Is it better to consider our climate as one aspect of a living nature?
- sciart0
- May 26
- 2 min read
Excerpt (to first link above): When Angela Auambari, a Muisca woman I was recently interviewing, said the phrase again, I asked her what she meant by it. “You can put water in tubes to send it into our homes, and yet that water will always have a life of its own,” she told me. I explained that in grade school I was taught that a tree is alive, a bird is alive, but a lake is not. “You and I are women; we give life,” Angela countered.
She gestured to the open window above us, through which the laughter of my 1-year-old daughter traveled. “The lakes up in the hills, the rivers that connect them to us, they, too, give life, and for this reason, they are alive. Agua es vida.” I understood what she meant. I even agreed with her. Still, what separates living, breathing beings from inanimate matter remains frustratingly set in my mind. Stones, no; seagulls, yes. The entire scientific tradition, from Descartes down to Linnaeus and Darwin, is built upon this division.
Nevertheless, as climate change superheats the planet, things we have long been taught to think of as inert are springing into action: ice sheets splintering, flood-prone rivers devouring mountain towns, wildfires consuming Paradise.
Those who live on the front lines of these eruptions don’t have the luxury of encountering the Earth as anything other than animate. In his new book, Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane, one of the most significant nature writers of his generation, attempts to unlearn this persistent and damaging distinction.
By exploring four extraordinary bodies of water and the people and laws aiming to protect them, Macfarlane examines a question whose time has come, whether we like it or not.
The current environmental catastrophe is a problem not only of missed emissions targets but also of the human imagination, as the writer Amitav Ghosh has argued. “Our plight is a consequence of the ways in which certain classes of humans––a small minority, in fact––have actively muted others by representing them as brutes, as creatures whose presence on earth is solely material,” Ghosh argues in his 2022 book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.
Human stories have historically refused to recognize that these others—both human others, and also things like gold, glaciers, bacteria, the jet stream; the list goes on and on—shape us just as much as we shape them.
Ours is the language that makes extraction possible. People need new narratives, Ghosh insists, that foreground nonhuman actors in order to slow this planetary cataclysm. (The time for averting it has long since passed.)