Is a River Alive? What Rivers Teach Us About Nature, Mental Health, and Connection

If a river could speak, what would it say about our world today, about the way we treat the water, the land, and each other?

This question pulses at the heart of Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive?, and in our recent Wild Connection podcast conversation, he invites us to reimagine rivers not as background scenery or mere water channels, but as living entities, storytellers, and entitled to rights.

My conversation with Robert stayed with me long after we recorded it. I’ve always sensed that forests are alive. You can feel that immediately when walking beneath a canopy of trees. But rivers? I hadn’t thought of them that way. Not really. Until now.

In Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane explores the idea of a natural contract, an ethical agreement between humans and nature. It's not just poetic language. It's an old truth echoed in Indigenous worldviews across the globe. That we are in a reciprocal relationship with nature and rivers are often at the center of our lives.

For the Māori, the Whanganui River is not a resource, it's an ancestor. In 2017, after over 140 years of advocacy, the river was granted legal personhood, becoming the first in the world to hold rights as a living being. As Robert shared in our conversation, “This wasn't about giving nature human rights, it was about recognizing that rivers already have their own integrity and dignity.", though both of us agreed that perhaps personhood wasn't exactly the best approach.

But the Māori are not alone. From the Atrato River in Colombia to the Magpie River in Canada, communities are reframing the relationship between people and place through the lens of kinship and care.

If you think about it more deeply, rivers and people aren’t so different. Just as a river can be polluted, diverted, or blocked, so can we. Emotionally, many of us experience a sense of being drained, disconnected, and under chronic stress. We push through without noticing we’ve become reduced to a trickle. Neuroscience and environmental psychology increasingly confirm what ancient wisdom has long known: being around water restores us.

Studies show that spending time near rivers, lakes, or oceans, the so-called “blue spaces”, reduces anxiety, improves mood, and enhances cognitive function. More than metaphor, flowing water helps us regulate. It teaches us about release, resilience, and renewal. Robert writes that recognizing rivers as alive is not sentiment, it’s sanity. It’s survival.

A few weeks after my interview with Robert I stood along the banks of the Rhine River (Rhein) in Germany, watching its

steady flow pass castles, vineyards, and towns steeped in centuries of human history. It’s one of Europe’s great rivers, but more than that, it felt like a living thread running through time, linking people, ecosystems, and memory. I couldn’t help but reflect on the themes in Is a River Alive? and wonder, what has this river seen? What has it heard? What are the stories it tells? The Rhine has been engineered and re-channeled over the centuries, yet it still hums with a presence that feels very much alive.

In Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane asks us to reframe the way we relate to rivers, from resource to relationship.

If we begin to see rivers not as objects to manage but as partners in our lives, we may begin to see ourselves differently, too. Our stories, our health, our future, they are all connected.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What river shaped you?

What story do you have about a river?

If you want to go deeper into the idea of reconnecting with nature, whether it's the land or the water, start today with my course and workbook: Reconnect with Nature on Audible and Rooted in Nature workbook on Amazon

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