Intervie with Robert Macfarlane: ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me’. The writer and poet on reimagining rivers as living beings, the ecological crisis near and far and why copyright laws should protect nature.
Robert Macfarlane has been called the “great nature writer and nature poet of this generation”. A teacher, campaigner and mountaineer, he has been exploring the relationship between landscape and people since his breakthrough book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003. His latest work, Is a River Alive?, was more than four years in the making, and, he says, the most urgent book he has written.
“In English, we have no verb ‘to river’, but what could be more of a verb than a river?2
