An interesting question posed by Sam Holden:
Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? asks what would it mean for our understanding of the natural world and our relationship to it if we saw rivers not just as ecosystems containing life, but as truly alive. In beautifully animistic prose, Macfarlane ventures to the frontier of the rights of nature movement, where rivers are treated as subjective entities that think, feel and are endowed with legal protections. The book also inspires a related thought experiment: is a city alive?
My personal view, one that I held for years, is that a city is an organism – so yes, it is alive. Its citizens are its cells, its genome, its flesh, its live blood. Remove those, and the organism will die and wither. Remove the stones, however, the steel and glass, the asphalt, and you’re left with half an organism quickly regrowing the missing parts of its body.
