One symptom of civilizational collapse is the urgency with which people begin looking for new stories to make sense of their situation. The feeling that everything seems to be coming undone all at once gives rise to an intuition that something more will be needed at such a moment than new policies, theories, or inventions. Wholesale collapse takes shape in our minds as an evacuation of meaning – ideals and beliefs we once trusted lose their capacity to guide action or sustain hope. Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming.
All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.
The dichotomies that structure judgment – e.g., wise vs. foolish, right vs. wrong, animate vs. inanimate – also propel plot and character development. Meaning typically emerges from the resolution of conflict – within characters, between characters, often as lessons learned after getting roughed up in social or natural settings.
I hope to shed some light on what might be at stake in all this by comparing two recently published books. In The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works (2023), Helen Czerski explores the ocean in its myriad forms and functions. She is a physicist and oceanographer, so her story is told in the language of science. Robert McFarlane’s Is a River Alive? (2025) also aspires to a deep understanding of a body of water, but he feels no obligation to adapt his story to scientific conventions. His is a bit of old-fashioned nature writing – open-ended, free-ranging, impressionistic. Both do a great deal of exploration and fact-gathering after the fashion prescribed by their respective disciplines.
The Blue Machine opens with a ritual. Czerski is sitting in a canoe off the coast of Maui with a crew of local islanders. Before they can set off on the day’s excursion – a voyage around one of Maui’s volcanoes – they pause to honor the moment when the first rays of sun strike the ocean. They do so by raising their paddles and voicing in unison a chant that bonds them to one another and to the sea. In traditional Hawaiian culture, the ocean is a living entity that must be shown proper respect before voyagers risk the dangers that come with taking to it in an outrigger canoe. The chant affirms a kinship that unites animal, plant, and ocean in one big animist family.
A machine, of course, is not a living entity. Czerski’s choice of a framing metaphor for her account of the ocean undermines her ambition to establish the same relationship with it that the Hawaiians enjoy. There are people who worship machinery and yearn to merge with it but most of them live in Silicon Valley and every one of them is deranged. As a lover of nature, Czerski yearns for a caring, reverential connection to the sea; as a scientist, she dares not remove the barrier that keeps the human observer in one sphere and everything else in another. Were she to take that step she would soon be looking for another career.
Czerski’s decision to imagine the sea as a machine defeats her ambition to tell a new kind of story about it. The discord between metaphor and purpose bleeds into the language she uses to make things clear to a popular audience. To characterize the ocean that her scientific training prevents her from seeing, she gives it a “tradition and culture.” She describes it at various times as a “beast,” she gives it an “anatomy,” has it “snuggle” around Arctic ice and “groan” in reaction to pollution and climate-induced warming. A big storm is just one way the ocean “breathes.” To see it properly, she concludes, is to visualize it as “the beating heart” of a “living planet.”
All this animal behavior notwithstanding, Czerski sticks to her machine metaphor. She cannot bring herself to animate the ocean, even as the words that come to mind to picture it pulsate with vitality. Almost against her will, and certainly beneath her awareness, her descriptive prowess breathes life into an entity that from a scientific perspective has no business breathing, let alone snuggling, groaning, or performing a cardiovascular function.
She is aware of what is at stake. When we declare something inanimate, she argues, we destroy our “emotional relationship” with it. That clear assertion would seem to rule out the machine as a useful metaphor for something she believes to be in danger precisely because we have severed the “visceral human connection” that once tied us to the sea. She also concedes that while science can gather evidence to deepen understanding, only “tales” that arise from direct experience of the natural world can “change opinions.” But a story that might inspire the necessary change of consciousness must do for us what the traditional beliefs of Hawaiian islanders do for them – affirm a meaningful kinship with the ocean. And this neither the “mechanistic” (did she not notice?!) science Czerski deplores nor the more sense-tolerant one she promotes in The Blue Machine can do without violating every stricture that has governed the practice of science since Newton, Bacon, and Descartes came along. Down that road lies animism, panpsychism, anima mundi, elan vital – all the pagan and metaphysical belief systems against which modern science waged unremitting warfare to establish itself as the sole proprietor of truth.
Robert Macfarlane decided to go down that road and have a look around. He opens Is A River Alive? with an introduction entitled “Anima,” announcing at the outset which wall had to come down before a proper story about the human relationship to nature could be written. As someone who was “raised on rationalism,” he found it difficult at first to imagine how anyone could answer the question posed in the title in the affirmative. Curiously, he notes, we have no trouble imagining “dead” rivers – that usage is common in environmental circles, fish and game magazines, media accounts of the damage wrought by industrial agriculture. The truism that before it can die a thing must first be alive falters before the same intellectual bulwark that blocked Czerski’s path.
Is A River Alive? describes the process whereby Macfarlane found his way to a resounding “yes.” His awakening proceeds along two tracks. The first takes him back in time, to ways of seeing water common to indigenous, pre-modern cultures. To access these, he travels to the mountains of Ecuador, the rivers of southeast India, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. In each place he finds people fighting in various ways to protect waterways from those – developers, dam builders, mining companies – preparing to sacrifice rivers to the insatiable deities of modernization. Some of Macfarlane’s companions, akin to Robin Wall Kimmerer, practice “two-eyed seeing,” a weaving together of scientific botany with traditional ecological knowledge. Some are versed only in indigenous modes of understanding. The rest are individuals who, regardless of their cultural pedigree, have made themselves native to a place by long and attentive residence in it. All presume as a matter of course that all features of an ecosystem, rivers included, are living beings.
Macfarlane’s second discovery route leads inward. One of his companions observes that “children are born animists” who, through acculturation and education, are stripped of their power to see vitality in all things. Some such facility, on this reading, still lies buried in the human psyche. Macfarlane tests that proposition by setting off on long, often perilous river journeys and making careful note of what direct experience of these watery worlds allows him to see and feel. It is this inward journey that provides what he considers incontrovertible evidence of a river’s sentience.
The first step is a feeling of ignorance that overtakes him when confronted at first hand with the complexity of a forest. The rationalist is ambushed and brought low by humility. Complexity gets real when a now humbler Macfarlane swims under a waterfall and submits to the sheer force of it. This experience of being pounded by such high-spirited turbulence and the “elation” that accompanies it give him his first glimpse into how we might see a river as alive. We do so not by personifying it, he argues, but by expanding the category of “life” so that a river is not excluded. He worries that this conclusion is too “pat” – how can we hope to communicate with something so “weird” and “alien” as white water? – and lets the matter rest.
But not for long. Seated alone by a fire late at night Macfarlane has a vision of the river he has camped next to sandwiched between the “star-river” filling the sky and the “fungal river” tunneling beneath the ground. With that image in mind he suddenly finds it easy to imagine how everything is related, how impossible it is to distinguish “life forms and forms of life” from one another. The mind does not stop “at skull and skin” but extends into and interpenetrates with everything else, much as the water cascading onto his body dramatically altered his emotional state and caused him, thereafter, to engage the river differently. No words can be exchanged but a connection exists which language-bound mammals need a word like “communication” to describe. Here is his most concise summary:
… the “aliveness” of a river … isn’t endogenous to the object, a property possessed by a bounded body; rather it is a process which relocates “life” within the flux of which, at best, we understand ourselves to be extended generously outwards into a vast community of others.
After a long journey down the Mutehekau Shipu River in northeast Canada, generous extension becomes full on merger. Macfarlane describes a feeling of “growing together” with the river, a bodily sensation rather than a reasoned arrival. The union feels like something the river has done to him rather than knowledge acquired by an act of will. Neither the river nor Macfarlane alone but both together, in a manner that lacks intention and eludes language, have become kindred beings. Only after this kinship is forged does he declare “it seems incontrovertible to the point of trivial that the river is alive.”
Czerski, you will recall, believed that a profound change of consciousness was required if humans were to repair the damage done to the ocean by pollution and overheating. Like Macfarlane, she is motivated by an existential dread of what is likely to happen if that change does not begin soon and worries that science sits atop the list of powerful institutions standing in the way. Yet her unwillingness to take the step Macfarlane takes – to lower the wall between the physical and the biological to a level where affectionate regard might flow over it in both directions – ultimately thwarts her intentions. At the very end of the book, after an alarming account of the many ways human activity is harming the ocean, she exhorts her readers to raise their paddles and chant … but to a machine! We have been showering technology with reverential praise since the days of the clockwork universe. The computer has replaced the clock but it is still the same story – Reason, from its solitary fortress in the human skull, endlessly pulverizing the dead things in its purview until they can be packaged into equations and marketed as truth. The enduring credibility of this myth has contributed mightily to the devastation Czerski laments. But her refusal to see the ocean as somehow alive leads her to reenact in her conclusion the very scientific rite she set out to invalidate. The tale she tells cannot do the work she believes only a better story about the ocean than we have been telling can do. Her main character is dead on arrival.
Hers is an instructive cautionary tale, however. If we are to conceptualize a pathway out of the mess we have created, we are going to have to be willing to let go of much of what we have long accepted as hallmarks of modern civilization. The model of inquiry bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution strips away too much of what it is vital to understand if we are live in any kind of harmony with our environs. We must forge a different relationship with nature than a quantifying science allows before the broad, multi-layered, and, yes, warmhearted understanding needed to get us in tune with the world we inhabit can emerge. A reductive science is a simplistic science. Once its spirit permeates the public domain it delivers the keys to the economy and the government to the simpletons among us. They are clueless because the detectives are busy following the trails of molecules. We can so heedlessly ignore all the warning signals flashing in our midst because a studied ignorance is baked into the process whereby the information we are brought up to trust is gathered and analyzed.
Modern philosophy aspires to do something meaningful with such intangibles as science has sloughed off but does so in thrall to the same conception of Reason. It is a parlor game, like chess, fun enough for those drawn to it but unsuited for the radical re-visioning of knowledge and truth that impending collapse has placed on the agenda. We simply cannot afford to keep setting ourselves apart from the rest of nature. The presumption that we can, whether mandated by a monotheistic religion or a mechanistic science, has always been unwise. It has become lethal.
The conclusions we might draw from Macfarlane’s story are instructive in a positive way. His humility when confronted by the complexity of the natural world and his determination to seek prolonged, immediate contact with it – these sensibilities seem to me prerequisites for anyone who hopes to know it for what it is rather than for what humans might do with it. They positioned Macfarlane to see interdependent relatedness wherever he looked and, from there, to imagine a deeply ecological manner of breathing life into a river. To “relocate life within the flux” is to unite, as nodes in a single web, things that flow and quake with things that breathe and walk. This gesture does not require that we dissolve the distinction between physical and biological entities but that we attend more carefully to their modes of collaboration within natural systems than to the differences that emerge when we analyze them in isolation. As part of the flux, everything – regardless of its chemical composition or physical form – exhibits the qualities of a sentient being.
Czerski’s seafaring Hawaiians, and indigenous people generally, perceive those qualities by virtue of their acculturation to an animist worldview. Macfarlane’s story shares features with animist and panpsychist narratives but does not require that we infuse everything in existence with a drop of Spirit, Mind, or God to account for the experience of kinship. The rationalist in him is not completely extinguished – good news for the rest of us raised as he was – but straining to break free of the constraints a Reason-heavy upbringing imposes on our understanding.
It was Darwin, after all, who observed that “we are all netted together” and imputed intelligence and will to the plants he studied throughout his life. Macfarlane is just stretching that net a bit farther. A big haul indeed, and one to which we might all raise our paddles and sing.
