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The Observer Book Club with Robert Macfarlane
Invited experts
Jeevan Vasagar
Climate Editor
Robert Macfarlane
Jeevan Vasagar
Climate Editor
Robert Macfarlane
Join the Observer Book Club in the newsroom with Robert Macfarlane, celebrated nature writer and best-selling author of Underland and The Old Ways, as he discusses his captivating book Is a River Alive?
On a quest to understand rivers as living beings with agency, personhood and rights, Macfarlane travels from Ecuador's cloud forests and India's polluted creeks to Quebec's mighty Magpie River and a fragile chalk stream near his Cambridge home. Blending immersive travelogue, natural history and fervent activism, this is his most urgent and personal work yet - a poetic call to rewild our imaginations and grant legal protections to waterways amid ecological crisis.
Together, we'll ask: Can rivers truly be alive? How might personhood reshape our relationship to nature? And what do these ancient flows reveal about our entangled fates?
Invited experts
Jeevan Vasagar
Climate Editor
Robert Macfarlane
Jeevan Vasagar
Climate Editor
Robert Macfarlane
Join the Observer Book Club in the newsroom with Robert Macfarlane, celebrated nature writer and best-selling author of Underland and The Old Ways, as he discusses his captivating book Is a River Alive?
On a quest to understand rivers as living beings with agency, personhood and rights, Macfarlane travels from Ecuador's cloud forests and India's polluted creeks to Quebec's mighty Magpie River and a fragile chalk stream near his Cambridge home. Blending immersive travelogue, natural history and fervent activism, this is his most urgent and personal work yet - a poetic call to rewild our imaginations and grant legal protections to waterways amid ecological crisis.
Together, we'll ask: Can rivers truly be alive? How might personhood reshape our relationship to nature? And what do these ancient flows reveal about our entangled fates?