Is a River Alive?

What are a river’s pronouns? “In English, we ‘it’ rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons,” writes Robert Macfarlane in Is a River Alive?, his cri de coeur for the world’s dying watercourses. “In English, pronouns for natural features are ‘which’ or ‘that,’ not ‘who’: the river that flows; the forest that grows. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow.”