Latest news with #natureWriting
Washington Post
09-07-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
We need to reset our relationship with nature. This book shows a way.
'I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany,' the essayist Annie Dillard mused in 1974. 'We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing.' The work of the British nature writer Richard Mabey is proof of Dillard's wisdom. He has been thinking about botany since the 1970s, when he published 'Food for Free,' his classic guide to edible plants, and his interest in vegetable life has always yielded a corresponding interest in human obligations. For him, botany is both a science and an ethics, and its primary tenet is that plants are — or ought to be — our equals.
Times
09-05-2025
- General
- Times
Robert Macfarlane: Why shouldn't rivers have rights? Companies do
Robert Macfarlane has been thinking a lot about rivers. Sat under the huge limbs of one of his favourite trees, an oriental plane in Cambridge, he points to where the 'elbows' of its branches rest on the ground, drawing water from a nearby chalk stream. Talking about his new book, Is a River Alive?, the renowned nature writer's conversation is punctuated with his sightings of the birdlife around us: blue tits, goldfinches, a jay making an odd noise. Few would argue they are not alive. But in a mix of travelogue, nature-writing and philosophy encompassing journeys along waterways in Ecuador, India and Canada, he argues rivers are alive, too — and should have rights. The modern 'rights of nature' movement was arguably born in
