Robert Macfarlane’s book Is A River Alive (2025) is thoroughly stimulating. As well as his observations of, and encounters with, three distinct landscapes and rivers in Ecuador, India and Canada, he raises many questions about how the law could be transformed to include the more-than-human. He both challenges and offers hope:

“I can’t help but feel a fundamental incommensurability between the stiff discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘standing’ and this quicksilver being running three yards away from me” (page 104).

“I feel a flash of optimism. This place, saved both by law and by imagination, is part of the geography of hope” (page 105).