This week on Mongabay's podcast, celebrated author and repeat Nobel Prize in Literature candidate Robert Macfarlane discusses his fascinating new book, Is a River Alive?, which both asks and provides answers to this compelling question, in his signature flowing prose.

Its absorbing narrative takes the reader to the frontlines of some of Earth's most embattled waterways, from northern Ecuador to southern India and northeastern Quebec, where he explores what makes a river more than just a body of water, but rather a living organism upon which many humans and myriad species are irrevocably dependent — a fact that is often forgotten.

Regardless of whether humans see rivers as useful resources or living beings, Macfarlane says their great ability to rebound from degradation is demonstrable and is something to strive for.

" When I think of how we have to imagine rivers otherwise, away from the pure resource model, I recognize that we can reverse the direction of 'shifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make it ‘lifting baseline’ syndrome. We can make our rivers touchable, then swimmable, then drinkable again. Drinkable rivers. Imagine that!"

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: The author Robert Macfarlane. Photo by Bryan Appleyard. Courtesy of Robert Macfarlane.

--------

Timecodes

(00:00) The liquid asset story

(05:42) The beginning of the ‘hydrocene’

(12:49) Is a river alive?

(20:01) ‘Rights of nature’

(30:02) Landmarks of hope & looming threats

(35:41) ‘Slow violence’

(39:43) ‘A gathering that seeks the sea’

(45:13) Public waterways under private ownership

(48:59) How the Cuyahoga River caught fire

(53:58) Collective health over private wealth

Roughly a billion people enjoy coffee daily, and more than 100 million people rely on it for income. However, the coffee industry is the sixth-largest driver of deforestation and is also rife with human rights abuses, including the labor of enslaved persons and children. But it doesn't have to be this way, says this guest on the Mongabay Newscast.

Etelle Higonnet is the founder of the NGO Coffee Watch, having formerly served as a senior adviser at the U.S. National Wildlife Federation. The main commodity on her radar now is coffee. On this podcast episode, she explains how the industry can — and should — reform its practices.

"It's so simple … pay a living [a] living income wage," she says, " and a lot of human rights violations will just dry up."

To target deforestation, Higonnet says the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is "a beautiful law" that "simply put, would bar imports of coffee into the European Union if that coffee is tainted by deforestation or illegality. So, two things that are illegal off the top of my head are slavery and child labor."

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Image Credit: A cup of coffee with beans and a teaspoon on a stump tabletop. Image by Anja (cocoparisiene) from Pixabay (Pixabay Content License).

---

Timecodes

(00:00) Coffee tied to slavery and deforestation

(07:03) How we can stop it

(12:36) Why are prices soaring?

(19:25) How the EUDR can help

(25:56) When will the EUDR come into effect?

(29:40) Why the coffee supply chain is simple

(33:54) What about certification schemes?

(37:46) What coffee drinkers can do to act

Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast.

While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (DECOIN), and allies in the local community notched a major victory against mining there in a 2023 court case, he explains they're still not out of the proverbial woods.

"Every day, I have to think about mining [and] I'm not exaggerating, my life now revolves around mining. Even though we won a case, I know they're going to come back because the copper's there, and there's a lot of demand for copper."

His advice to anyone who wants to protect their community from mining is to go on the offensive, early and aggressively, comparing the strategy to how one might view treating cancer.

"You have to think of it like a cancer, that you need to treat it immediately and you need to look for signs that your body, in this case, your community, is sick,” Zorrilla says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: Carlos Zorrilla in the DECOIN office in Apuela, Ecuador. Photo by Romi Castagnino.

-----

Timecodes

(00:00) A victory for Intag Valley

(07:19) The influence of ‘rights of nature’ laws

(09:57) The return of vulnerable fauna

(15:56) Reprieve is only temporary

(22:02) Mining companies omit important information

(25:07) ‘How to stop’ mining before it starts

(30:52) “Every day, I have to think about mining”