“A River had to be killed for a city to live”
– Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
It sounds extreme.
But look closely at many of the rivers flowing through our cities today.
Every glass of water you’ve ever drunk. Every meal grown from irrigated soil. Every city built where two banks met a flowing river – each is part of a debt owed to rivers. Many of the rivers that sustain our lives are under increasing pressure, yet most of us know little about the rivers closest to where we live. It is time to notice them again.
ForRivers.life is a place to begin.
We dam rivers, pollute them and build over their floodplains. Rivers rarely decline overnight. They are lost through countless small decisions, until a degraded river begins to feel normal.
When a river is altered, polluted and confined over time, we can slowly forget what that river once was. Can we remember?
A river with room to breathe
This one is easy to recognise as a river
Still a river. Barely.
The water has changed and the banks are closing in. But she still holds her shape, still recognisable as a river
Not anymore.
Somewhere between the walls closing in and the waste piling up, we stopped calling her a river. She became a ‘mori’ (Kannada word for drain).
This is how rivers disappear. Not all at once, but first from our language and then from our lives.
Shifting Baselines
Each generation inherits a river already diminished and calls it whole.
“What we no longer remember, we no longer miss; and what we no longer miss, we no longer protect.”
— Excerpt from The Freshwater Blog
It is never too late
To remember. To understand. To restore.
Across the world, including in India, rivers have recovered after decades of neglect and degradation. Recovery begins with understanding what sustains our rivers, what is threatening them and finding ways to rebuild our connection with them.
