What does it mean for a river to be ‘alive’?

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Mala Ayad. We're walking under a pup button. Wow. That's a real game show buzzer After weeks of damp Finally, a warm sunny day. The award-winning British natural history writer Robert McFarlane took full advantage strolling along the Humber River in Toronto. This river Bye. Well it's not as otherworldly as the river of Cedars or As degraded as the rivers of Chennai, and it's not as wild as what you experience in Quebec. But when you a river like this. What what do you see?

Well, what I did is I went immediately down to it to right to the shore. It just drew me straight to it. I mean we're in this we're in sunshine, which I understand is Constant. Pretty boring actually. An apt setting to talk about the ideas, stories, and rivers in his latest book, Is a River Alive? The book is a question. Is a river alive question mark. And I in its form it is an exploration and not a declaration. This is a hard question.

A question that's also an invitation to consider what constitutes a living being and to reconsider utilitarian views of Rivers as simply resources. When McFarlane encounters a healthy river, He sees and feels a life force, one that brings forth life, sustains life, and draws life to it, insects, plants, and Yeah. The idea of rivers as being alive has animated the rights of nature movement. Around the world, the movement is fighting for and winning the legal rights.

To flow unimpeded and unpolluted, rivers like Los Cedros or River of the Cedars in the cloud forest of Ecuador, and Muteshka Shipu, or the Magpie River in Quebec. I call it a new old idea. I mean I travelled to countries and and cultures and people where this old idea was in many ways self-evident, where rivers are being imagined and have been imagined in what seemed the rationalist radical ways.

So in Ecuador, in India and then in Quebec, in Natas and there in each of those places rivers are under threat of death from mining, pollution and damming respectively. But they're also places where rivers are being or have forever been imagined in in radically different ways to the to the ways that are in the ascendant. Ideas producer Chris Watzkow met with Robert McFarland on the banks of the

But it it just thrilled me to to m to meet your river straight away. And I c I just watching the life that the aura this river casts around itself, the bird song which is I can't understand because it's not in my British idioms of the bird songs I know, but it's so busy, and the sound of the river itself, the songs and stories that it's telling, and people, people just poor drawn to the river. So a river is alive when it is. That's one of the things a living, healthy river does.

So to that question, is a river alive? How do you answer it? Or what considerations do you take in coming to your answer? My son early on will he's not at the time he says what's the title of the book you're writing dad and I say is a river alive and he's like well duh that's gonna be a short book then because the answer is yes I would love the answer to be that simple but it's not is a river alive in ways that exceed the sum

of the lives it contains and enables? Well, yes, if we change our understanding of what life is and what living means. It took me four years of travelling with rivers, meeting river people, feeling river, ideas and I wanted to take myself and the reader through these journeys to to ask, Well what flows from us reimagining rivers as having lives and deaths and rights? And the answer is An enormous amount. The world changes depending on that answer.

You know it is interesting that the question when it is posed Yes. get two types of responses along the lines of how absurd it is. And it tends to come from people who Thank you. That question doesn't even make sense. Like you said. Why are you even asking? Isn't it obviously? Exactly. As it were the the rationalist and the intuitive answer. The intuitive answer is rivers alive. Its life flows with ours, always has. You can see.

Yeah, if once we start to reimagine rivers as the active agents they are historically shaping the movement of land of people, s songs, stories, when we think of them as as life forces, then suddenly they they spring into another kind of being. But the rationalist answer No, a river is H2O plus gravity, is another kind of story, right? It's a story about a regime of perception, about how we see.

And in my country, England, our rivers are fully privatised. So water rivers, they're just liquid assets. And that story Have been privatised since then, and all of our rivers, every single one in England, now falls short of being in good overall health, according to our environment agency. So that story, the story of river as resource, has resulted in a dying river network in England.

The rich and varied natures of running waters have been simplified into an understanding of river as limitless source and limitless sump, that which supplies and that which disposes. For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.

We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water. Rivers have been systematically stripped of their spirits and reduced to what Isaac Newton called inanimate brute matter.

I guess my question then is what is a room? Yeah. Yeah. A body of water that flows from the source to the mouth and water travels along it. But yeah. Ha ha. Yeah, it is more co the I spent whatever it is four and a half years following rivers and the best definition of a river I've come up with is a gathering that seeks the sea. We when we singularize river, we misunderstand river. It's like calling a tree a trunk. A river has a vast watershed, a river

rises from countless springs, areas of rainfall, and then all of these tributaries braid and braid and gather and gather and gather and eventually that becomes the main current that then reaches the sea. So when you start to imagine a of a river as alive, then exactly the question you ask is, well where does the river stop? And in many ways the river doesn't stop and I think that's one of the things I I came to terms with in a series of journeys that

that caused me in fact to reimagine self and time in very consequential ways. We're we're water bodies, right? And even beyond that, I mean the term for this kind of environment is is reparian, which you know you think of as the actual banks that were standing. Right. Well, I like to think of this idea of aura and Paul. So a living river casts an aura and that aura is one of enlighten and that might be of the spirit as we feel it. I feel lifted to be close to

this river uh and it might be also just biologically in the life that it enabled. Willow trees that we can see behind us, the poplars, they're all drinking of that river, partaking of its life, being enlivened by it. You flip that and you get the pall and the pool Is what a dying river casts, and when you step into the pool of a sick river, you know it, right? You feel it. It's you feel it. You smell it. You smell it, you see your heart knows it, and I live in Cambridge and

And my river is sick. It's sick as a dog, and it pains me to see it. We have a declaration of the rights of the River Cam every 21st of June. We stand on its banks on Riparian Cam and we declare its yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r Okay, so you just... Alluded to the Movement too. the rights of urban and to codify the personhood of of Hẹn gặp lại các bạn trong những video tiếp theo. Thank you. Nature.

Movement yeah. This is a movement to recognise in law and in imagination the rights of natural entities. So rivers have become the most common focus. So a river has and has always had in inalienable rights. This is law playing catcher. It's it's law that's getting pluralised by often indigenous perceptions of river or community guardianship perceptions of river that are coursing into the arid terrain of Western legal structures.

Stop being so anthropocentric, recognize that rivers can have rights as well. There are a couple of landmarks in this movement that is is both young and old again. It's really the 21st century and it's gathering enormous momentum globally. In 2008, Equity In this remarkable act of moral imagination, revised its constitution and into the heart of its constitution it placed four articles recognizing the rights of nature. And the first of those recognize the rights of nature to exist, to

flourish and to persist and the fourth of those made the state the guarantor of those rights. And then in 2017 very famously the Fonganui River, Teawatapua in Aoteiro, New Zealand, had its rights and the legal personhood recognized in a parliamentary act and that that is a kind of an amazing moment in perception and recognition of rivers as alive then taking legal form at a very high level in a nation state.

I traveled to Ecuador in 2022 and I went there because in in late 2021 an astonishing ruling was handed down by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. And if you never thought jurisprudence could be poetry, I could I commend this ruling. to you. It's a beautiful conceptual and textual document. So this ruling upheld the rights of the cloud forest of Los Cedros, the Cedar Forest, and the rivers that flow from that cloud forest among

them Rio Los Cedros to exist, to flourish and to persist. And it did so in the face of the threat of the absolute annihilation of that cloud forest and its rivers by a Canadian mining company, you will not be amazed to hear, in conjunction with the state Ecuadorian state mining company and Army, and they had come for gold. And they wanted to crack that mountain open and slurp out the gold. The interior of a cloud forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green.

To be inside a cloud forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized. There life thrives upon life upon life upon life in a seemingly endless misona beam that bewilders the imagination and opens a scale slide of wonder into which the mind might plummet. Here, life is in constant hyperdrive, splicing and splitting, folding and tangling symbiotically, epiphytically.

A cloud forest is full of epiphytic life. So epiphytes are plants that grow on other plants, life that grows on other life. And so one of the reasons a cloud forest is a river maker is that moisture laden air rises up in this case from the Pacific up to about eight-nine thousand feet and then it condenses on the immense surface area of leaf and flower and moss and trunk that the cloud forest with all its epiphytic abundance provides and

And then those droplets gather, again, a river is a gathering that seeks the sea. They gather and gather and then they roll off the leaf tips in a beautiful process known as continuous fog drop. Ha ha. Which I think should be a band name. And that means that the rivers are sustained not by rain primarily but by this amazing rolling of single droplets of water. And the rivers there are so

Clear watered, the bird life is insane, mind-blowing. The howler monkeys, the six to eight species of cat that prowl this forest, the spectacle bears. It it goes on and on. So this is a place where life has flourished in abundance.

For a million and a half years potentially and mining would eradicate it. So this astonishing judgment came down at the last minute really. And it came down with such power that it compelled mining companies to evacuate the area, make good the small amounts of damage that they've

they'd been able to make by that point. And so this is often taken as the great sort of gong strike proof of concept of the rights of nature because the it was all on the basis that that nature's rights would be violated by the mining. So an alliance of of local

people, indigenous communities, uh who were essential to getting the art the rights of nature articles embedded in the constitution in the first place. And then in Canada in also twenty twenty one the uh Muteshikau Shipu or Magpie River became the first Canadian river to have its rights declared and this was in a joint declaration by the Mingani Regional Council and the Innu Council at Equanish, the township of Equanish. mention how Canadian companies are implicated.

how assets around the world pension funds, etcetera are all implicated in Thank you. And I guess that is another way of looking at how everything is connected. Absolutely. I mean I think it's 70% of of global mining companies have their HQs in in Canada. I mean Canada is deeply implicated in in in River Death.

Death worldwide and in this case, the case of Los Cedros specifically. And I I'm interested in how global capital implicates all of us. I mean the laptop I wrote predominantly wrote this book on has gold as part of its vital structures. So I'm implicated in it as well of course. So I as a writer I began to try and find ways of of nesting and recognizing what was happening in that tiny, astonishing forest and this beautiful clear watered river.

Of pressure. And I will just say obviously we're speaking now when gold prices I think are at an all-time historical high because of the war in Ukraine, because of the volatility of the tariff wars, capital-like safe places, and so it's rushed to gold. So the the

Pressure on Los Cedros is now even greater than it was in 2021 and I've remained very, very involved with the I'm part of this circle of Ecuadorian and International Guardians of that forest. But it's an it's not a a fairy tale ending to to that story, the the the fight goes on to protect that forest and its rivers.

There are three aspects to this. There's the recognition of a river as alive, there's the recognition of a river as bearing rights, and there is the recognition of a river as having legal personhood, which means the ability to have standing in court, i.e. the ability to bring suit in court. One can recognise the rights of a river without recognizing it as a living being, though I'm most interested in those forms of the movement which do conjoin rights and life. But Actually I am very skeptical.

about the legal personhood side of things. I think that making a river a person, a legal person, in many ways just re-resubordinates it, the river, to the interests of power and capital. So corporations have rights. You know this. Um I think in a weird way we have naturalized this idea. The company has legal personhood. In the UK and the US and North America I think it has a whole suite of rights. In the UK the company has a right to privacy, has a right to a fair trial.

We think nothing of that. It's a non-human entity with a whole suite of rights. That doesn't bother us. But when someone says, can a river have rights? A river that's flowed for ten thousand years, twelve thousand in the case of the Humber, suddenly there's a kind of uproar and surprise at this idea. So I'm interested in that discrepancy of imagination. Why is it so confronting to us to think of a river as alive and of a river as a? And would a river think of itself as a person?

Ha. Or another place. What does a river want? Oh, well what a river wants is to reach the sea. That is one thing a river wants. And gravity is not intent, but I think we can agree on that point. And then who speaks for the river, who interprets what the river wants. My own feeling is that there are clearly people who are much closer to and with the lives of the river and there are those who are very distant from it indeed.

Broadly, again looking at my country, one reason our rivers are suffering is because they they were juiced by uh private equity companies who came and invested extremely heavily in our river system, then extracted huge dividends, did very little in the

Uh and also Fed Fed my pension company, the universities scheme. So we see a kind of capital flight, we see rivers being absolutely kind of forgotten. They the assetization of everything is the story that I am interested in contesting because when we think of things such as rivers only in asset value we forget so much about them.

One thing you said early on in the book when you were introducing the rivers that You bet. Yeah. You said that your rivers were your co-authors. Yes. What do you mean by that and and how were they your co-authors? I mean it very seriously. I don't mean it flippantly at all. I I mean they shape

The way I thought, and one of the things that happens over the book's course is that language itself begins to shift under the pressure and presence of rivers. But then towards the end of the book, in fact, after I'd descended, the majority of the Muteshkesh. should be the Magpai River in in Quebec Tessan. I mean language just loses all almost all its mooring, so but I mean there are sort of two two page sentences in the book where flow

has become so powerful a presence that it's actually just shaped the way my my thought was moving and the way my my language as a writer moved. So yeah, fundamentally they co authored this book. Thank you. Who? Not which. These lands who are alive. Words make worlds. In English, we it rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds, and animals. A mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff and distinguishes them from human persons. Yeah.

In English, pronouns for natural features are which or that, not who. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow, and forests who grow, In English we speak of a river in the singular, but river is one of the great group nouns containing multitudes. In English there is no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river?

George Elliot has this beautiful phrase, she says, We must seek to expand the range self has to move in. And I think that's one of the things that rivers do to us and especially when we think of them as as persons. But I I think the best Best terms I came up with were sort of presences or forces. In in English, actually, in British English, we speak of of rivers as forces. They shape

They emanate, they radiate there highly and beautifully, often beautifully, and sometimes tragically consequential presences, forces. Rivers are gatherings and they gather. They expand the possibilities of community. Robert McFarlane is the award-winning author of books like The Old Ways, The Lost Words, Underland, and his latest book, Is a River Alive? I'm Nala Ayed, and you're listening to Ideas.

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Ideas producer Chris Wadzkow spoke with Robert McFarlane as they walked along the Humber River in Toronto. And as McFarlane writes in Is a river alive. Rivers have a gravitational effect on people. So it wasn't long before they had come. It's a good day for a meeting along. It really is. Yeah. John Johnson, a historian at the University of Toronto.

and my research is focused on indigenous land based history knowledge, uh particularly in Toronto. I'm uh also working within Toronto's indigenous community uh through

organization called First Story Toronto, which is an organization that's grassroots community led and that focuses on researching and sharing Toronto's indigenous history. The idea is to get people out onto the land and to story Toronto as an indigenous territory because they're There really isn't any place you can go in Toronto where you're not

I love hearing story used as a verb. I do that a lot as well. Story this land. And I mean I I sometimes say rivers are among the first storytellers themselves. themselves the first singers. But do you find that the rivers help you story restory Toronto? Yeah. In so many ways water is so foundational. Not only for landscape but for livingness and life itself. Uh it's like a seed for all of life, but it's also a seed for story.

And of course people have always been attracted to water, to riverways, and and it's certainly true of the riverways of Toronto. For as long as any of us know, those those rivers have been traveled by indigenous peoples, either by canoe or simply just walked along. All of these rivers in Toronto, the credit

the Don River, the Rouge, uh and of course here the Humber, uh they're all portage routes. And so really, really important set of routes to get f uh from northern Ontario into northern United States and they were all ran along the rivers. And indigenous peoples have traveled on along these rivers uh and storied them and made use of them and and done ceremony along them for all of that time.

Water is livingness, rivers are livingness and and life. Could you unpack that lovely word livingness a little more? Well, a livingness to me it's like it's an idea to suggest that, you know, waters are of course uh not only a progenitor of life but in fact are living themselves. Yes. So they they create the possibilities for life, but they themselves are their own intentional agentic

beings with their own set of possibilities, even ethics, right? And this is something that I think a lot of Indigenous peoples understand implicitly when you come out of a philosophy of land-based education, where you know land is teacher.

If you understand that as true, then you understand that these are beings that have knowledge to offer and if you approach them with humility and you develop relationships with them, they will teach you. And out of those lessons will coalesce an ethics for what it means to be in relationship with a river.

or the lands that it crosses and all of the beings that compose those ecologies, you might learn what it means to be a good visitor within these lands. A good a good neighbor, uh a good person who is in relationship with more beings and I think that's what rivers, along with so many other entities in the world, can teach us.

It's such a beautiful articulation of this idea of water as teacher, water as theoretician, water as opener of possibilities, uh shapeshifter, yeah, breaker down of boundaries and binaries, right? Mm-hmm. Water is named, you know, like this water has so so many different names. Ha ha.

Uh there's of course the Humber River which we all often know it know it as, but I often think back to First Nations uh names and there's a plaque right here that talks about uh Humber River as Kebejnong this overnight stopping place right talking about that history of movement that history of camping there's another plaque that talks about this the Hot Nashone uh name for this river, uh Niwa Onega Gaii, uh little thundering waters. You know that that describes

spirits. So it describes possibly Thunderbirds living along and being encountered in these areas. Um so a very spiritual place as well, right? Living in multiple senses of that word. Absolutely. And and a in a very material and practical place in the day-to-day lives of indigenous peoples for millennia. Could could you talk about the significance of where we are right now in the base of what is now called the Hubber River?

If you understand the archaeology of this river, uh kind of close to Lake Ontario, you know that there are villages that have been located along here for millennia. Uh the Wendot have for a thousand years before Europeans ever explained. occupy the upper reaches of the Humber River profoundly.

So you know, dozens and dozens of villages and burial mounds and sacred sites all along these waterways. And then in the uh sixteen hundreds, mid to s late sixteen hundreds, this place was all uh Horton Ashone territory. There was a lot of like

Movement across these rivers and sometimes even fighting over these rivers because of the possibilities they offered. And when the Hot Nachone uh occupied these lands, they built villages in Toronto both along the riverways, one along the Humberh here and the other one along the Rouge River, you know, at a place that

that was called Genajagwegon among the birches. The village here along the Humber River was called Daegon. And it means maybe like it cuts the river or it it cuts the river in two and it kind of looks like the bluff does that a little bit from a top down view. But all of this Floodplain along the river. This was all corn, beans, and squash at that time. It was the agricultural fields that sustained thousands of people who lived at that village and the surrounding territory. Sorry.

And then beyond the immediate environs of that village it was all savanna, uh black oak savanna. And that's significant because that's an ind indigenous ecology that's only created through controlled burns and maintained that way, right? So this was like

a profoundly, profoundly settled area because of the landscape and because of the water and because of the breadth of possibility that it always offered for indigenous life. And so when in Europeans came to these territories, indigenous peoples already made it a good place.

It was already known that way, a strategic place, a place of meeting, uh a place of wealth and abundance, and and so of course Europeans wanted access to that. The very first treaties are for the lands along the Humber River. It's not

uh an over exaggeration to say that the whole reason why Toronto is here today is because of how the Humber River and the other rivers and the paths that ran alongside them. They absolutely do organize life. They they represent that seed, right? That initial possi set of possibilities.

Ursula Le Guin, the great Ursula Le Guin, very late in her life actually, she she said one way to stop seeing she says rivers and forests as objects is to see them as as kin. That's right. But she also says that that will take And this phrase has always stayed with me, that will take for many people a great reach outwards of mind and imagination. Absolutely. And of course the your expertise, the indigenous communities that you're speaking of, it doesn't require that great reach out.

Outwards, but for those to whom the idea of life as possibility in relation it isn't intuitive, it's hard, right? Right? Very much so, yeah. I mean when we're doing the work that we do, we're always working against what you're talking about there, that that sort of mindset.

you know, really is is a mindset that has evolved and and taken shape and and proliferated over, you know, millennia within the Western world and, you know, at some point we separated spirituality from the natural world and we we we we looked for that elsewhere.

Yes. Uh and as soon as we did that we we stopped recognizing life around us that as spiritual, as agentic, as alive, uh the possibilities for being taught by teachers that are all around us, these natural more than human beings. Everything about teaches us not to do that. Uh but as I sat there and I looked at all of the life and the possibility around the river, it it came back to me pretty quick. Ha ha.

There's the river as teacher, right? And and river as something we think with. Yeah. We write with, we think with, we imagine with with it becomes With and alongside. at the enemy button. Nice to see you. Hi Chris. Hey Great day for it. Robert, John and Chris are joined by another chronicler of river history. So happy to see you again.

And I guess I describe myself as a historian of environmental change and I look at that experience of environmental change that people have encountered and created over the last two centuries. I'm the author of a book. What is it? Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE the dawn, the huddle, whatever. I'm a historian mainly of of the Don River. But certainly rivers in cities in North America and Toronto is is not.

In this respect, were in the 19th century at least viewed as convenient places to get rid of wastes to generate energy. But I think in Toronto's experience especially, it's that industrialization on the On the banks of the Lower Dawn and being able to dump your waste into the river and have them float down to be someone else's problem is the story of our river. Here, at least the 19th-century history, a history of really awful pollution, to the point that you know, in the 1890s, uh Toronto is.

facing a cholera threat because of the level of organic waste that are going into the Don from um everything from municipal sewage to industry on the banks of the Don tanneries and slaughterhouses, etc. All the stuff that people do didn't want to see or didn't want to smell or experience went into our river valleys. And I think, you know, this city is one where our valleys, they have that convenience of being a place where you can tip wastes. That's part of the store.

In terms of how we think of that as the way the city imagines itself and imagines rivers, that's based upon a an imagining of rivers as having a basically infinite carrying capacity, right? They will continue to supply fresh water upstream and they will continue to dispose of waste downstream. Is that a very nineteenth century form of e as it were ecological imagination? Yeah, I think that that catchphrase dilution is the solution to pollution was something that

I think a lot of nineteenth century engineers found extremely convenient. And when you're looking at a tiny river like the Don, which was the much more industrialized river of Toronto's two main rivers, you know, it it never had the capacity to absorb a lot of waste.

Both the Dawn and the city's waterfront became places to drag your dead animal carcasses and dump your sewage. And we're only now in some of the work that's happening along the Toronto waterfront, sort of beginning to turn our ourselves back. these water spaces and recognize that we're a water city, we're a river city, we're a lake city, but only by making those spaces more desirable and more safe have people been turning their their attention to them again.

Amen. Now, Rob, the the second part of the book is about the city of Chennai. I guess it would qualify as a mega city. Yes in southeastern India. Yeah. Can you talk about the rivers there and what's become of them? Yeah. So J Jennifer describing Toronto as a water city, Chennai fundamentally a water city, is a city of complex water bodies, a lot of wetland, a lot of marsh, but then these three great rivers moving n north to south, the Costa Stalaya, the

and the Adya and these are rivers which in many ways have become ghosts in the city. They've become built over, they've become buried, they've become suppressed. The rapid expansion of the city into a kind of maximum city. city and water has been forgotten but they return As monsters these ghosts when the monsoon comes, but particularly then when the the cyclones strike. So Chennai lives despite being set in an area where water husbandry and w and hydrological literacy runs back Yeah. Yeah.

certainly tens of thousands, arguably hundreds of thousands of years, is now struggles with this desperate double identity of a as a city of drought and a city of flood. I was drawn there partly by And here I thought often of Jennifer's work on the Don, partly because the waterways there are Yeah. many ways the the the deadest I've ever I've ever met. So zero percent dissolved oxygen in in parts of them, zero species count at times.

They get flushed by the monsoon but then they kind of revert. And again, tanneries, high chromium levels, raw sewage, no sewage infrastructure, everything goes into the rivers there. Yeah y in fact you asked the question, can a river be murdered? Yeah, this remarkable water activist called Bridge Candlevale. Um after the the Ganga and the Yamuna were recognized as

spiritual living entities. Uh he called the the police station at Agra and and said, I want to report a murder and the police said, Who's been who's been murdered? And he said a river and of course they laughed him out of town. But it was a very interesting moment and I thought of our conversation a few years ago, Jennifer, and and the work you've done on ways of commemorating river death. So the funeral that was held for the

Yeah. In nineteen sixty nine pollution probe staged, you know, what is now an iconic event in Toronto's history, at least in the in Toronto's river history, of declaring the Dawn dead. And they they staged a funeral procession to the banks of the river. They had someone dressed

As Elizabeth Simcoe, who was here with John Grave Simcoe, you know, when the town of York was founded in 1793. Reading, and she she was someone who enjoyed moving upriver for picnics, and so she was an important figure in its early history. history. Anyway, they staged this funeral procession complete, I believe, with a sousaphone. So But this was advertised in that sort of

Sixties beginning of Greenpeace, really theatrical activism time. And so Pollution Probe was picking up and working with those kind of methods to awaken Torontonians to both the state of

Toronto's River and its potential for rebirth, I think. Uh so that funeral was combined with a series of very savvy ads in the newspapers at the time, um inviting Toronto politicians to sample a drinking water glass um full of Don River water, which looked like more silt and sediment than water got a lot of people's attention and I think was part of the real resurgence of citizen interest in the Don River and in trying to come up with a different vision for what it might be to our city.

And w and one thing it it asks one to do is to is to flip the image. So if a river can die and a river can have a funeral, what does a li what does a living river look like? And I love the fact that as you were describing the funeral of the Don, we heard this wonderful chorus of shouts and laughter from children under the bridge who are down there on the shingle

shingle bank, throwing stones, they're just so joyful to be by that water, right? And the Don did not make that possible because it was a dying river. And now, how is it now? There is some great exciting things to report about especially the lower dawn right now.

So certainly conditions are much better than they were in the fifties, but it's still one of Canada's most urbanized watersheds. I think ninety percent of the watershed is, you know, non-porous surfaces, which means that water runs fast. into the waterways, it runs hot and it runs salty in the winter when all the salt from the city streets runs into the water all of the dog feces and everything else the rest of the year. So we get because of that high level of urban

urbanization. We don't have the wider watershed absorbing that water as it should. So there are some intractable problems I would say in the Don, but we're seeing you know phosphorus levels have come down which is good for aquatic life. But the really big development over the past ten years has been the work to reimagine the mouth of the Don River in relationship with the city. They have

Created really wonderful and quite viable wetland spaces that are doing kind of triple purpose. Their main function is flood protection. So it's this heavily armored landscape. And like now when you look at it, it looks like looks like a natural wetland after it's been constructed. But while they were building it, it's like the bottom of a swimming pool. You know, it's so heavily constructed in order to channel.

the floodwater if we do face um a major flood event. So it's dealing with that flood protection problem. It's creating wetlands around that area to provide for wildlife. but also sequester carbon and absorb some of those waters. And it's creating a recreation space for Torontonians. I mean I sound like a tourism promoter, but I'm kind of excited about it. It's been a long time in the main.

Re and it just proves of life in this rich sense of the word as being drawn to an opening out of healthy, fresh, flowing water.

coming out of this. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok Thank you. I think of the eleven-year-old Yuvan helping to grow this riverland back into life, even as his own emergence was being contaminated by violence at home. I think of both land and boy finding ways to transform themselves, to cleanse themselves of poisons that have settled deep down over a long period of time.

I have learned a new kind of water literacy from Yuvin, a terraqueous one, in which the opposition between river And land is undone, replaced with a metamorphic vision of river as a shape-shifting being, never only itself, and always in conversation and interanimation with both Earth and and human body. Robert McFarlane speaks of Yuvan Aves, a young man in Chennai, India, from whom he takes great inspiration. at the heart of

All three of the main sections of the book are three people who have been moved close to death by life and then who have also then been in some way revived by their relationship with Rivers. I couldn't have foreseen that. way it became the purest proof of of the book's argument that the rivers are life forces. And one of those is is this young Indian naturalist and activist called Yuvan Aves, who I'd been friends with for five years before I travelled out to Chennai to

to meet him. And if the rivers are the ghosts and monsters of that section of the book, Juvan is one of the angels uh and he suffered a really brutal childhood. And so he he's known a lot of harm in his life, but he has remade himself astonishingly and I travelled with Juven and I learned so much about resilience and I came to understand through Juven that

Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline. And by that I I think I mean that watching him try to bring rivers and all that lives with rivers back. life in Chennai against these astonishing forces that were hostile to to the life of rivers, political and chemical and industrial. And I thought well some compared to this what right do I have to feel despair? towards it, organise, gather, work for change. He he is utterly inspirational.

I think it's pretty good though. It's in Quebec and it's simply titled The Living River. Yeah, this third section of the book. The longest but also the fastest running without a doubt. fastest I suppose is where is where it all comes together. All the tributaries of thought and people and story and river they all converge there in on this river called the Muteshkashipu the Magpie. And we've a drop by float plane

about a hundred hundred and ten miles up the system and then we we we kayaked out over ten, eleven days and before I kayaked that river I went to see Rita Mr Kosho, this uh poet and community leader in the Inu uh township of Equanisht, near the mouth of of the river, and I asked her

permission to travel down this river, uh, of course. And she just laughed at me. She was like, Yeah, yeah, you can have my permission, but the permission you really need is the river's permission. I was like, What? Rita, how do I get that? And she I had to pitch my tent every morning facing east. I had to gather her water from a certain place, Labrador tea from an another place. I was not to take my notebooks on the river and that struck fear into my writer's heart.

And we eventually came to a negotiated settlement where I I could take my notebooks but I couldn't write while I was on the water. I could only write at night or in the mornings on the banks of the river, so that's what I did. But she also said to me, You can ask one question of the river that will be answered by the river but it's gotta be the right one. And I was like, how will I know?

She was like, You work it out, just don't look too much with your eyes, don't think too much with your head, feel more with your heart. Yeah, it was an amazing set of kind of preparations for that. journey. So she prepared me to be, I think, open to that river in ways I wouldn't otherwise have been. My first sight of the Muteshikau Shipu itself catches my breath. A world snake in the green. Cliffs dropping near-sheer to water, house-sized boulders on the banks.

Time falls from the rock faces above. Water blue black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs, peat brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids. Churning green golden cream in the rapids and for the world. This is a big river, a wild river, and this it's not dammed until there's one small dam near it near its mouth. And when we descended it, it was a big river in a big mood. Everything about it was

Huge, forceful, muscular. As soon as we were on it, in many ways my my will was sort of surrendered to this this force, this presence. It was also utterly beautiful and it travels through trackless forests. You don't cross a road or any infrastructure until you reach the sea. So we we fished as we went.

We portaged hard and every day we were descending that river, we were capsized, we swam, we were buried in it, we negotiated big, big rapids. And I know this is an experience that many people in Kanda have Growing up, uh you have an extraordinary river system here, but it's it's like nothing I'd ever done. I I grew up as a mountaineer and I've been on big mountain trips.

that have lasted weeks at a time, but nothing prepared me for this river and what it did to me. And it basically i it wore me away. It wore away so many things that I took for granted, I took as orthodoxies. 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 Muteshaka Shippu, 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 am now sliding down its slope, and the water ahead is behaving strangely, A funny piece of water that, for it looks decal edged and cockled, forming a tangle of movement and shallow turbulence, but then, amid that turbulence, I see

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. 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.

it had this incredible force and yet you say in that chapter that it seems counterintuitive but a river can be drowned.

The only thing that can drown a river is a is a reservoir. A dam. Hydro Quebec of course have done this immense job of conversion of so so many of Quebec's rivers into into hydro systems and the Romain River just to the east of the Muteshkar Shabu was has just concluded its malt multi-dam project there and and that has brought jobs, it's brought power of course, it's brought money to the region, but it has also drowned a lot of ancestral lands.

it has also really drowned the river. So the m the magpa the Muteshika shippu is next next in line and r Rita a and others at at Community along with the Mingani Regional Council drafted this extraordinary mirror resolution declaring the river to be a rights-bearing vehicle. and in the Inu version of that the river is recognised as alive and so far it has worked.

thrown this sort of imaginative force field around the river. But we shall see what what happens if and when Hydro Quebec do decide to dam the Muteshka Shipu, but I know Rita and I and others will be very active in its defence. Yeah, she said that the river would reveal to you the reason you came, the true reason you came to the river and She also said that you would, as you mentioned, uh come to have a question for the river. So What did you find?

Altyazı M.K. and what did you find that purpose was? I in an odd way I don't want to try and paraphrase it because what happens at the end of this book, what happened at the end of the river, there are two endings to the book and both of them were complete surprises to me. They astonished me. And I wrote them down more or less as they happen to me. And I've never had a stronger sense of being

written by, thought by, a force, a surrounding an environment external to me. But at at Day Short of the Sea on the Muteshikau Shippu we we came to this place called the Gorge, And gorge, of course, is what we call the throat as well. It's the throat of the river. And we we approached the edge of the gorge that day where millions of tons of water a day are crashing through this immense bottleneck. And in ways I I can't account for and and do my best to describe

in the book, but in a way where where language really starts to run and liquefy. So many things that I had taken as certainties. um fell away, were dissolved, vanished really. And yeah, I had something like a mystical, religious, ecstatic experience. It's just that the God was was a real And my heart is full of flow, and I sit because I can no longer stand, and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense of the shatterbelt of my awareness.

of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels, but not bears and angels. Something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river being. Why should a god make choices we recognise as choices? And the coast of my mind senses this force, and I know that this is no pepper's ghost, no projection or illusion or trick.

And that the question Rita wanted me to ask of the river is nothing to do with fear or age, but is after all and of course the question of life, which is not a question at all, but a world find the current. follow the flow, and the river's voices say and sing what I cannot comprehend, and each time I lean my mind out to listen, they retreat in the measure I approach them.

And for those few seconds, beckoned on and shivered by that hourglass-shaped and silvered force that is a mouth and has a tongue and utters after miles and minutes and years on the flow and in it. Bye. Riven't. What does it mean? I think it means to be opened. I think it means to move away from a small self, to use Yuvan's phrase. It means to to understand that life

This world we live in, time, is composed of flow and of relations. It's not composed of units and boundaries. That is easy to say, but it's not so easy to feel if you've grown up in the kinds of philosophical traditions I I have, but the river opened me to that understanding, to those ideas. And i I have very little of what I understood of time is left.

by what I went through over those three to four years on the rivers and particularly on the Muteshikau Shipu. And the very ending of the book, this very short epilogue, where the river becomes time and flows forwards into the future. Again,

I thought the book was finished with I Am Rivered. Of course that's the ending of this book, full stop. But then I walked up up to the little spring near my house and a sort of scene played itself out in my imagination absolutely spontaneously and yeah time had flowed on in that scene and I was no longer present in the world.

And I I wrote that down. But the s really the the Springwaters they told that story. And the river the big river made the seeing and the hearing of that story possible. Yeah, that is how the rivers were my co authors, utterly and fundamentally. So if Talked about how human activity human behavior or worst impulses can kill rivers. And we've also talked about how humans better instincts Can restore rivers.

How do rivers restore people? A beautiful question. How do rivers restore people? I Rivers revive themselves, with our help or without our help. But they when they heal themselves they heal us too. I believe that very profoundly. And America has a a a miraculous recent example of this in the story of the Klamath River which flows down out of Oregon and into Ca California.

Which was the site of the biggest de-damming project in US history. The campaign for the de-damming of the Klamath was led in large part by the Eurok tribe. And the last of the big four dams that were put up beginning in the 1920s through to the 1960s came down last year. And within days of the final big dam coming down

salmon were back. This this river had the third biggest Pacific salmon run on the on the west coast, but salmon had been o unable to reach the headwaters to spawn. And the speed meat with which salmon returns new. or had been knocking on the door of that dam all of those years, unable to pass. They rushed up. And and with them came life to the wider watershed, but also cultural identity to the Europe people, the Salmon people.

Food security, food sovereignty, a sense of pride, the return of story that itself had been blocked in many ways by by the dams. And I saw a photo just three weeks ago. because Europe revegetation crews had had seeded the banks where the old reservoirs had been the drowned land with a mix of drought-resistant wildflower seeds back in February after the drawdown of the waters.

And those flowers had bloomed just this late spring, early summer, and there was lupine and there was California poppy and the whole land was just blazing with this yellow and orange flame and to me it just look like hope. Thanks so much for this rod. I I feel almost vicariously rivered. I've been looking forward to this since I knew it was gonna happen. And I knew the sun would be shining. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, took a Brit to bring the sun to the big Who'd have thought it? Yeah.

From the islands of rain. But yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. On that bright sunny day, that was Robert McFarlane, a renowned British natural history writer and the author of Is a River Alive? Special thanks to John Johnson, a professor of history at the University of Toronto. And Jennifer Bonnet. An environmental historian at York University and the author of This episode. Our website is cbc.ca slash. And you can find us on the CBC News app and we're going to be able to do this.

Technical production Danielle Duval and Emily Chiarves. Senior producer Nikola Luxich Greg Kelly is the executive producer of I. For more C B C podcasts, go to C B C dot C A slash podcast.