Is a River Alive?

Macfarlane structures his argument around three specific rivers rather than abstraction: cloud-forest streams in Ecuador tied to a legal case over corporate mining rights, a polluted, culturally sacred creek system in India, and wild rivers in Canada, using each place to test whether granting rivers legal personhood is a workable idea or just an evocative metaphor. He doesn't resolve the question with a flat yes, instead staying visibly unsettled by it across the book, which is what keeps it from reading as advocacy literature. Compared to his earlier, more solitary nature writing, this one is warmer and more hopeful in tone, a shift some longtime readers welcome and others find slightly less bracing than his best work.