{"id":3514273,"date":"2025-06-27T11:50:56","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T11:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3514273"},"modified":"2025-06-27T11:50:56","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T11:50:56","slug":"why-do-we-not-recognize-that-a-river-is-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-06-27\/why-do-we-not-recognize-that-a-river-is-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do we not recognize that a river is alive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the solstice, I began reading Robert Macfarlane\u2019s book\u00a0Is a River Alive<\/em>? (seemed appropriate) which is already as elegiac and reverential as anything he has produced. Lauds can not do justice. However, there is a fundamental logical error that has not been addressed in this book yet (I am not that far in at the time of this writing). Not directly. In the introduction he brushes it gently, cautiously, and then steps past. He relates a story of when his nine-year-old son asks the title of the book. Upon hearing the titular question, the child responds \u201c\u2026 that\u2019s going to be a short book\u2026 because the answer is yes!\u201d<\/p>\n

Macfarlane chuckles a bit in the prose that follows and wistfully alludes to the wonder alive in children that enables them to unquestioningly accept the living conviviality in the rest of the world. But, Macfarlane seems to say, grown-ups heavy with rationalizations and cultural conditioning lose that facility with the life in the Other. We adults can\u2019t even\u00a0see<\/em>\u00a0the living being that lacks a human body, never mind interacting with them. But instead of pressing on from the point of innocent wonder, Macfarlane begins to describe the death of things that we did not recognize as alive.<\/p>\n

But what if the child is right? Duh! It\u2019s alive. Of course, you numbskull. It eats. It breathes. It grows. It reproduces itself. It changes. And yes\u2026 it dies. Transmogrifies into something else. That\u2019s life!<\/p>\n

The question might be better formulated, so as to avoid enculturation and blindness, from another perspective. Is a human alive? What makes a human, a complex organism composed of millions of other organisms working in concert, an individual life? And then, if you accept that the human organism is a living entity, how is it different from a river? Both are embodied systems made up of many parts, intensive and extensive. Both bodies are composites of many bodies, both smaller and larger than the recognized individual body. Both transform materials and energy into bodily forms. Both follow timelines in which the streams are never exactly the same at different points on the line. Both have beginnings that are dependent upon others, some of recognizable kin, some not. Both bodies end, though life continues on, transforming the bodies into new bodies. If a human body is all those things and yet alive, then why is not a river, also all those things, assumed, with the assurance of a nine-year-old, to be alive as well?<\/p>\n

The question isn\u2019t \u201cis a river alive?\u201d It is why do we not recognize that a river is alive? More importantly, why do we lose the ability to recognize this manifest truth? What is it about our adulting, our culture, our logic and philosophy that makes us so unwitting? That transforms perception into tortured explication?<\/p>\n

Well, that might be a short book also\u2026 but it would take quite a lot of verbiage to cut through the modern mind-fog to make its point. In fact, most of what I write is trying to do just that.<\/p>\n

Why can\u2019t we accept a river as a living entity? Because then we could not abuse it.<\/p>\n

Oh, I\u2019m sure we could work around the ethics, as we do with all the other living beings that we heedlessly use to further our ends, caring not one whit about the consequences. Not even for our own future bodies. We are very good at proscribing life, drawing an ever-tightening ring around what merits care and attentiveness, what deserves to be unmolested, what may not be trashed on our altars to avarice. And then, bodies of all sorts are excluded from the resultant genus of the worthy. This one is too small. That one too large. Those over there are the wrong color. These do not speak our language. Turns out most bodies are not fully alive, by our standards. All these bodies lack that one essential quality that makes it a living entity with embodied rights \u2014 they lack a body that perfectly matches the ruling body.<\/p>\n

We have variously labeled that quality a spirit, a soul, a mind, a consciousness. We then insist on hierarchies of these disembodied qualities. My consciousness is superior to yours. I am more rational. You are more emotional. My soul is elevated and noble and eternal. Yours is earthy and common and destined to die. (Or suffer eternal torment\u2026) But it always comes back to the body that houses that discarnate quality. The measure is always man, with\u00a0man<\/em>\u00a0defined as narrowly as possible \u2014 so as not to need to share the wealth of the world too broadly.<\/p>\n

All our hand-wringing philosophy and convoluted logic, the stuff of endless debate and oceans of exegesis, it all comes back to justifying the boundaries around what is deemed worthy of integral rights to life. This question bubbled out of our wondering minds the moment we started reducing the world to words. It is older than modernity, older than capitalism, but not older than greed. Some claim that the fundamental human problem, the \u201chuman condition\u201d, is being aware of our own mortality. Hogwash! All beings know there is a time for dying. All beings grieve the loss of former loves. All beings know that their existence is limited and therefore precious. The human problem is not that we are aware of death but that we do not accept those limits. All our philosophizing is concerned with proving this one theorem: that our lives are singularly limitless, above all other bodies.<\/p>\n

It is a bit more nuanced than that, perhaps\u2026 or maybe not. Because all hierarchies are essentially rankings of what we call freedom to live. Those at the apex of the pyramid (and it is a very pointy pyramid, indeed) are free from limitations on their wants. They are allowed to act upon any whim. They are not even beholden to time and mortality. Their meat bodies may wither eventually \u2014 though they will spare no effort or resources to preserve those bodies long past their expiration date \u2014 but at the end of embodied life they will enter disembodied eternity where presumably there are no limits at all. (I can\u2019t imagine a more hellish idea than heaven\u2026 or its modern equivalent, the metaverse\u2026)<\/p>\n

This began with the recognition of the central fact of animality \u2014 we can\u2019t produce our own energy. We must eat other bodies to get at the nourishment that is produced by plants and that ultimately comes from the burning of our star, the sun. There is guilt associated with this eating. It necessitates taking lives, often killing the food. To assuage our conscience, we invented stories. Some food-bodies, we deemed noble adversaries, bodies that we vanquished after arduous and valorous battles that we did not always win. Some, we said, were lowly and subservient, giving their lives willingly, happily, so that we might incorporate that life into our own bodies. But most of the world, including all the primary producers, including the Earth itself, was named inanimate. Not living. We stripped all these bodies of their senses, their thoughts, their interiority. We rendered them into base matter, to be used as we superior beings wished. We took their lives.<\/p>\n

The rest is more or less history\u2026 or as the ecofeminists say \u201chis-story\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n

More and more bodies were reduced to inert and unconscious things. The body itself was vilified as mere temporary housing for the perdurable and superior spirit. Notice that the thing that we name human in these bodies is the disembodied mind and its preoccupations. This may be because even in our ignorant rationality we recognize that there is no hard boundary on this body, no distinguishing it from Other. The only way to separate the human from the world-embedded organism that is the body is to give that human a special quality that is independent of the body. All the better that it can\u2019t be measured or compared with other beings. The rest of the world just has to take our word for it when we say we are worthier.<\/p>\n

Where did the river go in these stories? Once we saw spirit in the river. We feared it and worshipped it. We understood our place in relationship with the flowing waters. Water always wins\u2026 Except when we go shock and awe with concrete and poison. But even then, water will find a way. All our efforts at conquest are temporary. The river flows on.<\/p>\n

We used to know this. We accommodated our lives to the river. We did not try to mold the river to our desires. Because we knew that strenuous effort to be ultimately futile, usually causing us more harm than the river\u2019s worst moods could ever effect. We bowed to the river. And because it was deemed superior, the living body of waters was accorded a spirit\u2026 and guess what that spirit looks like\u2026<\/p>\n

All our gods look like us\u2026 Those beings that are named equal or superior to humans are given human appearance and personality. More specifically, we make our gods in the image of humans of the current ruling class\u2026 Does that not say something about why we can\u2019t see life in the river?<\/p>\n

And then we learned how to extract energy from rocks \u2014 that which we long ago deemed insensate and ripe for the taking, completely guilt-free eating\u2026 as long as we could hide away the scars and pollution flowing from our burning desires. In this transformation, we confidently dispensed with deity. We became gods. Nothing was above us. Nothing more noble. Nothing more dignified. No embodied territory was sacrosanct. The landscape was food for whatever our disembodied minds could dream up.<\/p>\n

The rivers were relegated to what Macfarlane names a \u201climitless source and a limitless sump\u201d. A body to be exploited, taking what we want from it and disgorging all our wastes into it so its continual flow would wash our hands clean. Until the algal blooms and oil spills, tailings and plastic and filth, red tides and invasive species (other than us), until it all became too abhorrent. Then we channeled the streams into concrete caverns and closed the beaches and tried to convince ourselves that our technology was properly cleaning the water flowing from the taps and into our bodies. (What\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0that taste\u2026)<\/p>\n

A body so treated is, by definition, unworthy. Of respect. Of dignity and sentience. Of self-determination and agency. Of health and a right to wholeness. Of life. Yet, such a body is not dead. The river is still alive. Slave bodies endure this half-life for a frightfully long time. That is the horror in this question. Is the river alive? Of course, it is! Is it suffering? Clearly\u2026 Is this our fault?<\/p>\n

Yes.<\/p>\n

But we sociopaths do not feel the guilt any more. We are as gods, hovering above this embodied world.<\/p>\n

We hide behind regulations and rationalizations and all our ruling words. We debate the question in ever more abstruse terms rather than acknowledge the obvious answer. The river is alive and all its horror is our making. It is on us to unmake the harm. But, but, but, we sputter, we can\u2019t unmake it. We can\u2019t afford it. We can\u2019t take on this magnitude of mess. We can\u2019t even stop causing the harm. Because then our culture would fall apart\u2026 and those in charge would no longer be so.<\/p>\n

The minute we accept the essential life in other bodies, we have to accept that those bodies under our rule are in profound pain. Then the question becomes: what is wrong with us? And the corollary to that: how do we fix ourselves? The answer to that is to accord at least the same worth to other bodies as to our own. To give those bodies back their lives and all the conscious dignity a life entails. To give them the freedom to be well and whole. To let them live.<\/p>\n

The interesting conundrum in all this is that we have no choice. Because we are embodied in this world also. Meaning we are organisms interdependent and interpenetrating with all other organisms. Wholeness and wellness in our own bodies is contingent on the wholeness and wellness of all that we live among. Most especially the rivers. As we used to know\u2026 Moderns are singular, right enough, singularly stupid\u2026 Every little harm we enact upon the world around us affects us. The big harms are very likely leading to extinction of our kind\u2026 though not of life. Nor of the rivers\u2026 Why can\u2019t we figure that out?!?<\/p>\n

Because we know that there is no status, no profit, no specialness without taking life from some other being. Even when we are taking life from our own future bodies, we will not forgo the dubious rewards of our invented hierarchies. A man can\u2019t be taught if his paycheck depends upon his unknowing\u2026<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit deeper than that (though only a bit)\u2026 Take away this exclusive right to life and there is no distinction upon which to build hierarchies. There is no reason that man should be superior to any body. There is no rule. It is all anarchy\u2026 Which scares the living daylights out of most people. Though that might be more the result of elite propaganda than any thoughtful consideration of the term.<\/p>\n

What is anarchy? It is a lack of hierarchy. It is also an opposition to hierarchy as a concept that is immoral in essence and\/or application. But fundamentally, anarchy is simply a world without rulers, where all bodies are self-determined.<\/p>\n

Which, you\u2019ll note, is the actual state of the universe.<\/p>\n

Anarchy is not chaos. It is balance between embodied beings. It is living within the limits of relationship, not under the limits of arbitrary control. It is a world in which all bodies are alive, recognized as such, and accorded the dignity that is inherent to that life. There are still animals that require food. There are still timelines and endings. There may even be wasteful harm. (Weeds exist, after all\u2026) But there is no class of being that is allowed to enact while all others are compelled to serve his whims purely based on his ideas of who is a who and what is a what and what in all of that is deemed alive\u2026<\/p>\n

So is a river alive? Yes. (Duh\u2026) Why are we not capable of seeing that? Because our culture is built upon not seeing. Why is that so? Because\u2026? And we call this the age of reason\u2026<\/p>\n

More like the age of \u201creasons\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n

This, too, is a very short book. But it overturns pretty much every other word in publication.<\/p>\n

Give the river back her life, and man can no longer rule\u2026 end of debate\u2026 end of his-story\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The question isn\u2019t \u201cis a river alive?\u201d It is why do we not recognize that a river is alive?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3514275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79718,79720,213535],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3514273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-society","category-society-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3514277,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514273\/revisions\/3514277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3514275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}