Words We Need: Rivering
Remembering a "grammar of animacy."
Nature writing, as a genre, often leaves me cold, but I’ve long appreciated the work of Robert Macfarlane, who thinks deeply about not only landscapes but the language we use to describe them. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane seeks words for a concept that many modern minds find almost impossible to grasp: that a river is not simply water running downhill but, as he writes, “alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains.”
The trouble begins, or ends, with the English language itself. With a nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for a “grammar of animacy,” Macfarlane observes that English speakers typically “it” rivers, trees, mountains, and animals, “a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons.” He continues:
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?
As Macfarlane notes, “grammar” also meant “magic” in Middle English, and a “gramarye” was a book of spells. “A good grammar of animacy,” he maintains, “can still re-enchant existence.”
Macfarlane’s exploration of river animacy takes him from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the tributaries of the Bay of Bengal to the Magpie River of Québec, known to the Innu people as the Mutuhekau Shipu. Each “rivering” and its telling carries him, and his readers, deeper into the old idea of rivers as living beings and the new idea that such beings can be protected with legal rights.
Last week, I saw Macfarlane speak in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s Books, the region’s secular shrine to language and its possibilities. Recalling Barry Lopez’s notion of the “syntax of the river,” he reflected:
Knowing the names of things is the first step. That’s the lexis, that’s the vocabulary. But the hard bit, and the bit that really matters, is knowing the relations between things, and that’s the syntax — that’s the syntax of the river. So we may have remembered the lexis of the river, but broadly we’ve forgotten the syntax.
I drove home from Portland along the Columbia River, upstream with the spring chinook. The Columbia has been subjected to what Macfarlane calls the “resource model” since Lewis and Clark first sighted her in 1805; dams for hydropower and agriculture have depleted her salmon, who now struggle to survive the summer heat. The most recent attempt to repair her cultural and ecological syntax has just been quashed by the Trump administration.
Wounded though she is, the Columbia still rivers. She still reaches the sea, still feeds those who depend on her, still casts spells from her gramarye. As I sped east on the interstate, under a sky hung with wildfire smoke, I imagined her waiting for us to remember, waiting for us to catch up.
Conservation at Work
Republicans in the U.S. Congress just won’t quit trying to sell off our public lands. While the House amendment to the Republican budget package, proposed in May, would have made some 500,000 acres of public land available for sale, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has now drafted a proposal that conservation advocates say would allow the sale of more than *250 million* acres of public land. The Wilderness Society promptly published a detailed map of the places at risk — find the spots you love and start making a racket.
Wildlife professionals usually prefer science to politics, but the members of The Wildlife Society have stepped forward to oppose the Trump administration’s proposal to radically narrow the definition of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act. The comments, submitted by 13 chapters and a group of past TWS presidents as well as TWS as a whole, are profoundly well-informed and worth reading.
I applauded the recent call by Marco Malavasi, in Bioscience, to go “beyond crisis and grief” [paywalled, sorry, but worth tracking down] in conservation narratives. “Given the urgency of the current situation,” he writes, “it is essential to emphasize transformative change as the guiding narrative — reframing conservation science as a transformative discipline.”
Finally, congratulations to Boyce Upholt, whose *print* magazine Southlands launches this fall. To learn more about the magazine’s mission, and to support great reporting and writing about a region too often ignored, pay Boyce and his team a visit.