Is A River Alive Robert Macfarlane W. W. Norton & Company 2025. Part two

 Ecuador, the home of Los Cedros, The River of Cedars, emanates from the cloud-forest. A phenomenon at higher elevations, the cloud-forests produce cool, fast, and mineral rich water from the rocks that form their trail. The clouds feed the river, "bringing the water it bears to condensation point, and forming the mist which cloaks such forests year-round" (p. 54). The author, with his fellow travelers, follow the river with its South American cedar trees to its source, telling tales of the mineral extraction and other threats, social, political, economic, and international that threaten the river. 

In India the author sought ghosts, monsters, and angels near Chennae, a city of three rivers, the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum, and the Adyar. They flow into the Indian Ocean. The author described his characterization of the rivers:

The ghosts are those of the rivers who had to be killed for this city to live.  The monsters are the terrible forms those river ghosts take every few years, when they are resurrected by cyclone or monsoon. The angels are those who watch over the lives of the rivers where they survive, and who seek to revive those who are dying, and the Yuvan Aves--teachers, naturalist, writer, water activist--is one of these angels (p. 124). One of the Yuvan's explained the relationship between cities and rivers as initially one of mutual benefit, then they lose sight of the connection, finally, they sow their mutual destruction. The monsoon rains replenish the rivers each October and 55 tons of sewage kills the river each night. 

Ending the book, Is a River Alive, with a living, endangered river, the Nitassinan in Canada, from its source in the boreal forest between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. A remote place, near the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, the Saguenay Fjord, beluga whales, white whales, leopard seals, narwhals, etc. Hydro-Quebec, that ranks fourth in the development of hydro-power world-wide, threatens the Nitassinan with a new dam. "The proposed multi-dam complex would triple-kill the [Nitassinan]. It would flay its banks, drown it and entomb it" (p. 207). The author, accompanied by Wayne Chambliss, a geographic information systems (GIS) nerd who maps earth's systems and, personally, seeks "to find ways of making the planet's larger-scale geophysical phenomena humanly legible, bodily tangible" (p. 211), reached the mouth of the river and later paddle, kayaking to its source and the Gorge.