Last night, I was very excited to attend a talk by British writer Robert Macfarlane on his latest book, Is a River Alive?. I had high hopes that it'd be a deeply philosophical one that would inform and inspire. And did it ever.

I was enthralled from the start, when Macfarlane began by clarifying that he uses the pronoun "who" for rivers, not the usual "that" pronoun. (For non-editors, "who" refers to people, and "that" is used for inanimate objects.) Radical! Stuff like this is right up my alley. The thoughtfulness. The subversion. The obvious reverence for language (and rivers too).

For example, instead of asking, "Which are the rivers that flow through your life?" he asked, "Who are the rivers who flow through your life?"

The way we speak of something changes our relationship to it.

He spoke of the first Canadian river to have its rights declared, to be recognized as a living, rights-bearing being. (It's the Magpie River // Muteshekau Shipu in Quebec.)

The talk reminded me so much of a book I picked up on a whim from a community library while travelling in Ecuador in 2013. The book was called Should Trees Have Standing? by Christopher Stone and it was the first time I can recall being prompted to consider if the environment should be granted personhood status in the eyes of the law.

In his love letter to rivers, Macfarlane leans into a similar question, recognizing and revering rivers as those who heal, who humble, and who are inherently relational. “Falling back in love with rivers is urgent work,” he said gently, radically, as he encouraged us to participate in a moral reimagining of rivers.

Congrats and thank you to Jason Allen (The Environmental Urbanist) for guiding the interview with openness and finesse, and to the Burlington Public Library and Ian Elliot of A Different Drummer Books.