This week on Mongabay’s podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, Is a River Alive?, which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose. Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth’s most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to southern India and northeastern Quebec, where he explores what makes a river more than just a body of water, but rather a living organism upon which many humans and myriad species are irrevocably dependent — a fact that is often forgotten. “It’s unsurprising in a way, when we’ve become such terraformers … such users and manipulators of water, that [its] status as a life force … should have been forgotten,” he says. As we’ve previously covered on the Mongabay Newscast, bodies of waters’ rights to exist have played out in the courts from Aotearoa New Zealand to Toledo, Ohio, but legislation and litigation are not the only ways human beings stand up for waterways. Sometimes, it comes in the form of removing dams, as the world witnessed last year on the Klamath River on the U.S. West Coast, in a dramatic move that has catalyzed its recovery to health. Actions like this require humans to push back on the “shifting baselines” syndrome, which denotes gradual shifts in societal attitudes where increasingly poor environmental conditions are accepted as normal— like forgetting what healthy rivers were like before they were polluted, dammed…This article was originally published on Mongabay