Magic Canoe is dedicated to the vitality and regenerative possibilities of Salmon Nation, within the bioregion we call home, a home for so many others, too, human and more-than-human.
Home, to us, is defined as a flowing system of relations, of continuing life.
In Robert Macfarlane’s newest book, Is a River Alive?, the author thinks and writes as a watershed might, traversing an animate meridian of rivers across the world, three watersheds to better understand the personal, political, legal, and spiritual stakes in defense of their health and inherent sovereignty.
In reading this book, and in thinking about all Magic Canoe is doing to build a bioregional movement — what I like to think of sometimes as an “eco-political counterprogram” to the nation-state — Macfarlane makes the case that, if you agree that rivers are alive (spoiler alert: they are!), then you might have to agree that everything upon which that river depends, has depended on, and will continue to depend on, is also alive and sacred.
Therefore, rivers and their communities are worthy of legal protections against industrial extraction, climate change, and unchecked development. And it’s often traditional Indigenous lifeways whose cultural foundations remember and carry the living body of a river, whose bodies carry values of restraint and reciprocity as a way of organizing, as a politic. This, the author insists, is to be protected. This is to be taken very seriously.
In the end, what I learned from this remarkable book was this: We are alive only so far as we view the more-than-world as alive, and this book’s prose and internal vulnerability comes alive on the page, which enlivens the reader and the world further, as a result.
— Nicholas Triolo, Managing Editor
Newsletter Sign-up
Sign up for our newsletter to receive inspirational stories about people working to build a bioregional movement across Salmon Nation.
From the Publisher:
“Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams.
Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”
About the Author:
Robert Macfarlane’s best-selling books include Underland, The Old Ways, and Mountains of the Mind. With the artist Jackie Morris he is the coauthor of The Lost Words, The Lost Spells, and The Book of Birds. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence and is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.