Is it fair to say that rivers are having a bit of a moment? Robert McFarlane’s invited readers to ponder their vital parts earlier this year with Is A River Alive?, while Fergal Sharkey cannot get a day off from leading the public campaign to clean up the UK’s rivers. Thousands tuned in to watch Youtuber Ed Pratt complete a third ‘source to sea’ challenge in as many summers to raise money for the Rivers Trust, this time along the course of the River Tay.
These names primarily look to the present condition and likely futures of our waterways, but can more be learnt about the current environmental challenge faced by rivers by delving into their pasts? Seven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor would unquestionably suggest so, its handful of well-crafted snapshots of world rivers across four continents as captivating to read as they are unrelenting in their accounts of mankind’s impact on the riverine landscape and vice versa.
The names of the fluvial septet (in order the Rivers Nile, Danube, Ganges, Thames, Niger, Mississippi and Yangtze) are ubiquitous, but the historical particulars behind some of them are unlikely to be as fully realised in a reader’s mind as one might care to imagine. What this book does especially well is its exactitude with what to include from millions of years of their lifespans. Each river is afforded three thematic movements, a sonata form of sorts by which the diverse civilisations which developed alongside the running waters are probed.
Whether it is by the trade of natural resources, the conceptual exchange of ideas relating empire, identity or belief, human struggle against each other or nature, these riparian motifs, both of division and commonality, glide on effortlessly. The narrative is not averse to avail itself of the stories of its tributaries, the globally-influential Tennessee Valley Authority’s displacement of residents and inundation of historic Native America sites in quest of economic development standing as an example with contemporary repercussions.
Taylor’s deftness when it comes to blending in mythic and literary source material rounds off the appreciable scholarship and fact-based nature of these expositions. The ‘First rhyme-prose on a Red Cliff’ by Su Shi and its meditation on the inconsequentiality of human life and on constancy and change in nature is the pick of them, quickly followed by closing discussions on the extinct baiji (Yangtze river dolphin) and Shanghai sinking into the estuary mud. Sweeping comparisons and contradictions are included in parentheses mid-chapter, convincingly forged with rivers half a world away, one of the many achievements of this potamological miscellany.
This is not merely prepossessing history, as breathtaking as many of these river scenes appear off the page. It is essential reading on account of its concern to provide a gauge of the threats that face rivers and the efforts to counter these, a blueprint even for how they might best have a place in our future.
Zeb Baker-Smith is a Classics teacher based in Malawi, a freelance journalist and Editor at Aspects of History.
