In Is a River Alive? Robert MacFarlane deliberates if water bodies are meant for human use

Rivers seem to come into many people’s lives today when they overflow, or at times when they run dry. It is seen as a source of water, hydroelectric power or a harbinger of floods and destruction. This instrumentalist understanding of a water body is, however, a recent phenomenon. As Robert MacFarlane underlines in Is a River Alive ?, the idea that water bodies are mainly meant for human use is contested even today. The worldviews of several indigenous communities have, for long, underlined the connections between humans and other elements of nature. The truth is, as MacFarlane points out, rivers are both “worshipped and mistreated”. “They give us metaphors to live by and decline our attempts to parse them. Unruly, fluid and utterly other, rivers are potent presences with which to imagin