Released 01.05.25

The Conversation

In this episode, Sophy speaks with bestselling author, Robert Macfarlane, about his new book, Is a River Alive? — an extraordinary work of literary non-fiction that braids cultural history, anthropology, prose, poetry and reportage. At the book’s heart, Robert asks readers to imagine rivers having lives, deaths and rights.

His far-ranging travels take him from Ecuador to Canada to Chennai. He talks about water’s “numinosity”, and how the death of rivers is a “failure of imagination as well as of legislation”. He explains the Rights of Nature movement, which recognises rivers as rights-bearing beings, and how that principle is enshrined in the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution.

We meet Giuliana Furci — a woman who can sense rare mushrooms hidden in the Los Cedros forest, which is a place with so much life “you feel teeming and seething on your skin and in your bones”. Yuvan Aves is an Indian ecological activist whose work reminds Robert that “despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline”. Innu poet, activist and community leader, Rita Mestokosho, in the ancestral land of the Innu people in Quebec, shares her powerful words of advice — to “stop looking with your eyes, stop looking with your head. Think with your body, think with your heart”. She propels Robert into a wild journey downriver in a kayak “buried in six foot standing waves — great green-gold tongues — rapid after rapid.” 

The key to understanding Is a River Alive? says Robert, is to know that we live in “one great roiling web of relations” with water, land, nature and air: ultimately, “all of us are water bodies. We are all part of the water cycle, and the water cycle is also made of power and greed and injustice. It is a moral cycle as well as a geophysical one.” No surprise, then, that Robert and Sophy fall into a discussion about The Epic of Gilgamesh with its ancient message about human greed and ecocide: “we are still failing to heed its warning 4,500 years on,” says Robert.  Hence the choice of episode image — taken in Iraq by photographer Michael Turek en route to Uruk with Sophy in 2023. Uruk is where the Gilgamesh epic was found inscribed onto stone. The image depicts an Iraqi river activist — fighting at a local level for a global tragedy we must resist.