Walk like a river
Be the Pattern of the World.
To be the Pattern of the World is
To move constantly in the path of Virtue
Without erring a single step,
And to return again to the Infinite.— Tao Te Ching
The most important thing we can learn from the wild is that diversity and difference, not standardization and uniformity, are the norm. They are how the wild functions, the source of its resilience, the engine of its productivity. That also makes them the most effective tools with which we can cut our new paths toward sustainability. What this means is that we need to be ready to experiment, to try new things, accept failures and dead ends, and above all else, never get locked into a specific way of doing things. We must learn to accept that the paths we leave behind us will be forever changing because they are being forged in a dialogue with a forever changing world. To put this another way, we need to learn to walk like a river.
Rivers walk across this planet with a single goal, a simple purpose, to empty into the sea. But rivers do not merely flow downhill. When water, in the form of snow and rain, comes to the mountains and vast upland catchments, its ultimate destiny may be with the volumes of water already filling the world’s many lakes and oceans, but how it gets there is much more complicated. Each step in a river’s path is part of a conversation, a negotiation between the water and the riverbank. As the water makes its way downstream, it pushes against mud and rocks and tree roots and they push back, and in this pushing back and forth majestic spaces are created, legacies of life. Rivers take ephemeral ribbons of water and inscribe generations of abundant diversity into the planet’s surface. They twist, turn, and double-back. They bend and contort into oxbows and sloughs, sometimes kinking at such harsh angles that they pinch off orphaned remnants, what we call oxbow lakes. Some that may last for many decades or may dry up in a few years leaving scars that draw life of their own.
We call this a river’s “meander;” in the vernacular, people use the word to imply drift, aimlessness, randomness. Civil engineers have long considered a river’s meander to be a nuisance. Left to their own, a civil engineer or city planner might say rivers are unruly, too wild and unpredictable for civilized spaces. So, we build channels to move the water, build levies and dams for “flood control,” and fortify banks with rip-rap, all to tame to hold back rivers’ messy, wild nature. But a river’s meander is not aimless. Ask any Indigenous person living along the Yukon or Colorado Rivers and they will tell you in the plainest terms that rivers move with purpose. Rivers have agency. They flow with intent. Each twist and turn of a river is a part of a dialectic, an ongoing conversation among water, rocks, silt, trees, scrub, beaver, and countless other features and creatures. Much of the world as we know it, the vast and rich swaths of biocultural diversity we see in Turtle Island, Amazonia, Asia, and so on, exists because of rivers’ purposeful meanderings. If rivers took the shortest paths possible, flowing “as the crow flies,” rain and melted snow would pass swiftly into the sea. It would be efficient, in the industrial sense, but it would leave little in its wake. The lands around this hypothetical river would be parched and lifeless. When rivers meander, they create life. Every twist, turn, and braid of a river keeps fresh water, the life-blood of this planet, on the land for a few seconds, minutes, or hours longer. Each path a river carves creates habitat. It keeps soils moist and creates pools for fish and amphibians. It quenches the thirst of bushes and trees. With a little help from beavers, rivers flood into expansive wetlands that cycle nutrients, tame forest fires, and sequester carbon. These beautiful, meandering rivers of life are what happen when unstoppable forces meet immovable objects. Rivers don’t merely erode; they are also generative. They give at least as much as they take for their own purposes. Could there be a more respectable ethos to which we might aspire?
Aldo Leopold famously suggested in Sand County Almanac that humanity needs to learn to think like a mountain, to develop a holistic and expansive view of where we stand in the world so that our actions and decisions are not short-sighted, selfish, and destructive. This is an important start, but his metaphor has fallen short, I think, of helping us know how best to act in the wild. Walking like a river fills that space, provides an example that we can follow. When the river cuts across the landscape, its wide, meandering path is neither random nor unruly; rather, it is shaped by simple, immutable natural laws. Rivers flow with great power. They assert their place and leave their mark. Their path is neither rigid nor uniform, and as a result, a bounty of life springs forth in that path. Walking like a river means cutting our path with intent, but also doing so in a way that respects the laws of the world around us — and accepting how the natural world pushes back. If we learn to walk like a river, we will enrich it, beautify it with an abundant diversity of life, just as it will beautify us.
This is an excerpt of my book, Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology, which is available wherever books are sold.
