Robert Macfarlane

Hello — Is A River Alive? is No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list this week. To celebrate, my wonderful Dad & Mum decided to thoroughly…river a copy of the book. They went up Gasgale Gill—a steep-sided north Lakes valley between Grasmoor and Whiteside, where the water runs silver & clear & very much alive—Dad (@johntmacfarlane ) pulled on his wetsuit, Mum (@rosmacf ) took the camera & these glorious photos ensued. Huge, vast, tumbling thanks to everyone here & beyond who has helped this book find so many readers. I care deeply about the rivers, ideas & people who flow through its pages — & who are now meeting readers in number. As I travel around, I’m now signing the book using blue ink which contains the water of 105 rivers, lakes, streams and seas from across Britain and Ireland (see image 4). This ink was mixed for me by the amazing @paul.powlesland , and the waters it contains were “woven” during the great March For Clean Water which happened in London last autumn, co-organised by the mighty @riveractionuk . Many of the participants in the March (the biggest clean water protest in the history of these islands) brought flasks and bottles of their local water. These were ceremonially mixed in Parliament Square during the rally there. Paul gathered some of that woven water, made ink with it, and then I added a few drops of water from the Pools of Dee, high in the Cairngorms (the mountain range I know and love best), gathered for me by my father and brother on a long, hard winter pilgrimage to the Pools in February (photos here). It’s joyful to me to sign Is A River Alive? with this special ink. It means that rivers really do run through the book. It also connects it to the rolling, roiling, inspiring river guardianship which is surging everywhere in the UK now, as people and communities come together in passion and action to revive these wounded rivers and water-bodies. Oh — and the ink writes beautifully smoothly, too. Hope is the thing with rivers.

Hello—this week The Book of Birds by me & @jackiemorrisartist takes flight into the world. I feel a lift of the heart to be able to say this! It’s been a long while fledging: we began work on it in 2018. The Book of Birds re-imagines the field guides & bird books Jackie & I grew up reading—& which helped us see birds for the first time. It’s also a love letter to birds & the ‘Seven Wonders’ that make them: Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight & Migration. Instead of asking ‘What is that bird?’, though, we ask ‘Who is that bird?’. We want to help readers identify birds, but also identify with them. We’ve tried, in paint & language, to pull birds back into focus & fullness & celebrate each species ‘is-ness’: what makes Dipper Dipper, or Curlew Curlew. We live in a time of staggering avian loss. 600m birds gone from Europe in the last 50 years. 3 billion in North America. 50% of bird species in decline globally. Shifting baseline syndrome habituates us to thinner skies, quieter springs. We have to reverse this loss. It’s not enough to love the song but forget the singers. So we’re working with the @rspb & others on campaigns, activism & change; how, in Robin Kimmerer’s phrase, to join ‘attention to intention to action’. The Book of Birds is cousin to our first two books—The Lost Words & The Lost Spells—but different in scale. It’s big! Almost 400 pages. Jackie has painted more than 300 new artworks, in watercolour & gold leaf (echoing sacred icons): an astonishing body of work. I’ve tried to let language sing, soar, play, glide & tumble on the page—& to find different rhythms & voices for each species: the neon scorch of Kingfisher, the aria-aura of Skylark. A wonderful team has helped us create this book. It’s out this Thursday in the UK from @penguinbooks & in Canada by @houseofanansi ; on 7 June in US from @w.w.norton . Here are some images & films of the book & its making, inc. of Jackie’s magic den of a studio. OK. Enough. This one’s for the birds! Please help it fly far & wide.

Hello—the film adaptation of my book Underland has its UK premiere @barbicancentre on 24 March, after a world prem @tribeca last June. In cinemas 27 March. The film took 4.5 years to make & the team created something astonishing. This first poster-still from the film shows a true place: a vast limestone cenote in Mexico, into which the limb-roots of a fig have descended over centuries, creating a ladder between the upper world’s light & the underland’s darkness. It’s a portal into a labyrinth; one of many such in the film. Underland is directed by @robmilkwood , of whom more later. It has a brilliant, experimental original score by @hannahpeelmusic (Game of Thrones, The Midwich Cuckoos), also released 27 March. The ‘Storyteller’ is voiced by Sandra Hüller (The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall). The film’s produced by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Whale) & Ari Handel @protozoa.studio , & by Lauren Greenwood @planetoctopusstudios & Jess Harrop @sandboxfilms (Fire of Love, Fireball). What a team. DP is @rwdfilm (The Reason I Jump, Silent Roar), who’s a humble master of his art & tough as they come. I’ve co-written with Rob Petit. UK distribution by @dogwoof At the film’s heart are three people, each drawn to ‘seek the void’: Fatima Tec Pool, an archaeologist of the Mayan underworld; @goblinmerchant , explorer of the humanly made subterrane; & Mariangela Lisanti, a dark-matter physicist whose lab lies 2 km below ground. Over the film’s course, the journeys of these three spiral together, as everything deepens towards the film’s startling core & end. The story of the film’s filming is a Herzogian epic. Stills from it here courtesy of Rob, Ruben, @clawrencejones & Chris Sanchez, right down to the literally back-of-napkin diagram drawn by Rob that began the film’s imagining. Again & again, the team filmed in staggeringly challenging conditions; each time they surfaced with extraordinary footage. It’s all come into being in large part because of the questing, obsessive, generous, perfectionist vision of its director. Rob Petit is a genius, simply put—& he has a huge heart. Sometimes in the darkness you can see more clearly.

Hello — The Book of Birds is Number One in the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list in this, its first week of publication. Huge, huge thanks from me & @jackiemorrisartist to all who’ve helped the book take flight in the world. Especial gratitude to all who’ve bought from independent bookshops & thereby supported those vital habitats where ideas, free thinking & communities flourish. My Dad caught the moment (photo 2) when a Greater Spotted Woodpecker came to investigate the book. To my disappointment it didn’t immediately drill a hole in it, thereby delivering a performed review of the book (“boring”)… As with The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, there is an accompanying “Explorer’s Guide” to the book: a free-to-download, beautifully designed and written 40-page booklet to help teachers, parents, community groups & anyone else teach/work with the book’s ideas, art, language & birds. The Explorer’s Guide was brilliantly created by Eva John, herself a former teacher. The @rspb are kindly hosting this resource; I’ll put a link in the bio, and have included some sample pages here. And in September, an album of music called In Thin Air by the extraordinary Spell Songs collective/@lwspellsongs will be released; a sequel to the two albums they have already created in response to The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. The Spell Songs musicians — @jimmolyneux , @seckoukeitamusic , @rachelnewtonmusic , @bethanyporterplease , @karinepolwart , @krisdrever & @juliefowlis — will be touring in the early autumn too. Dates and places in an image here. Some of the venues are close to selling out now. Final image is my Dad’s (@johntmacfarlane ) defamiliarising image of a Yellowhammer shaking off the rain: bird, blurred, whirred, whirled… The opening lines of Hopkins’s spectacular ‘The Windhover’ to end. “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy!”

Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up—& this week I walked stretches of the beautiful, stricken River Roding in east London with a human embodiment of that hope, @paul.powlesland , & a group of other river-folk from Mexico, Colombia, the US & beyond. Paul’s an environmental barrister & a river guardian. He lives on a boat in a reedbed on the Roding, surrounded by reed warblers and HGVs, as you are on London rivers. In 2024 he became the first juror in English legal history to swear his oath in court upon a river: the right-wing press exploded, obviously, because. Whenever I’m feeling helpless I think of Paul, for whom despair is both anathema & a luxury. He organises, inspires, gives, energises. He imagines the world otherwise & better—and then goes out & goddam makes it so. He loves the River Roding & works for its life: to free it from pollution, from disregard, from being sump & dump for capital’s uncosted externalities (road run-off, human waste). He’s waded its reaches, mapped its illegal sewage outfalls, its poisoned tributaries, the glittering wonders of where it’s survived & revived. He works with the communities who live by & with it. It’s a labour of love, vigilance & vision. Now the Environment Agency, who’ve been chronically inert in the face of the river’s degradation, have served Paul a notice of intention to prosecute on the grounds that one of his interventions was unlicensed by them. That totally sucks. But if the @envagency do prosecute, I guarantee they will meet a tidal wave of objection, ridicule & more. Please, help us build that wave if this happens! Working with my colleagues at the @moth_rights collective, we made plans to help revive rivers & challenge polluters in law, activism & song, from the Roding to the Río Magdalena. We saw where the Cranbrooke meets the Roding, an inflow so poisoned with ammonia that you can see the grey toxic shroud it projects into the cleaner water of the Roding (photo 5 here). And @samleesong sang a beautiful folksong from literally within the Roding, that spoke of rivers’ abilities to heal both themselves & us, given a chance. Hope is the thing with rivers, as Emily Dickinson almost said.

I’m taking up the 2026 Arne Naess Visiting Chair in Global Justice and Environment—previously held by the Dalai Lama, Olga Tokarczuk, Ramchandra Guha, David Abram & others—at the University of Oslo this coming autumn. Thank you to @unioslo & Professor @kalykke for this honour & the generous welcome. Looking forward to engaging with students, citizens & colleagues during my time in Norway in September.

118 angels soar aloft in the hammerbeam roof of a medieval fenland church, where they first took flight in the 1530s, carved from oak by craftsmen who went by the fabulous title of “Imaginators”. It’s a host of angels—or rather a flock of them, because the distinctive ‘fingered’ wings of these angels were carved to resemble the wing-feathers of Marsh Harriers (Circus aeruginosus), raptors who would have been abundant in the region when the roof was raised, a century before the drainage of the Fens really began. Standing under this roof awes me, as its makers intended. Angels, made of both oak and bird. Here, ornithology and theology—feather and faith—all begin to rhyme with one another in fascinating, uncanny ways. This braiding of bird and angel is more than only representational: both harriers and angels have been subject to waves of persecution and protection down the centuries, with the Reformation ushering in the destruction of angels in churches as evidence of “Popish” idolatry, and the Tudor Grain Act monetising the frenzied slaughter of “hawks”, whose heads would be brought to parish churches for bounty. I made a @bbcradio4 programme called Harrier Angels, celebrating the ‘angel churches’ of the Tudor period—especially this one, @stwendredaschurchmarch —and tracing their (to me) startling ideas and histories. It was brilliantly produced and edited by Julian May. Link in bio if you’d like a listen to this exploration of raptors and raptures.

Last dusk, using a river as a path, we found the remnant feathers and bones of a swan on the bank, so densely woven through by grasses that it seemed almost to have nested in death. It must have died in the autumn, lost in the reeds. Winter bleached it and the river, flooding, would have washed it. Its skull was clean, and pale against the dark, lucid water of the river, which pressed cold against our legs as we walked it. I’ve never seen a dead swan before. They are so vastly creatures of flight — I love the creak of their pinions and the audible hush of the air they displace when they fly low — that there was something uncanny and awry in seeing this one so utterly earthed. At Vedbaek in Denmark, a 6000-7000 year-old grave was excavated which held the bodies of a young mother and her newborn child. The child had been placed upon the wing of a swan: such a tender cradling. @johnnyflynnmusic & I wrote about that burial in a song called Coins for the Eyes: “The swan’s wing, sheltering, sheltering…” The swan in the river reeds is likely to have died from avian flu. Mute swan populations especially have been ravaged by the disease in the UK and Europe. As @kalykke said to me, the swans need our sheltering now. We walked on upstream for hours, and the reed buntings gameshow-buzzed and static-crackled in the phragmites, and at last light the jackdaws came in to roost with pinging cries. It was a beautiful and melancholy evening.

Two rivers run side-by-side in an English rainforest: one of water, one of moss; one flowing silver in the soft light of after-storm, the other green; each tracing the other’s shallow sine-wave line through the given. An invitation to imagine “green” not as property but as process; not the possession of an object, but rather something like water — colour as flow that the object temporarily stabilises and discloses. A river, tree, moss or leaf is not a thing to which processes happen, it fundamentally is a set of processes (growth, decay, deliquescence, glow), constantly arising, tumbling and entangling in the liquid we call “life”. Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame, rivers run — and in a temperate rainforest in the Lake District in spring, green is a tide; slow, immense, thrilling and unstoppable, rising from the cellular level upwards and outwards, to fill the full flank of a fell. Spring as verb. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (Dylan Thomas). Birch, rowan, gorse, sorrel, honeysuckle, ferns furled fast as fiddleheads, a commune of lichens—and moss banks so deep you dream of miniaturising and wandering the vast cloudforests of their interior, beneath water-droplets big as moons.

Winter light and hissing snakes of spindrift on Toll Creagach, the Hollow of the Crags. Westerly gales so strong on the summit approach we could only move between gusts. -20C or so with the windchill. Twenty-foot-high twisters of snow and ice roving the gullies, moving through us like furious ghosts. A gate, fenceless and intact, seemingly separating nothing from nothing: a portal to be treated with respect, clearly. Down as the day failed and the wind eased, among ancient Scots pines. Dusk light falling blue on the distant snow-fields of An Riabhachan, The Brindled Grey One. Pine, river, crag, snow, light. The elementals. The old ice might only have left yesterday, you said.

Wild, hard, glittering conditions on Sgurr nan Conbhairean, the Peak of the Hound-Keepers, today. Times it felt as if we’d walked into a Norman Ackroyd etching. Others as if we’d walked into Antarctica. Raven, ptarmigan, plate-ice still on the high lochans. Wind gusting to 70mph; ice-blizzards blowing in and through us. Astonishing, silvering light.

Hello—the paperback of Is a River Alive? reached Number One in the Sunday Times bestsellers list in this, its first week of publication; ahead of the Formula One tie-ins & the self-help books about how to optimise your brain that get piled high & sold cheaply in supermarkets. Makes me happy that a book which celebrates rivers as life-forces not resources; recognises them as beings with lives, deaths & even rights; a book of complex ideas & extraordinary people; a book about water & the web of life, about activism, beauty & wonder, about political ecology and wild law; — & hell, a book that uses the word “ontology” on multiple occasions…is reaching readers. Galactic-scale gratitude to all of you — booksellers, readers, writers, fellow river-lovers — who have helped this book flow into the world as it has. “It pleases me, loving rivers. Loving them all the way back to their source. Loving everything that increases me…” Raymond Carver, ‘Where Water Comes Together With Other Water’