Brian and Lairer on WNYC, and for the last few minutes of today's show, we're joined by the

decorated nature writer Robert McFarlane. The title of his latest book poses an interesting question.

Is a river alive while skeptical at first after traveling to converse with rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada?

The answer to him becomes obvious.

McFarland invites us to see our rivers not only as alive, but beings that deserve rights in law.

Robert, thanks for joining. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks, Brian. Good morning to you. We all know rivers are ecosystems. So what made you ask,

are they alive? How is that different? Well, partly because my rivers are dying. I'm

English and we have a pretty shattered and wounded river system as a result of privatization,

36 years of privatization. So we have not a single river in good overall health in England. So there's a

crisis there. And I suddenly began thinking about rivers not as

ecosystem service providers not as resources but yes as as as neighbors as friends

as citizens they flowed for 10 12,000 years in our landscape but but here we are treating them very, very badly.

So it's an attempt to reimagine our relationship with rivers away from resources

and towards the life forces that they absolutely are.

What do you mean rivers you know are dying?

I guess if we ask, are rivers alive? We can ask,

can rivers die? Right. Yes, they can. A dying river deadpoles. That's what hydrologists

call it. That's when a river doesn't have enough flow to move itself along its own bed. A dying

river, its fish float belly up in England.

So we have two measures of river health.

One is ecological health.

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