Rivers as Legal Entities: A Paradigm Shift

Our greatest living nature writer, Robert Macfarlane shares with Horatio Clare a single, transformative idea: are rivers alive?

Robert Macfarlane is both the author of prize-winning bestsellers including Underland, Landmarks, and The Old Ways, and an artistic polymath whose collaborators include many of the most distinguished artists, musicians, and poets of our time, including Olafur Eliasson, Johnny Flynn, and Jackie Morris.

Inspired by the activists, artists and lawmakers of the young ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, Macfarlane takes us on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.

Transporting us from the miraculous cloud-forests of Northern Ecuador to the wounded rivers and lagoons of Southern India; and from north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a riverrights campaign, to the fragile chalk stream that rises a mile from his house and flows through his years and days, this is a magical and radical listen that will make you rethink what you think you know about rivers and about the nature of life.

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