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New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Robert Macfarlane: 'Come and meet this incredible tree'
Photo by Peter Flude In middle age and closing in on national treasure status, Robert Macfarlane is as close to greatness and far from death as he has ever been. It's a far cry from his perilous youth of solitary mountain summitting. Climbers, he wrote in his first book, Mountains of the Mind, are 'half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion'. That book's hero was George Mallory, the explorer who died on his third attempt at climbing Everest. Macfarlane read Mallory's letters home, and traced the slow drift of his heart from wife to mountain, life to glory. In his imagination, Mallory's frozen corpse seemed inhuman and immortal, like a Grecian marble sculpture. For a moment in what he now calls those 'selfish' days, Macfarlane expected that he too would die in the mountains: 'They were my first love, and they will be the last.' They weren't. Mountains turned out to be his 'resignation letter from danger'. His wife is his 'rock' now, and they have three children. By his third book, The Old Ways, about ancient paths, published nine years later, he was relieved to see a peak and feel no desire to climb it, instead being 'glad only to have seen it in such weather and such light'. Now he is happier adventuring with friends than alone. On a recent trip to a 'fabulously precipitous mountain', he told me, 'I found myself very happy to take the path that worked around the danger, rather than over the pinnacles.' As with his role model Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain (1977), 'Circumambulation came to replace summit fever… plateau substituted for peak.' His new book is 'the one I've been learning how to write all this time'. He knew he wanted to 'write about life', and in 2020 had three questions in a notebook: 'Can a forest think?', 'Does a mountain remember?', and his eventual title, 'Is a river alive?'. By now Macfarlane has covered a lot of ground, and gathered many admirers. I came to his books through his friendship with the late swimmer and writer Roger Deakin. But others reach him through his conservation work, the music he makes with the actor Johnny Flynn, or his vastly popular children's book The Lost Words. We met at Cambridge's Emmanuel College, where he teaches English. I had been informed he was something of a heartthrob to students. 'It seems very unlikely, pushing 50 and balding,' he laughed, and led me into the college gardens. 'Come and meet this incredible, incredible tree… The branches come down, they root, they reroot, they draw, and they surge back up. You see all the power they draw from the earth… If you cut those branches, they would be trees. So it's now fully self-supporting but also absolutely part of the original singular organism. The other incredible thing it does, if you start to notice, is it melts into itself. It's called inosculation, or in-kissing. Can you see one of the branches is starting to basically snog the other and then there are places where that merging is complete, like there? It's one of the best trees, and it's a good friend.' Macfarlane takes his students to this tree to conduct the first supervision of their first year. It is a 220-year-old Oriental plane: only two in the world are known to have branches that reach the ground then climb back up in this way. He offered me homemade lemon and ginger tea from his Thermos. Sitting together at the stump, the effect was like sharing an umbrella in beautiful rain. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Macfarlane was born into a medical family in 1976, to a mother with an 'astonishing sense of wonder' and a father of 'huge integrity', who were both 'always jumping into cold water'. They lived at the end of a country lane in Nottinghamshire, and for holidays visited his grandparents in the Cairngorms. It was 'a life filled with animals and with space'. Macfarlane went to Cambridge, then Oxford, and has not stopped teaching or writing since his PhD. Now, his publications are major occasions: in this magazine, the poet John Burnside declared him 'our finest nature writer'; John Banville praised his 'poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy'. As well as mountains and paths, his books have covered wilderness (The Wild Places) and subterranean landscapes (Underland). Is a River Alive? is billed as Macfarlane's most political book to date. In the years he was writing it, Britain's river crisis rose in the public consciousness. Headlines reported that every river in England was polluted beyond legal limits, Thames Water almost went bankrupt, and the summer drought of 2022 moved the source of the Thames nine miles downstream. The disaster, Macfarlane said, 'is born of a failure of imagination… We have come to envision water in this country as a privatised deterritorialised resource, and not as the life force, lifeline, history-maker, life-giver that it is.' He would like for us to see rivers as living things, and to give them rights. The book describes journeys to three rivers that have generated 'revolutionary thinking', and which run through a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, contaminated lagoons in south-east India, and the wilderness of Quebec. Flowing through the narrative is the small, nameless chalk stream that has its spring by Macfarlane's house, just outside Cambridge. The government's draft Planning and Infrastructure Bill was published in March. 'At the heart of it,' Macfarlane explained, 'is the idea of 'offset'. The idea that you might offset the harm you're going to do to a fragile and ultra-globally-limited chalk stream network in the name of growth – and to make it good through some kind of water work somewhere else – fundamentally fails to recognise the non-fungible nature of nature.' He led me to what looked like a pond. In fact it was a surfacing of the book's chalk stream. He dropped to his knees and tapped the water. A large black fish swam up, sort of belched its mouth out beyond its lips, and bit Macfarlane's finger. I realised, with horror, that it was now my turn. 'Hold your nerve,' he said, as I extended a tremulous digit towards the fish, who thankfully was no longer interested. I withdrew my arm the moment I was told I had passed 'the great carp test', but Macfarlane's hand lingered. On his wrist was the red cloth bracelet given to him by a healer named Rita, one of many eccentric characters who feature in the book. What Macfarlane never foresaw, he said, was how each trip would bring him to someone who had come very near to death, then found their way from grief, 'back towards life by water', by sharing a river's life with others. Some of these people were present at the book's launch party in London the following week. The author arrived by canal boat, leaping from its roof into the party. The room was packed with readers, students, children, beer, pizza, sandals and bits of tree in people's hair. Later, Johnny Flynn led a singalong. In a speech, Macfarlane described the launch as a 'second-order wedding. I am astonished with delight at every face I see. Beloved family, dear friends. I thank you so much.' Conquering mountains in his adolescence, he drew exhilaration from the chance of death. But happiness is better found, he now feels, in the hope of joining life. I recalled his description of the plane tree in Cambridge, equally a forest of trees and one individual tree: 'The whole thing is this great affront to singularity, and it's this incredible community.' Under that tree, he told me: 'It's been the work of many hands and many years to create this crisis, and it will be the work of many hands and many years to undo it.' [See also: The brain behind Labour's EU deal] Related
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Nature's right to exist, flourish and persist
You have said you are 'north-minded,' drawn to high altitudes and high latitudes, to snow, ice, and rock, to mountains. You debuted with Mountains of the Mind but then your trajectory descends and your latest book is on rivers. Why? Mountains and rivers live in an ancient dialectic; mountains lend their gravity to rivers, as it were, and rivers in return sharpen and cleave mountains. So, in a strange way, turning to rivers felt like a coming home! I have always and will always be drawn, as a writer, to the limitless terrain where nature meets culture; where the complex and eventually unmappable reciprocities of imagination and landscape shape one another, dynamically. Is A River Alive? asks its readers to imagine rivers as possessing lives, deaths and even rights, and to see what consequences flow from that, in terms of law, story, song and, of course, the aliveness of rivers themselves. I've never known a subject like this one –– so urgent, so ancient, so torrenting –– nor known a book which continues to flow through my life long after I have notionally 'finished' writing it. I feel deeply passionate about the ideas, rivers and people who run through its pages; among them Yuvan Aves, the young Indian writer, campaigner and naturalist with whom I am fortunate to have been friends for six years or so now, and whose home city of Chennai is at the core of the central section of the book. The publishers have called Is A River Alive your most personal and political book. Does this description resonate with you? It is certainly the most personal and political I've ever written. The former, perhaps, a function of being nearly 50; the latter of the emergency in which the Earth finds itself, in terms of the living world, and the need to re-imagine so many of our laws, customs, perceptions and practices from the understanding of humans as part of a web or flow, not as the summits of a pinnacle or pyramid. Thinking 'with' rivers, as I found myself non-trivially doing in the course of writing the book, proved a powerful, even radical experience. Which leads us to the question of whether rivers have rights. What does this mean for you and are you optimistic about it? There is nothing so powerful as an idea that changes the world, and the ideas at the heart of the young Rights of Nature movement have the potential to do so. Since Ecuador recognised, in its Constitution in 2008, the inalienable and fundamental rights of Nature (Pachamama) to exist, to flourish and to persist, and charged the state with the guarantee of those rights, and with enforcing the repair of damage should those rights be violated, the world has seen the spread in number and consequence of Rights of Nature cases and thinking, across and up and down jurisdictions. The Parliamentary recognition in 2017 of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as a 'living entity' with attendant rights, for instance, or the 2021 ruling in Ecuador that recognised the rights of an astonishing cloud-forest would be violated if gold mining were to occur there. These have been gong-strike moments, the noise of which has resonated around the planet, and I believe are part of the path to a truer, more just future. If you find the idea of a river having rights initially confronting, remember that in European and American law, corporations have both rights and legal personhood (the right to bring suit in court). Why should a company founded two days ago have rights, but not a river that has flowed for tens of thousands of years? It's a form of socially normalised madness. You have filed a petition seeking that the Los Cedros cloud forest, Ecuador, be recognised as the co-author of a song. Please explain the reasoning behind this? To me it is self-evident that a forest might co-author a song with human collaborators, and bizarre that not a single jurisdiction in the world allows for a natural being or entity (forest, river, animal) to be recognised as a 'moral author' of a creative work. We brought this case within the Ecuadorian legal system where, as mentioned, the Rights of Nature are recognised within the constitution, after writing a song in the Los Cedros cloud-forest and with the Los Cedros cloud-forest: indeed, the many voices of the forest (barbet, howler monkey, river, wind, fruitbat) are literally present as singers on the song. You can hear it on any of the main streaming platforms: search for Song of the Cedars, and you will find the forest named as one of the song's authors! You are passionate about the river Cam in your backyard, about the dumping of sewage in rivers across the UK, whose waters — as you put it, 'have become undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable', but for this book you have explored other geographies, including India, Ecuador and Canada, to write about our polluted, but fiercely defended, rivers. Because these are all places in which rivers are being imagined otherwise. Rivers desperately need new stories telling about them –– and some of those stories are very old, and have been forgotten. The dominant story now is one of river as resource, not river as life-force. In India, in Canada/Nitassinan, in Ecuador, different forms of moral imagination are at work, or trying to be heard, and so I travelled there to meet people and places where radical revisions are being attempted to the natural contract. It was an honour to write about the rivers, marshes, lagoons and creeks of Chennai, and to do so in the company of –– and seeing through the eyes of –– Yuvan Aves and his fellow campaigners, who are trying to imagine and implement a just future for Chennai's many water-bodies, inspired by the Tamil word palluyir, meaning 'all of life'. In India, the paradox is especially sharp. We hold our rivers sacred yet are killing them in a multitude of ways. This is true also of the region you visited. You write that water was central to Dravidian culture which has eroded. How do you make sense of this? I struggled to make sense of it, in all honesty. This deep discrepancy between the religious recognition of rivers –– the Ganga, the Yamuna –– as sacred, and the ecological devastation of those same rivers is incomprehensible to me. If a river is divine, surely the imperative to keep its life flowing and its waters clear would be a beautiful and primary form of worship? You write that you found optimism difficult in Chennai, that you had never seen a river as close to death as Enmore Creek, or the Kosathalaiyar. Did you eventually find hope in the waterways of Chennai? Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline. I watched Yuvan and his friends and colleagues struggling to drive change for the better, despite the threats and power levelled against them; in the face of such courage and moral clarity, what right would I have to sit back and say that I despair? As my indefatigable friend Rebecca Solnit puts it, 'You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.' And hope is a discipline because it requires vigilance, concentration and lucidity to imagine other, better possible futures –– and then to push onwards in search of their realisation. And though there were times and stretches of the Cooum or the Kosasthalaiyar in which the river seemed as close to death as any I have ever known, there were moments of illumination and possibility – not least accompanying the 'Turtle Patrol' overnight, as it walks the beach to secure the safety of thousands of Olive Ridley Sea Turtle eggs each night during the nesting season. As sun broke on the night I had walked with the patrol, the first turtle hatchling of the season broke through the surface of the sand in the hatchery, and we carried her towards the surf, and watched as ancient instinct drove that tiny, perfect creature to seek the water. Hope, right there! You co-wrote a ghazal with Yuvan for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. Tell us more, and about the turtles you saw along the Chennai coast, both dead and alive Yes! A praise-song to these extraordinary deep-sea voyagers, these mothers who have been hauling themselves ashore on the coasts of what we now call India for hundreds of thousands of years, to dig their nests and lay their eggs. We wanted to celebrate them in verse and song, so we co-wrote a ghazal for the sea turtle. It was later set exquisitely to music for a nine-voice choir called HOWL: again, if interested people can listen to the song by searching for Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle) and HOWL on the main streaming services. But you are right that, of course, the story of sea turtles and Chennai is now one of death as well as life. Trawler-strikes and net-entanglements threaten the lives of sea turtles during nesting season in particular, and Yuvan and I saw many dead turtles washed up on the tideline, their eyes picked out by ghost-crabs. This year (2025) has been especially catastrophic for turtle deaths, with well over a thousand washed up on the greater Chennai coast alone. It's absolutely crucial that the government strictly enforces the exclusion zone which requires trawlers to stay a certain distance offshore and legally requires trawler nets to be fitted with TEDs (Turtle Excluder Devices) to minimise bycatch deaths. You find ways to champion people, including those from neglected, relegated geographies. I recall your support for the campaign against tree-felling in Telangana in 2021. What prompts you to care for places and landscapes unseen, of uplifting people that few in positions of influence do? You are too kind to say so. If even a fraction of this is true, though, well, I am glad. I guess it is in my nature to want to help as many persons (human and more-than-human) that I can. I have a voice of some volume, and I can't imagine not trying to use it on behalf of those who have had their voices muted by power or circumstance. To be silenced is not the same as to be silent. I also fundamentally thrive on collaboration with others; the world is a 'mycelium', a webwork of relations in which we are all entangled –– collaboration is an extension of these countless mutualisms. Prerna Singh Bindra is a conservationist, author and PhD scholar at CambridgeUniversity. She is @prernabindra on X
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
‘Why do companies have rights, but not rivers,' asks nature writer Robert Macfarlane
Even before he began travelling along the rivers of Ecuador, Canada and India for his new book, nature writer Robert Macfarlane spent hours beside the 10,000-year-old chalk springs of Nine Wells, near his home in Cambridge, England. These streams drew life to the region, as rivers tend to do: at first, they fed the birch and hazel trees; then the deer and foxes; then people, kings and a city. 'These streams are where a river is newborn,' says Macfarlane, 48. His new book, Is a River Alive? (May 2025; Penguin), focuses on what happens further downstream, in three massive river systems: the Rio Los Cedros (River of the Forest of the Cedars) in Ecuador, now under threat from gold mining; the choked, polluted and encroached-upon creeks, lagoons and rivers of Chennai; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River of north-eastern Quebec, which was granted personhood in 2021, following a pitched campaign led by the indigenous Innu people. For two years, Macfarlane has toured these regions, trying to answer the questions: Who decides what is and isn't alive? How is this changing? And what does it mean to recognise, both in law and the imagination, that rivers (as well as mountains, glaciers, forests) are living entities? 'In a sense, Is a River Alive? is a love letter to rivers, and their many defenders,' says Macfarlane. 'The book is also a political and philosophical confrontation.' Over the years, we've accepted the idea that a corporation can have rights, including the rights to privacy and fair trial, Macfarlane adds. Isn't it strange that we're uncomfortable saying the same of a river's right to flow, go unpolluted, or bring life to the earth around it? Excerpts from an interview. What first sparked your love for nature? I grew up as a climber, in a family of mountaineers. My grandfather, Edward Peck, was a mountaineer. My parents have returned time and again to the Himalayas. As a child, holidays meant going to the mountains. And when you go to the mountains, you go to the rivers too — they give energy to each other. So my first book, Mountains of the Mind, came from a question I've had since childhood: Why do people climb these peaks? I was born in Oxford and grew up in the countryside of Nottinghamshire. So I read my way into a love of landscape, as well as walked my way into it. In my teenage years, I became fascinated by poetry about nature. I went on to study literature at Cambridge and Oxford. Over time, almost everything I did began to fall within the field of environmental humanities, which I sometimes describe as the borderlands where nature, culture and politics meet. I now teach literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge. Is a River Alive? lives in this tangle of complexity too. What led you to ask this question, about a river? It emerged from a bunch of ideas, in 2020. I've always been interested in who decides what is alive and what is dead. That question is deeply tangled with empire, religion and philosophical worldviews. The worldview I've inherited, probably best described as 'rationalism', sees animals as more alive than plants, humans as more alive than animals, and water, rock and large natural systems as sort of passive, inert resources. Countries such as India have long recognised rivers as living entities in myth and religion. India is also one of the early nations to recognise river rights under the law, in 2017. Also that year, the Whanganui River was acknowledged as an 'indivisible, living whole', under a Parliamentary Act in New Zealand. In each of the three regions in the book, rivers are under threat. But they are also being radically reimagined as alive and life-giving. I realised that is how I want to think about life. In the book, you discuss this idea with people from indigenous communities, among others. What did you learn? No landscape speaks with a single voice, but one thing that connects these voices is relationality — the understanding that our life is continuous with and linked to the life of water, and all the lives that water makes possible. Ecuador's constitution was the first in the world to recognise the Rights of Nature (including right to respect, and maintenance of life cycles), in 2008. What was it like travelling through this landscape? (Before Ecuador) I had never been in a jurisdiction where nature's rights were legally recognised. It was exciting to enter that legal space, which is also a morally imaginative space. I also felt this uncanny resonance with the Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest written work of narrative literature, from c. 2100 BCE Mesopotamia). It features a sacred cedar forest that is eventually destroyed in the epic. So in Los Cedros, in Ecuador, I found myself wandering, you could say, in a forest made at once of literature, art, chlorophyll, birds, and possible destruction. What will it take for more countries to take this step? I applaud any efforts, legal or cultural, that cause us to rethink the fundamentally anthropocentric laws that have come to govern all jurisdictions. We've accepted the idea that a corporation can have rights, including to privacy and fair trial. It's a narrative that has been exported around the world by colonialism, by legal structures of property and ownership. At the same time that those laws were being framed, in England, the river was being redefined as a resource: it could take our waste away, provide power, fill our glasses and cups. This narrative is so utterly dominant around the world that we have created dam structures that have measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth. We've forgotten that rivers are also life-givers. The movement to recognise the rights of nature is more than symbolic; it is a philosophical confrontation. That not a single river in the UK is in good health is proof that the stories we've been telling about our rivers have been desperately inaccurate. What is it like writing about nature as we fundamentally alter it? I think hopelessness is a luxury. So the book, and I, live in the flicker between light and shadow, damage and healing, hope and despair.
Times
28-04-2025
- Times
Robert Macfarlane takes an epic trip down three great rivers
A new book from Robert Macfarlane is a literary event. A Cambridge professor and bestselling author, he is the grand panjandrum of British nature writing. In a suite of adventurous, poetic and thoughtful books, he has roamed and probed the landscape, from mountains (Mountains of the Mind) and the wilderness (The Wild Places) to ancient pathways (The Old Ways) and subterranean spaces (Underland). Now he has turned to rivers. Is a River Alive? recounts three short but eventful journeys to the Ecuadorian cloud forest, to the waterways of Chennai in southeast India and to the Mutehekau Shipu, a whitewater river in Quebec, Canada, where things nearly go epically wrong. Between each trip he makes a small pilgrimage,
