Robert Macfarlane

Huge admirer of your work, Katie. I use it a lot in my teaching, among other things.

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.

It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

The Latest Tactic for Silencing Ecuador’s Environmental Defenders: Shuttering Their Bank Accounts - Inside Climate News As the country moves to intensify mining and oil operations, environmental and Indigenous leaders’ bank accounts are being frozen or closed. Such “debanking” cuts them off from financial support and p...

This is a really important @katiesurma.bsky.social piece on the strategic state silencing of land & water defenders in Ecuador—including colleagues of mine—as Noboa’s gov. moves to intensify mining & drilling (Trump playbook).
Please share widely.
insideclimatenews.org/news/1003202...

Thank you, Eric — that’s mighty to hear!

Wooohoo! Glad for those goosebumps!

“Winston Churchill did intervene in Iran and we are living with the consequences of that today”
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social

Hello—here’s the official trailer for UNDERLAND, based on my book of the same name, dir. by Rob Petit, with a haunting, glittering score by @hannahpeel.bsky.social, & the ‘Storyteller’ voiced by Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest). Hope you like it.

In UK/Irish cinemas 27 March.

Thanks, Adam!

🫡🫡🫡

Hello—Is a River Alive? is published in paperback in the UK today.
It’s dedicated to the rivers & their guardians.
Thanks to all who’ve supported its journey into the world: read it, talked about it, got in touch.
It’s @waterstones.bsky.social book of the month.
“Hope is the thing with rivers…”

It is true!

Thanks, river-friends!

make that £2.2 billion and the water companies might take notice; anything less, it's just the cost of doing business (badly)

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.

I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump.

Thanks!

Ah — thanks, EFL!

Yes! Been following this one: a terrific outcome

Dirty water, death and decline: the inside story of a privatisation scandal There is no end in sight to the pollution caused by a ‘broken’ system. Experts say it could even be getting worse

“Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to clean water, has singled out the English system for criticism, saying water should be managed as a publicly owned service, rather than run by private companies set up to benefit shareholders.”
www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Hello — the film adaptation of my book Underland will be showing at the BFI IMAX on 1 April.
It should be spectacular on the 26m-high screen there.
Tickets go on sale at 4pm today (Friday) here via bfi.org.uk.
I’ll be there for a Q&A with the director, Rob Petit, who’s created an extraordinary film.

Hannah Spencer: the Green MP speaking to everyday people’s frustrations Winner of Gorton and Denton byelection was driven into politics by growing gap between super-rich and the ‘rest of us’

The small, brave band of MPs who represent the trampled, not the tramplers, has a very welcome new member.

We should all ask ourselves why, in a supposed democracy, such representatives are so rare.

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Thanks Bob! It truly is. And, yes, a Cold War text of a kind, unmistakably to me.

Heck of a list to join 🫡

Here's a first look at official UK poster for UNDERLAND.

Directed by Rob Petit and based on the bestselling book by @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social, #UnderlandFilm is a cinematic voyage beneath the surface of the earth.

In UK/IRE cinemas from 27 March.
www.underlandfilm.com

@hannahpeel.bsky.social

Farwell Canyon The Chilcotin River in present-day British Columbia has long divided — and joined — the Secwépemc and Tsilhqot’in nations, each with an ancient claim to the land and the cherished salmon run there.

“This is my praise song for Farwell Canyon—that glorious Coyote-blessed and bewitched cathedral of salmon—for my enemy who is also my relative, and for the fish we love and share.”

Unmissable Julian Brave Noisecat essay on rivers, memories & imagining otherwise.

placesjournal.org/article/farw...

“it is well to hear, to become aware of, the operations of water among whose spider lacings by chance we live…”

James Agee in 1941, superb on the life and liveliness of rivers.

A river as a “huge, casual and aloof creature”. That trifecta of adjectives (not to mention the choice of noun)…

Lovely to hear that Is A River Alive? landed with you, Caroline

Ah, thanks so so much Bob! We finished the tour tonight here in Cambridge, and a wild strange celestial thing came powerfully into being. The @brittensinfonia.bsky.social are beyond brilliant: magician-musicians. Weaving a 21st-c Planets with them, Delia and Will was…a joy beyond easy expression.

Very happy to share that shelf with you, Ferris!

Hello — your words made me very happy. Thank you. I am so glad the many differently deep times of this book resonated with you, as a climber and maker and world-lover and protestor.

I have just read your response to IARA?, probably only the second or third review of the book I’ve read. Thank you; it is heartfelt, wise, generous and precise. No writer could wish for more as a mode of engagement.