Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

And I'm Steve Paulson.

Have you ever stood beside a river and felt it was alive?

Not just water flowing somewhere, but a presence, maybe even a being of some kind.

How do we draw the line between life and non-life, especially when it comes to something like a river?

We have a hard time imagining awareness on the scale of a forest or a mountain or water.

But it's one of the most ancient ways of understanding the world.

The book is a question. It's not a declaration.

Its title ends in a question mark.

Is a river alive?

And in a sense, it's an invitation to see what happens when we reimagine rivers,

not as stuff, not as brute matter, but as presences, let's say, with lives and with deaths and even with rights.

This is Robert McFarlane, a celebrated nature writer and explorer,

the author of some best-selling and prize-winning books, including Mountains of the Mind and Underland.

We both love his writing. I'm partial to the books about ancient landscapes.

But Steve, how would you

describe this one? Well, this is, I think, really the first time he's tackled head on the

concept of animism, the idea that all of nature is alive. And we're talking about plants and

mountains and rivers, that they possess some sort of spirit or consciousness. And, you know,

that's a common belief in a lot of indigenous cultures.

And it's the basis of the emerging rights of nature movement. Though to most scientists, that's just a lot of mumbo-jumbo.

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