World Rivers Day

is celebrated every year

on the last Saturday of September! 

The founder is Mark Angelo, a river conservationist from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

“I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.” – Roderick Haig-Brown, Canadian naturalist

“‘So-this-is-a-River.’

‘The River,’ corrected the Rat.

‘And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!’

‘By it and with it and on it and in it,’ said the Rat. ‘It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we’ve had together!'” – Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” – Jacques Cousteau, French oceanographer

“The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?” – T.S. Eliot, Introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

“Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything.” – Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist

“Rivers know this: There is no hurry, we shall get there some day.” –  A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong.” – Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher 

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.” – Leonardo da Vinci 

Goodman, Polly. Rivers in Danger. New York: Gareth Stevens Pub., 2012.

Green, Jen. Mighty Rivers. Mankato, Minn.: Smart Apple Media, 2010.

Kaye, Cathryn Berger.  Make a Splash! : a Kid’s Guide to Protecting our Oceans, Lakes, Rivers & Wetlands. Minneapolis: Free Spirit Pub. Inc., 2013.

Peters, Marilee. Ten Rivers that Shaped the World. Toronto: Annick Press, 2015.

Peterson, Christine. Renewing Earth’s Waters. New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2011. 

Click HERE for picture books and novels about rivers!

“How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…” – George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss