By Kathryn Nuernberger
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. Norton, 384 pp., $19.99.
The Age of Loneliness: Essays, by Laura Marris, Graywolf Press, 208 pp., $18.
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Haymarket Books, 224 pp., $19.95.
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Graywolf Press, 168 pp., $18.
When my grandmother was very old and my oldest child was very young, I took them both to a butterfly house. I left the stroller in the car so I could push grandma’s wheelchair, but my child, who was four, was overwhelmed by the butterflies everywhere, the too-muchness of so many wings, the legs creeping along our arms. I had a weeping child wrapped around my torso, faced buried in my neck and was struggling to push the wheelchair using only my right arm and my left hip, but my grandmother was too enchanted to notice any of the drama behind her. “Katie,” she said, “It hasn’t been like this since I was a girl.” I brushed a blue swallowtail from out of her hair. “So many butterflies,” she said. I counted four more gathering on her shoulder and one on the back of my own hand. I tried to shoo them away from my freaking out kid. You mean there were this many outside? I asked her. “Oh yes, every summer.”
My 86-year-old grandmother was remembering what it was like to be a four-year-old child in the meadows that stretched out between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, lying on your back in grasses that had never been sprayed, watching the clouds of butterfly storms pass overhead. And when I try to imagine it, I find I can’t believe so much life was ever real. I was overcome with grief. Grief for what was and what could have been. A grief for what we used to believe was possible. A grief beyond what we have words for. She’s nearly blind, I told myself as a comfort. She probably can’t even see how many butterflies there really are. Her memory has been faltering for years, she’s mistaken. It hurt so much to let myself believe her.
But I do believe her. And we have plenty of data to support what she said. We have oral histories from First Nations and Indigenous peoples. We have written accounts from the first settler colonizers about streams in Arkansas running silver with so many fish you couldn’t tell where the fish ended and the water began. There are descriptions of buffalo herds in the countless thousands stretched out to the horizon. In spring 2025, The Guardian reported on the latest numbers of insects from a number of field research stations at nature reserves around the world. The news out of Costa Rica: “The hum of wild bees has faded, and leaves that should be chewed to the stem hang whole and un-nibbled… more like a pristine greenhouse than a living ecosystem: a wilderness that has been fumigated and left sterile. Not a forest but a museum.” Reports from Germany document flying insects have dropped by 75% in less than 30 years. In Texas, caterpillar expert David Wagner said “There just wasn’t any insect life to speak of …. Everything was crispy, fried; the lizard numbers were down to the lowest numbers I can think of.” We know the trends are such that we will continue to lose about 1-2% of insect life per year, which when calculated out over the next 40 years will mean half the tree of life disappeared in one human lifetime. Birds are following suit. Biodiversity on this planet is in freefall.
But the data doesn’t seem to be helping us understand. Not really, not in the ways that matter. It hurts too much to believe and our human adaptations to fight or flee or freeze don’t serve us well in this moment. When I drive down most any country road within 500 miles of my childhood home, I see cornfields on the right, soybeans on the left. For years there were copyright signs from Dupont popping up at the ends of the rows like mile markers—now the corporations everywhere prefer to keep their heads down and hope we forget what they are doing here.
Moreover, stories like the one I’ve just told you about my grandmother don’t seem to do much good either. As writers we must contend with our own failure and futilities. After all, people love to weep. It is cathartic and after we dry our eyes, we feel as if we have really done something. And so I wonder what kind of literature could change us and the course we are on? Four new books of creative nonfiction address the climate crisis with fresh approaches. They don’t dwell on the data and they don’t dwell on the coming catastrophes. Their experiments in new ways of thinking about and relating to this changing world are each deeply moving and powerfully affecting in their own ways.
In Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane, whose nature writing has been a powerful germinal force in conservation for over a decade, engages with a promising new direction environmental activists and green-minded politicians have been exploring to protect and save our biosphere. They are attempting to use legal protections in surprising new ways by asserting rivers are people too. If a river is alive, if it has personhood, then that also means it has rights. And if a river can be granted personhood, the implications for all of the creatures that nourish and are nourished by its watershed are potentially earth-shattering. Or, better yet, earth-mending. In an effort to persuade those who might be attached to Enlightenment-era taxonomies that place humans at the top of a pyramid of living things that do not include rocks or mountains or soil or rivers or the planet itself, Macfarlane travels through three major waterways (the Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the watersheds of Chennai, India, and Mutehekau Shipu as the river is known by the Innu people who live near its mouth at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada). He chooses these rivers because they are sites where this legal and philosophical framework has been shaping conservation efforts. He intersperses stunningly beautiful descriptions of these landscapes with conversations with ecologists and activists about the biospheres held in those watersheds. He also describes with sensitivity and insight how it feels to open himself up to the spirit of the waters.
Macfarlane’s prose might be as exquisite as the rivers themselves. A great lover of geology, his writing can capture a cosmic sweep of time and living energies in a single sentence. To give just one example: “The Gulf of St. Lawrence stretches away in a gleaming silver sheet to the south, sea phasing imperceptibly into sky. It seems like we could hang a right and just motor out across the water and straight off the edge of the world.” The experience of reading this book is transcendent. Except that I was bothered every time I popped my bookmark into a new chapter and closed the spine to face that title on the cover once more. Is a river alive? Of course it is, I thought each time I saw the question. Why wouldn’t it be?
A different question hums between the lines of this book and I wished Macfarlane had chosen this one to ask directly. How is a river alive? This is the question I would love to see facing bookstore goers encountering this book on the shelves and tables. Not only because I am curious about an answer, but also because the world is ending in an extinction cascade all around us and I worry we don’t have time to keep rehashing basic truths with disingenuous opponents playing at debate. There are some who only believe corporations are people and worth can only be found in the soul of a dollar bill and we can only waste so much breath arguing with them. To ask if a river is alive feels like a compromise and I’m a few U.S. election cycles past willing to compromise about whose lives matter and whose can be used as bargaining chips.
But though Macfarlane does not make my preferred question explicit and I’m only in cantankerous moods these days, I do want to celebrate how Macfarlane beautifully shows how a river is alive in chapter after chapter. The book itself does deeper and more meaningful work than the title would suggest. In the waters flowing down from the cloud forests in Ecuador, he writes, “It seems clear to me then, in that strange, bright water, that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing—how had George Eliot put it?—‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.’” And his loveliest insights of all can be found in the interludes between the great rivers when he describes seasonal visits to a small spring, a holy well, near his home in the south of England. We see the spring reduced to a mud puddle in the middle of a drought and hear his son worry the water may be gone forever. And then we see its lovely gushing as branches tied with clootie rags, an ancient form of praying by tying a ribbon or string to a tree near a well like this one, bend towards the spring. “Then one by one they reach out over the pool where a river is born, and let the ash fall like snow onto the water’s surface, where the flakes begin to move together, drawn by undercurrents we cannot see. Death and love and life, all mingled in the flow.” How is a river alive? This question is best answered not through epic voyages down awesome rivers bigger than a human mind can fully grasp, but at the spring near his own home, a site of humble prayers, beleaguered by the droughts of climate change, sometimes a trickle so small you must lift a rock to find it. A place where you would go to leave a scattering of your beloved father’s ashes. It is in that crouching and lifting and wiping of a stray tear that I felt most deeply how the life in the water trickles through.
As I chaffed against the reality that we must, it seems, find a way to prove that a river is alive, my twin sons turned three. In preschools across the U.S. it is considered important for children this age to learn how to sort things that are alive from things that are not. A table, a swatch of cloth, my earring, the pebble one of my sons takes to bed with him in his little fist every night—these, my sons have been told, are not alive. I remember how I once learned what was alive and what wasn’t. I remember looking at a doll in a pinafore I had propped up to seem as if she were reading a book and thought “alive, not alive.” I felt so ashamed anywhere I let my mind rest. Everything is alive, I tell my children, contradicting the state science standards. The stone, a little ball of sheep’s wool, the thin curve of steel, all of it in its way, which can be a hard way to understand, but being hard to grasp, I tell them, does not make something less real.
I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn the kinds of binary thinking that characterize education at the heart of the incomprehensibly huge network of a nonliving thing we call extraction capitalism. I’ve wondered what thinking would yield if the first and most important lessons we taught our children were about how we are connected, rather than exercises in separation. What if taxonomies and classification were considered irrelevant to the field of biology? How perfect then, to stumble on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s new Theory of Water in my neighborhood bookstore. In this book, Simpson says, her collaborators “were snow and ice, slush and rain.” Her experience grooming cross-country ski trails near her home during the pandemic were particularly instructive. She returns to the lessons she learned about sintering over and over again. Sintering is the process whereby a snowflake joins with others to create a snowpack and in the way those bonded crystals change over time. Simpson writes that “the first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds… It weaves itself into its environment, and it does so in a way that doesn’t destroy its neighbors.”
This book is a continuation of a body of writings Simpson has created that attempt to answer the most urgent questions of decolonization—How?—with Nishnaabe teachings and other forms of Indigenous knowledge. In Theory of Water, she articulates a pedagogy of water in its many forms because water, Nibi, “offers us an invitation to learn from its embodied practice, a practice of cycling that is global, is permeable and brings about a continuous rebirth on our planet.” With each chapter Simpson takes us to a bank or a shore of water in her homelands. Seeking cattails or frogs or wild rice, attempting Nishnaabe practices of hunting and harvesting, but often thwarted by settlers’ vacation homes built right to the edge of the water, she teaches about laws, history, justice, and memory. How, she asks, might we restore and repair? How might we sinter? She writes, “Some revolts are incremental, eroding, melting, freezing, seeping, leaking … Nibi’s theories are all around us, all the time, the most magnificent manifestations of mino-bimaadiziwin. It is a theory of water, and it lives inside of all of us.”
This book too is characterized by fantastically immersive descriptions of watershed ecosystems, as well as by moving recollections of conversations Simpson had with her teacher, Doug, whose recent death she grieves in these pages, even as she seeks to hold and extend his memory with her words. Her recounting of Doug’s teachings about eels is one of many resonant moments in this book. “Every year, Doug said, the eel came into our homeland as a messenger, telling us that our world making was deeply connected not just to the species we shared our immediate time and space with, but to peoples and forms of life all over.” She describes how the eels, which have not been seen in her waterways for a very long time, once told people “something about the health of their environment and the travel route. It told us something about ourselves as well.” Simpson’s work models a new way of teaching. She reflects on a journey that would have once been deeply meaningful for people in her community—paddling the rivers to the sea, much as Macfarlane does in his pages. Simpson does not undertake this journey, but instead engages in an extended thought experiment about why it is, at this moment in history, a seemingly impossible undertaking. “Reattachment, I think now, is not glamorous or romantic. I would have learned some beautiful things from my re-enactment, but I also understand that some things are lost that I can’t get back. The densely populated route I would have travelled would not be without constant struggle. I would not feel safe, not for one second, on this journey. And there is a good chance my work of reattachment would have led to feelings of alienation. I feel sick thinking about it.” In Theory of Water, Simpson gives us the gift of space to grieve for Doug with her, grieve for the eels with her, grieve for the kinds of pain still to come. Reading these words, I felt as if I could look over the fields of my Missouri home and know there could be, there should be, there were, so many butterflies once it felt like a blizzard. And now, for now, they are gone.
In Laura Marris’s collection, The Age of Loneliness, the question that hangs heavy over her essays, many of which are set alongside the superfund site known as Love Canal, is what happens when a river dies. She begins by contemplating the biologist E. O. Wilson’s suggestion that rather than calling this the Anthropocene, the age of humans, we would do better to call it the Eremocene, which means the age of loneliness. Because when a species, an ecosystem, a river dies, a part of us does too. She begins with an essay about grief for her father and for the landscape of her childhood, which is inextricably tied to memories of him through senses of home, love, and belonging. In other essays she highlights the lonelinesses created and cultivated by late-stage capitalism that necessitates and normalizes rootless lives. Her focus is on the experience of contingent academics, endlessly roaming to some new fellowship or visiting professorship, even as she remembers and notes that many other industries cultivate even more extreme forms of migratory precarity. But she contemplates with insight the implications of this colonialist feature of the Academy—one of many—that those of us who teach in universities might never really feel like we belong to the communities where we teach and learn and play and breathe, that we are the gowns above and beyond and outside of our towns. For years Marris flew in and out of LA and other cities, from her temporary position in one city to a parter teaching in another. “I felt twenty-seven and threadbare, like at any moment the fabric of my life would rub away to reveal the skin. Or maybe there had never been any weave on the loom at all, and I had simply been shuttling back and forth across one set of threads until they broke.” Eventually she turns away from the disconnectedness of this life, its pervasive sense of unreality. “During those long airport hours, I started to think about the loss of these other forms of kinship. If studies show that just being around other creatures and their habitats increases feelings of well-being in people, reduces stress, and relieves loneliness, what happens when the ease of that proximity is diminished, or altered, or made merely transactional?”
With this yearning, not only for a sustainable romantic love but for a sense of reciprocity only found in community, she settled in Buffalo, NY, very near Love Canal. It is a community beleaguered by a string of cancers caused by toxins from defense department contracts that chemical companies dumped into the soil and the water of the region. In this landscape of loss Marris proposes a vision of conservation and community that leans into this trouble, that refuses to say we will simply move some place better, some place cleaner, some place where the toxicity can’t reach us. She refuses the allure of the distant vista and instead leans into this trouble by building garden beds atop the sickly soil, listening with delight to the birds who populate scraggly “junk” trees and invasive species hardy enough to withstand the difficult soil. She describes the surprise beauty of a forest of unexpected tulips planted by previous generations returning, even after a thorough tilling, to grow again in the ground where she now plants. The book reminds us of our inescapable entanglements. The poisoned air and water do not stay inside the maps drawn in a judicial settlement. The man living in the house on the other side of that line will also develop cancer. The water will seep and flow, the wind will blow. We cannot be safe if we dream of being separate, she suggests in this book, and we should not let ourselves be so lonely. “I knew when we moved that nowhere is untouched by human interventions, but I didn’t know we’d chosen a place that could hold such depths of loss and abundance and braid them together. That this, too, is a form of tending,” she writes. One way and then another, Marris suggests, we must let ourselves become responsible to a place and community. We are meant to belong to each other.
With awareness that the scale of what is and might be lost is too vast for a single human mind to grasp, in Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl Mandy-Suzanne Wong turns her eye to the very small, watery glimmers of extraordinary ocean invertebrates. She draws us deeply into the lives and sensoriums of sea creatures who are almost as distantly related to humans as a being can be. Enlightenment-era scientists put them at the base of the tree of life, while nestling humans at the crown, but Wong holds us side by side with our fellow creatures in these essays. To do so requires great feats of imagination as she eschews anthropomorphization, while also insisting we can, if we try, reach beyond our perceptions of the world to at least catch a glimpse of how other creatures experience this reality we share. How would it feel to be radial, she asks, like a starfish, with a sense of self extending out in five directions? Why might a being in such a body remove one of those arms and watch it drift away to grow into a being entirely its own? Or she draws us into the nervous system of the mother-of-pearl, who perceive the ocean almost entirely through smell. “How far can your consciousness go out from itself into other spaces and times while going forth within itself as simultaneous other selves?” she asks. The answer, if you are reading Wong’s writing, is very far.
Wong is a connoisseur of the microscopic, of life in the cracks and what emerges from the wake. She writes essays of adoration for sea snails and other oceanic invertebrates. She peers so closely she almost enters their watery bodies. Returning to Bermuda after living abroad for many years, she begins the book by celebrating and lamenting the Bermuda land crabs who have been extirpated from the beaches and nearby island forests where in her childhood she knew them best. Though not yet extinct, they have been driven by human activities into hiding in burrows and to more southern shores. And because she lets herself love the crabs as only a human person can love, she writes, “in all this irrational hope on behalf of the living, I can no longer overlook the dead, I can no longer bring myself to sweep all those million billion needless deaths and wasted lives under the rug, the constant and relentless grieving of which could drive even the most intrepid crab to surrender herself and all her children to the waves and never mind the floating soda can.”
Wong attends to transformations in the biosphere with deep care, asking constantly what it feels like to be the creatures, moving the center of the known world away from humans and towards these creatures of the sea. Her meditations on the relationships between humans and other creatures become lovely reveries on the poetics of attention. To attend to another creature requires setting aside the human sensorium. Wong writes of this poetics saying, “it is simplistic, anthropocentric arrogance to imagine that only humans can feel, vulgar to think that everybody’s feelings must be intelligible to oneself in order to exist or qualify as feelings.”
In her essay on the snail Poecilozonites bermudesnis, a lazarus species that was thought to be extinct but was then found surviving on plastic bags soaked with air conditioner droppings in city alleys, far from the pesticides these snails cannot abide, Wong contemplates love and intimacy. She lets herself adore these creatures that can hardly even perceive her. She lets us feel this adoration with expert use of the second person “you.” She bring us to so close to another tiny being living in a tupperware container on her counter. “Your skin, your entire body, was sensitive to light and the fidgeting of shadows. Like having eyes in the back of your foot. And you could hear me. Not quite as I’d heard you, since I have ears… I knew I had to let you go. I’d have to shatter my own heart.” By granting herself permission to unleash such unabashed intimacy with a beyond-human creature, the essay becomes a love letter to snails, an invitation to watch for them beneath sticks and in the leaves, to be delighted when they have survived, found a damp place where they can flourish. I’m afraid to let myself love this story, the almost miracle, as much as I do, because I know that in general what our species has done to others cannot be undone. But surely it is important to know and realize when we have been given another chance, so we do not waste it.
The essays reveal the porousness of all life on this planet. Perhaps because their bodies are so different from ours, it is easier to perceive how the water moves through us all. Wong’s description of jellyfish bodies as whole ecosystems moving through the open ocean reveals so clearly how much our own bodies are tied, by water and air and hunger and politics, to others. She invites us to love jellyfish and snails and crabs not for what they have to offer us, but purely because they are beings we love, we could love, we could try loving being. Reading this book, I come to understand the watery world of the ocean one thimbleful at a time, as it passes through the bodies of snail and jellies and crabs and seastars Wong so exquisitely chronicles.
Where I live the snow is finally melting and the soil makes little sucking sounds when you walk on it. The air carries a wet and fecund smell. My sons are following a curving line in the slush that vanishes into the cattails. It might be some sort of snake track, one of them says. Or a worm, says the other. I wonder if it could be the remains of a vole’s winter burrowing through the snow pack, collapsed now into a delicate swirl of cursive. As he stands on a bluff overlooking the place where the river meets the sea, Robert Macfarlane asks about the hubris of humans imagining they could know what a river wants. He stands not so far east of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s homelands, upstream from Love Canal, and quite a ways but not so far you might think from those seas where eels might still brush up against Bermudan snails. As I listen to the melting ice dripping around me, I hear it as clear as day. The rivers want their freshwater snails back. They are crying for their eels. I’m afraid of the hubris of my certainty that I can understand the river. But then I wonder, what if I’d never been told a river wasn’t alive? What if I’d been told a river is speaking to us all the time? These books of new nature writing help me hear a chorus of voices all around and begin to translate those languages into something a mere human person could understand.
Kathryn Nuernberger’s latest book is Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande, 2025). Her poetry collections include RUE (BOA, 2020) and The End of Pink (BOA, 2016). She is a professor of creative writing at University of Minnesota.