What Would It Take to Re-Sacralize Nature?

Ellen Wayland-Smith admires how Robert Macfarlane’s “Is a River Alive?” places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we regard as mere backdrop to human activity.

By Ellen Wayland-SmithMay 20, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Environment

IN RELIGIOUS COSMOGONIES, anthropologist Mircea Eliade argues in his 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, the natural world is the bearer of sacred meaning, a precious rune to be interpreted with care. For the Babylonians, the future could be read in the stars. For the Maya, freshwater cenotes marked a passage to the underworld, and priests made offerings of gold and jade amulets to appease the water god Chaac. In ancient Greece, the sacred oak tree at Dodona carried messages from Zeus for those trained to pull words from between the leaves’ whispers.

For the secular person of the modern age, however, nature has fallen silent. “The cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute,” Eliade observes, in Willard R. Trask’s translation; “it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.” What would it take for 21st-century humans to learn once again how to see the cosmos as alive, as a sentient being capable of speaking and bearing messages worthy of our listening?

This is the question at the heart of Robert Macfarlane’s haunting new book Is a River Alive? Tracking the health of three river systems across three continents—the Los Cedros river network in the mountain rainforests of Ecuador, the Adyar River basin in the Chennai region of India, and the Mutehekau Shipu (“Magpie River”) in the upper reaches of the Canadian wilderness—Macfarlane places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we have been lulled and dulled into regarding as mere backdrop to human activity. By the end of this wild travelogue of a book, he convinces us: a river is very much alive, a vital co-creator of our being in ways we desperately need to articulate in new linguistic forms.

Macfarlane begins his cross-continental journey in Ecuador, where in 2008 the recently elected president Rafael Correa drafted articles for a new constitution enshrining, for the first time in modern history, formal legal protections for “nature,” broadly defined. These articles included the state’s obligation to restrict activities that might “lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.” This landmark environmental legislation was tested when, in 2017, a broad swath of untouched Andean cloud forest known Los Cedros was auctioned off to foreign mining companies for gold and copper extraction. When Indigenous villagers and other activist groups brought the case to trial in 2021, pleading the Rights of Nature provisions in the constitution, they won an unexpected victory— and Los Cedros, one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet, was spared. “A river, a forest or other ecosystems,” wrote the presiding judge in the case, Agustín Grijalva Jiménez, are “life systems whose existence and biological processes merit the greatest possible legal protection that a Constitution can grant: the recognition of inherent rights to a subject.”

From Los Cedros, Macfarlane travels to the Chennai District in India to track local grassroots efforts there to mobilize Rights of Nature legal protections on behalf of the Adyar River. The Adyar is almost nonexistent: dammed and drained and diverted to near extinction under the British, the remaining trickle has been polluted into a gelatinous chemical soup by industrial dumping. State-backed legal efforts to get rivers and their ecosystems recognized as rights-bearing persons result in almost slapstick countermoves by local governments and chemical companies to make already-diminished waterways quite literally disappear. The logic is obvious: no body, no crime. Finally, back in North America, Macfarlane touches ground to find the Canadian Mutehekau river still magnificently intact and alive. But hydroelectric energy companies wait patiently in the wings, ready to strike should a legal loophole present itself.

The Enlightenment language of rights is a useful short-term instrument for beating back human predation and creating a protected legal standing for rivers and their ecosystems. Yet it falls sadly short in the face of what Macfarlane and his fellow river-travelers clearly sense is a spiritual, if not religious, obligation to and for the natural world. Rights are protections granted to legally recognized persons, from corporations to rivers. But the interconnected webs of life Macfarlane uncovers in his travels cut across the legal fiction of persons. “Where does the mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure,” Macfarlane muses in the Ecuadorian cloud forest. “[I]n the seethe and ooze of the forest, in the flow of the river,” he writes, “I’ve never more strongly than here […] perceived the error of understanding life as contained within a skin-sealed singleton. Life, here, stands clear as process, not possession.”

Similarly, as Macfarlane and his rafting party travel down the Shipu rapids, his friend Wayne tries to articulate the peculiar metamorphosis he feels himself undergoing after days of living in and on the water. “I’ve not felt … entirely myself,” he confesses, “as if I’ve been somehow […] hybridized with the larger situation in which we have been participating.” Turned inside out by his encounter with the river, he wonders “how the hell you might construct a politics or law out of this kind of apprehension.” Ultimately, he admits, “I just don’t know.”

Still, it is a question that calls for exploration, and Macfarlane concurs that “the encounter with these hugely other beings is where the making of a politics with the more-than-human world has to start.” In other words, if we are to move toward a politics of encounter, rather than of persons, we must push beyond the ventriloquizing question of mere stewardship—who speaks for the river?—and instead turn our attention back to those long-atrophied instruments humans used in previous eras to parse nature’s ciphers: what does the river say? The book’s larger burden, then, is not just to document the gains made by the Rights of Nature movement but also to create a language that might rise to the challenge of describing this newly “hybridized” state of being, and the new kinds of obligations it might require.

The notion of obligation—as opposed to rights—is a problem that also haunted German-born philosopher, religious scholar, and evolutionary biologist Hans Jonas, who maintained that the breakneck pace of our species’ technological mastery over nature demanded new ways of thinking about our responsibility for nonhuman forms of life. In his 1966 essay collection The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Jonas argues that a philosophy of matter (the study of biological life, the natural world) and a philosophy of mind (the study of human consciousness) are, far from being opposed projects, best thought of as two strands woven together into a single braid.

For centuries, Jonas writes, we have assumed that “man alone […] is the source of all demand, command, and call with which he finds himself addressed,” and that “whatever moral quality enters the relation of self and world can have its origin nowhere but in the self.” But this isn’t necessarily so. “True it is that obligation cannot be without the idea of obligation, and true that within the known world the capacity for that or any idea appears in man alone,” Jonas concedes. But it does not follow that obligation must therefore be an invention and cannot be a discovery, nor that “the rest of existence is indifferent to that discovery.” The human species is perhaps “the executor of a trust” on behalf of all life-forms—a trust that we did not create but that “only [we] can see.” For Jonas, the stakes of recognizing the continuity of mind and matter in this shared pact of obligation could not be more crucial. “We literally hold in our faltering hands the future of the divine adventure” of our planet, he urges, “and we must not fail [it] even if we would fail ourselves.”

Macfarlane’s book is a grand gesture in the direction of honoring Jonas’s plea to reimagine our human obligation to the planet—not as anthropomorphic invention but as (re)discovery of an original, and now lost, trust. After an exhausting day riding the rapids, Macfarlane rests on the riverbank as the sun sets; he is no longer “thinking with” the river, as objective travelogue-observer, but instead is “being thought by it”—“as if some vast and unknowable other life-way is scanning me, echolocating me, clicking away on frequencies far beyond the hertz range of human ears or minds.”

As Macfarlane drifts off to sleep, he writes, “the river runs flow and counterflow in my brain. I see spirals forming everywhere: on the eddy-lines, under the pull of our paddles, in the grain of the driftwood, the licks of fire, the sky-gyres of a watchful osprey.” Is a River Alive? is Macfarlane’s attempt to imagine, beyond skull and skin, the overlapping fates of mind and matter, to tap out a new language in which wood and word and bird, brain and river and flame, might reveal themselves as equal sharers in a single source of being.