Moderator Ingrid M. Rieser's reflection on the talk with Robert Macfarlane and Pella Thiel, originally published on Forest of Thought podcast Substack
In spring of 2020, in a notebook titled “Anima”, Robert Macfarlane scribbled three questions:
Can a forest think?
Does a mountain remember?
Is a river alive?
The final one, he says, kept tugging at his sleeve, and four years later brought us the book carrying that question on its cover. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking meandering journey along the courses of three rivers, or communities of rivers, some of them vital but threatened, others dying or already pronounced dead. If a river can die, Robert says, then surely it should be possible to consider it as a living entity?
But it’s clear throughout the book that Robert doesn’t find it easy to answer the question he has posed. I love the story in the first chapter, where Robert’s son asks him the name of the book he’s writing and upon hearing the answer bursts out: “Well, duh, Dad. That will be a short book, because the answer is ‘yes’!”
This short but telling exchange says so much about our culture. Why is it that most of us do not take the statement “a river is alive” as a self-evident truth in the way that children do? Come to think of it, in the way that pretty much every single culture except our modern one has done? That’s one of the questions we explore in this episode.
Last month, Robert Macfarlane visited Stockholm on the occasion of the release of his book in Swedish (Ocean Books, 2026). I was honoured to host a conversation between him and my friend (and previous guest on the podcast) ecologist Pella Thiel.
In a room filled to the brim with lovely audience members, we talked about what practices might help us to affirm the aliveness and interconnectedness of the more-than-human world, about the possibility of nature having rights, and about how “our fate flows with that of rivers”, as Robert puts it.
