Suggesting that a river could be alive has the potential to change everything. Robert Macfarlane, one of Britain’s best-read writers on the natural environment, has done just this in his latest book.
At one level, Is A River Alive? is a travelogue of adventuring in extreme environments: a lucid, lyrical addition to a genre Macfarlane has made his own. His odyssey through the cloudforests of Ecuador, the stricken rivers of Chennai in India and the tumultuous rapids of the Mutehekau Shipu in north-east Canada has it all: larger-than-life companions, astonishing revelations about the natural world and inadvisable levels of personal risk (including some particularly scary whitewater kayaking).
