stops vanish and dashes become this fluid form of punctuation. But I finished that, and I thought the book was done: what could be more done than “I am rivered”?

And then I ran up to the little springs near my house, which flow through the book and my life, and I crossed the bridge, the little foot bridge into the wood where the springs rise, and suddenly a whole other, almost like a pageant vision, of my own children, downstream of now, crossing that bridge when I have gone, but when I can still see them. They’ve aged: the crow’s-feet, the gray hair. My children, I can’t speak to them, but I can see them, and they’re there to remember me gone. They’re kind of impious and loving and kind and all the things that they are. And that scene just absolutely declared itself more or less whole. And I went home and wrote it down, and that became this second ending of the book.

EVLRight.

RMThe place to which the river flowed. And I’ve never known anything quite like those two endings in terms of an exterior declaration of what should be written or seen or felt.

EVLBeautiful. Well, I wonder perhaps if you can leave us with a few words from the book. I know you have a little section prepared that was capturing a moment experienced as you flowed downstream.

RMYeah. Thanks, Emmanuel. I’ve loved, I’ve really loved, the currents of our conversation.

This is a single paragraph and it happens where we finished days of paddling this 75-kilometer-long lake, flat water. And then at its very end, exhausted, we suddenly feel the pull of the river, and the river becomes gravity and begins to exert its force upon boat, upon us, and upon language:

“Then, faintly, I feel it: a current, the slightest of pulls—follow me, please, come this way—and long before I can see the mouth of the Mutehekau Shipu I can sense it, for I am suddenly now in the threshold where flow takes over from flat, and I call back to Wayne with a whoop—‘Can you feel it too? Can you feel it?!’— and an involuntary shudder of force moves through me, and the current’s pull becomes stronger, less negotiable—you will come with me now—and then it is as if the lake has somehow tilted such that I’m now sliding down its slope, and the water ahead is behaving strangely—a funny piece of water, that—for it looks deckle-edged and cockled, forming a tangle of movement and shallow turbulence, but then amid that turbulence I see, lying puzzlingly clear, a huge arc of silver-smooth water, a flat-fallen slice of moon over which lines and coils of foam are sliding seemingly without friction, in perfect laminar flow—like ice riding its own melting on a cast-iron stove—and my boat bumps over the stipple-line that marks the boundary of that shining moon-slice, and I know I have crossed the event horizon, the frontier beyond which all things tend towards the river, and a charge pours up my arms from the water and tingles my trunk and crackles my scalp and neck—as river births lake, so lake must birth river—and then the true mouth of the river is there, here, where the lake slips over its own rim and down, a point of astonishment that is also a point of enlivenment, and having longed for days for the lake to speed us on, now I long for the river to slow us down, for I can feel its immense and frightening will, and then I understand that at some level I must surrender agency to this incomprehensible presence.

“The river is born and it bears us…”

EVLRobert, so wonderful to be in conversation with you after these few years. I hope the next time we speak is not such a long gap.

RMAnd in person, my friend. Indeed. Thank you so much.

EVLI look forward to seeing you. Thank you so much. Beautiful words and a very profound book.

RMThank you.