Is a River Alive?

The Sarayaku people decided that they must re-explain the fact of the forest’s aliveness in ways that might be communicable beyond the banks of the Bobonaza. Today, as the river defender Feargal Sharkey puts it, ‘The simple truth of the matter is that every river in England is dying.’ They are dying through inattention and they are being killed by design. Research into the black spruce trees of the harsh terrain of northern Labrador has shown that some small trees – not even the height of a person, with trunks perhaps only a few inches in diameter – are as much as four hundred years old.