Most of what we now call rivers are the heavily domesticated descendants of their wild forebears, which writhed and jumped across the landscape, growing fatter and thinner with the seasons, as different as a wolf from a pug from a wolf.

But as Scott warns us, “When it comes to living beings—even domesticates—total domination is aspirational; it is never fully realized.” The last chapter of the book devotes itself to the many “iatrogenic” effects of our attempts at total domination, borrowing the medical term for an unforeseen illness caused by previous treatment. The examples are rife, and telling. By engineering rivers to never flood, we have made floods less frequent but more catastrophic. By walling off cropland from seasonal flooding—or by damming rivers to produce power—we have deprived the soil of the nutrients that made it productive in the first place.

It is here that the often-winding course of Scott’s inquiry opens out into its delta. We can see the outlines of a larger backfiring, one that extends far beyond our civilization’s relationship to rivers. In an era of spiking temperatures and ecosystem collapse, the entire natural world is contesting our myth of control. Our attempts to impose order have summoned forth its opposite. And yet we cling to our fantasy of dominion, even and especially as its consequences get worse. Scott is unsparing in his diagnosis: Without this cherished fantasy, we would face too painful a humbling, too terrifying an admission.

The problem with our myopia—self-coddling but ingeniously engineered—is that it keeps us blind to all the things over which we legitimately do not have control. We have the power to harness a river, but not to prevent its lashing out. We have the power to conserve or decimate a species, but we do not decide how that event will shudder through the food web. We have the power to run our economy by burning through the planet’s store of hydrocarbons, but we can’t contain the conflagration that this short-circuit has unleashed in the atmosphere.

All around us, our dominion is being rocked by what we thought were our kingdom’s mute serfs. Scott casts them instead as stakeholders in a grand biological democracy, in which decisions get made and outcomes determined not by the loudest species, but by the congeries of the whole assembly: the water, soil, rushes, swallows, catfish, microbes, etc. What happens, ultimately, is the product of these intersecting forces, each with an irreducible agency over the others. For Scott, this is not an ideal but a description. This is how the world is.

Our grand mistake has been not only to ignore the other members of this vast parliament but to not even realize there was anyone else in the chamber. In Praise of Floods is, in large part, a plea to start casting our attention much more widely, to understand what we’re hearing from our planet’s other constituents, and to act as if our own fate depends on theirs. To act, per the old Daniel Berrigan chestnut, “as if the truth were true.”

Here is a psycho-politics of the Anthropocene. On one side, a politics that seeks to radically widen our sphere of attention and consideration to encompass the lands, waters, and living things with which our fate is entwined. On the other, a politics in which care, attention, and reality itself diminish rapidly in proportion to distance from the self.

This is not quite the same as selfishness versus altruism (Scott’s primary premise, after all, is that humanity should look after rivers out of self-interest). It is something more like universalism versus solipsism. About what you decide to take as real, and therefore what you are capable of taking into account.

To witness this more fundamental divide map itself onto contemporary left-vs.-right politics is to witness a split in strategy, not just ethics. Both strategies emerge from a growing sense—whether suppressed and inchoate or desperate and vocal—of our umbilical dependence on the ecosystems we inhabit.

Scott greets this realization with an essentially responsive strategy: Now that we know we’re reliant on these things, we’d better look out for them, so that they can keep looking out for us. He joins a chorus of contemporaries in reminding us that, though this “knowledge” may still be only half dawning on much of the late capitalist world, it has formed the philosophic bedrock of many Indigenous societies, who for millennia have cultivated the “concepts of rivers as living beings.”

The opposing camp—Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are useful avatars—responds with an essentially avoidant strategy. The realization of interdependence is rejected with revulsion, with an almost panicked violence. The strategy becomes to sever ties, to brandish our will, to make true at all costs our idea of our own independence. Their dreams are rife with this separation: Mars as a vehicle for transcending our physical world; AI as a vehicle for transcending our physical bodies. They do not want to need rivers. They seem ready to scorch the planet in their bid to obviate it.

In this view, Scott’s insistence on the necessity of healthy rivers betrays a lack of ambition, a failure of vision, an essentially decadent stasis. The deterioration of the world is not a crisis but a proving ground for human exceptionalism, a chance to decouple from our dying host.

It’s no surprise that the leaders of this camp seem also to want to eliminate any interdependence with other people. Musk wants to build driverless cars using robots in nonunion factories. Thiel wanted an autonomous micro-nation built on an oil rig, but settled for an off-grid prepper compound in New Zealand.

But why this intensity of response? Why are they ready to do seemingly anything to outrun the fact of interdependence? Why are millions of people so eager, so viscerally relieved, to support this decoupling?

That it was a mistake to build cities in floodplains has long been a cliché among urban planners. Of course it was. We failed to heed the rivers and are still paying the price: in unpredictable catastrophes and in our increasingly expensive defenses against them.

In the shadow of the second Trump presidency, Scott’s choice to retread this ground feels naïve, almost to the point of anachronism. At a time when the embattled horizon of progressive American politics is being drawn (rightly, necessarily) around the rights of all people to basic services (free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent), In Praise attempts to keep a wider, older horizon in view. It’s a vision that passes through and also beyond multiracial democracy, beyond even multi-species democracy, toward something like a planetary demos. We can hardly make it out, but we can sense it there. Our rivers are increasingly in uproar, after all, from Pakistan to the Texas hill country. They are not behaving passively. In the most hard-nosed materialist sense, they are shaping human affairs and being shaped in turn.

Scott’s gift is to take them seriously as stakeholders. This is not an act of granting but acknowledging power. It is essentially grown-up, like a child acquiring a theory of mind: The world is full of others; the self is not the world. Scott wants to scale this realization, to cast the light of a full and separate reality not only on other people but on every thing with which we share the world. For most of us, this requires a long leap, beyond imagination, into something more like faith.

But faith is the source of any durable political project. You need an intuition of the heart, a first principle. When you don’t have one, people feel it. People felt it about the Democrats—that they’d been hollowed out by technocracy, that they “didn’t believe in anything.” Lost now in the wilderness, the American left searches again for something irreducible. And so Scott steps in—ill-timed, unsolicited—and invites us back down to the river, insisting that we see it for what it is: a porous and complexly populated gathering of waters, an entity difficult to hold in the head. And yet the implicit plea is that we do hold it, or try to. That we lend it the attention required for care.

This is difficult, it turns out. The book’s most guileless chapter imagines a forum of all the creatures of the Ayeyarwady addressing humanity in turn. The river’s iconic (and critically endangered) freshwater dolphins have been chosen to moderate, on the premise that humans are more likely to listen to a charismatic fellow mammal. After an introduction from the dolphins, we hear from the snow carp, the hilsa, the oriental darter, the Burmese roofed turtle, the white ginger plant, and a chorus of mollusks and copepods—all of them pleading with “you” (that is, “us”) to stop destroying the river. Each plea is paired with a reminder of how much we rely on them: for protein, for flood management, for clean drinking water. “Without us you would perish; you can flourish only if we flourish too.” The problem with these passages is that their art fails their ethics. We are left with the impression not of newfound understanding, but of redoubled frustration at how hard it is to imagine—really imagine—these alien lives.

Stronger, stranger Other attempts have also fallen short: the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous struggle to imagine “what it is like to be a bat, for a bat.” Or, more recently, the novelist Mircea Cărtărescu’s unnervingly believable projections into the lives of head lice. They expend considerable cognitive effort to cast human attention and empathy far outside their accustomed bounds—and return with only a modest catch in tow, hauling up just a taste of what must, we assume, lie beneath.

Reading Scott’s clumsy castings, we think back on the solipsists. Maybe this is what Musk and Thiel reject so violently: not just the moral conclusion that other beings exist and matter, but the raw mental effort required to sustain it. It is too scary and simply too hard to imagine far beyond the self. They hate the experience of trying. And, in a profound way, they would rather not have to.

This response is prior to politics, a rage that is less ideological than physiological. They cast out whatever they do not feel capable of entertaining. They are exhausted, we imagine: by the difficulty of the metaphysical leap, by a world that grows more complex the more we understand it. So they refuse the challenge, circle the wagons of the self. They cannot hold a river in their head, and will not be made to.

There are grounds for empathy here. What Scott is asking of us is legitimately difficult, as his book demonstrates. We are quickly forced up against what feels like the limits of the mind, past which we struggle to think. What is it like to be a river, for a river? A sliding gloom with distant limbs? A long vault of water and light? A braid strung through the lungs of fish and the roots of reeds, fraying always into rock? Confronted with the enormity beyond us, maybe we too feel the pull of the self, its familiar harbor.

And yet, we can ask, what is the noble response? Scott believes in people: in our capacity for a much wider attention, earned slowly over time. The solipsists do not. Their imaginations fail them. Contrary to branding, their philosophy is static and defeatist. They do not believe the self can change. They cling to it like a raft in choppy waters.

But you can let go, Scott thinks. You can go for a swim.