I’ll admit it: I’m a fan of Robert Macfarlane’s writing. I haven’t read all of his work, but I loved The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, The Wild Places, and Landmarks. I intend to read Underland this summer. Maybe I should’ve turned to that book before tackling his latest, Is a River Alive?, but all the attention it’s getting—the reviews and interviews—encouraged me to get a copy and start reading. I’m glad I did.

Is a River Alive? reflects on the recent shift in jurisprudence which began in New Zealand in 2017, when the Whanganui River was declared “a spiritual and physical entity” possessing a “lifeforce.” Alive, in other words. That idea had been circulating since Christopher Stone’s 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” It sounded radical 53 years ago, and to some it still does, but corporations are considered to be legal persons, and most of those who strain to understand the idea of ecosystems as living things have little trouble with that idea. Macfarlane explores the concept through three rivers, or perhaps river systems: Los Cedros in Ecuador, threatened by mining projects that would destroy the cloud forest that is its source; the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar Rivers in Chennai, India, which are dying because of industrial pollution and the draining of their wetlands; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River in Quebec, which may be drowned by a hydroelectric project that would see several massive dams constructed. Los Cedros and Mutehekau Shipu have been declared by law to be living creatures; the fact that the three rivers in Chennai are dying suggests that they have the potential to be alive. The book also considers the chalk springs near Macfarlane’s home in Cambridge, England, which nearly died during a drought several years ago.

I like the way that Macfarlane struggles at times to accept ideas that his rational mind is troubled by. Not everyone has so much difficulty. His son, Will, asks him what the title of his book will be. Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane responds. “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad,” the boy says, “because the answer is yes!”

I consider related questions about our kinship with the world around us in my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road, but I don’t have as much difficulty, partly because the fact that humans share 40 to 60 percent of the proteins in their DNA with bananas tells me that we’re made up of the same stuff as the living creatures around us. As Mike Francis, a PhD student in bioinformatics at the University of Georgia told Alia Hoyt, “This is because all life that exists on earth has evolved from a single cell that originated about 1.6 billion years ago,” he says. “In a sense, we are all relatives!” Perhaps I found it a little easier, too, because trees and birds are obviously alive, whereas it could be argued that rivers are inanimate. Spoiler alert: Macfarlane finds his way to seeing the animacy of rivers. That’s not much of a surprise, though: it’s pretty obvious from the outset that’s where he’ll end up.

Macfarlane’s writing is gorgeous. I was amazed by the book’s introduction, which presents a biography of the chalk spring in Cambridge since its birth after the last ice age. The last chapter, which imitates the turbulent flow of Mutehekau Shipu through long, flowing sentences, is pretty great, too. The book makes its readers think, too, about the destruction our extractive civilization wreaks on the world we live in, the foolishness of considering hydroelectricity a form of “clean” energy, and the grotesque unsustainability of the kind of resource projects our federal government intends to fast track. Maybe that’s all obvious, but it needs to be said, repeatedly.

Macfarlane sometimes gets criticized for the way his work focuses on men. The Old Ways, for instance, almost entirely ignores women who write about walking, as Phil Smith points out. That might be less of an issue here; two of this book’s main characters, mycologist Giuliana Furci and poet Rita Mestokosho, are women. Still, most of the people here are men, and some will see the book as a brofest. I’m not as bothered by that, because we all have blindnesses, but I still see it.

Still, this is a wonderful book. I’m glad I read it, and I’m looking forward to reading Underland.