Humans are made of water. Three quarters of our brains and two thirds of our skin consist of it; even our bones are weighted with water. As the author Robert Macfarlane observes, ‘Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools.’ But even though water sustains all life on the planet, the idea that a river might itself be alive is hard to grasp, as Macfarlane acknowledges: ‘to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-­intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.’

Is a River Alive? guides the reader through Macfarlane’s own process of unlearning. Over the course of the book, he travels to an Ecuadorian cloud forest named the Forest of the Cedars, site of the headwaters of the Río Los Cedros, to the ‘wounded creeks, lagoons and estuaries’ of Chennai in southeast India and to the interior of the Innu Nation’s Nitassinan territory in Canada, through which runs the Mutehekau Shipu (also known as the Magpie River). All three of these landscapes are under threat – from mining, damming and industrial pollution – and Macfarlane travels with the conservationists trying to protect them. These conservationists also want to shift society’s understanding of rivers, so they are seen not as resources to be exploited but as living things that share our planet.

In his early books, Macfarlane focused tightly on the British Isles, the natural world and the writers who had illuminated these subjects. Over time, his subject matter has expanded beyond Britain, while his perspective has broadened to include more of the people who occupy the landscapes he explores. As with