1 00:00:00,520 --> 00:00:02,240 Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,940 --> 00:00:05,340 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 3 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:06,600 And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:07,100 --> 00:00:10,560 Have you ever stood beside a river and felt it was alive? 5 00:00:10,980 --> 00:00:16,520 Not just water flowing somewhere, but a presence, maybe even a being of some kind. 6 00:00:16,820 --> 00:00:23,440 How do we draw the line between life and non-life, especially when it comes to something like a river? 7 00:00:23,440 --> 00:00:30,760 We have a hard time imagining awareness on the scale of a forest, or a mountain, or water. 8 00:00:31,540 --> 00:00:35,000 But it's one of the most ancient ways of understanding the world. 9 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:38,100 The book is a question. It's not a declaration. 10 00:00:38,580 --> 00:00:40,280 Its title ends in a question mark. 11 00:00:40,400 --> 00:00:41,620 Is a river alive? 12 00:00:41,780 --> 00:00:47,760 And in a sense, it's an invitation to see what happens when we reimagine rivers, 13 00:00:47,760 --> 00:00:55,800 Not as stuff, not as brute matter, but as presences, let's say, with lives and with deaths and even with rights. 14 00:00:56,780 --> 00:01:05,800 This is Robert Macfarlane, a celebrated nature writer and explorer, the author of some best-selling and prize-winning books, including Mountains of the Mind and Underland. 15 00:01:06,060 --> 00:01:11,980 We both love his writing. I'm partial to the books about ancient landscapes. But Steve, how would you describe this one? 16 00:01:11,980 --> 00:01:20,380 Well, this is, I think, really the first time he's tackled head-on the concept of animism, the idea that all of nature is alive. 17 00:01:20,500 --> 00:01:26,280 And we're talking about plants and mountains and rivers, that they possess some sort of spirit or consciousness. 18 00:01:26,280 --> 00:01:29,500 And, you know, that's a common belief in a lot of indigenous cultures. 19 00:01:30,020 --> 00:01:33,040 And it's the basis of the emerging rights of nature movement. 20 00:01:33,640 --> 00:01:36,560 Though to most scientists, that's just a lot of mumbo jumbo. 21 00:01:36,560 --> 00:01:42,400 But if you take this idea seriously, I think everything changes about our relationship with 22 00:01:42,400 --> 00:01:47,960 the natural world. I'm curious, was that true for you? And we were in Vermont this summer when you 23 00:01:47,960 --> 00:01:52,460 were reading the book, and you go for a long walk up in the woods pretty much every day. 24 00:01:52,980 --> 00:01:59,660 Did anything shift for you? You know, I don't know. I'm not sure. I tend to have a very rational, 25 00:01:59,980 --> 00:02:04,940 you might say, left-brained way of seeing the world. But every so often when I'm in those woods, 26 00:02:04,940 --> 00:02:08,820 I can slip out of that mindset and feel a kind of life force. 27 00:02:09,340 --> 00:02:14,760 And sometimes I will close my eyes and put my arms around certain favorite trees. 28 00:02:14,880 --> 00:02:16,020 I didn't know you did that. 29 00:02:16,080 --> 00:02:16,500 Oh, yeah. 30 00:02:16,600 --> 00:02:22,380 I'll press my hands into the bark, and it can feel like there's some sort of communication with a tree. 31 00:02:22,460 --> 00:02:27,060 I mean, it could all be in my imagination, but I would like to cultivate that sensibility. 32 00:02:27,220 --> 00:02:28,200 It's really hard for me. 33 00:02:28,240 --> 00:02:29,300 It does not come naturally. 34 00:02:29,860 --> 00:02:34,960 And so I am especially fascinated by the people who grew up in our world of modern science 35 00:02:34,960 --> 00:02:38,120 but have found ways to take animism seriously. 36 00:02:38,300 --> 00:02:40,020 And Robert Macfarlane is one of those people. 37 00:02:40,900 --> 00:02:43,360 He's an adventurer, right, as well as a writer. 38 00:02:43,500 --> 00:02:46,040 How far did he go for this book about rivers? 39 00:02:46,240 --> 00:02:47,440 He went all around the world. 40 00:02:47,560 --> 00:02:50,840 He spent a lot of time in several different river ecosystems. 41 00:02:50,840 --> 00:02:55,800 There was an Ecuadorian cloud forest, a dying river system in India, 42 00:02:55,940 --> 00:02:58,580 and a boreal forest in eastern Canada. 43 00:02:58,580 --> 00:03:03,960 And he had some amazing experiences that really stretched his understanding of how the world works. 44 00:03:04,060 --> 00:03:05,580 And so we had a really interesting conversation. 45 00:03:06,540 --> 00:03:07,780 I'm excited to hear this one. 46 00:03:08,560 --> 00:03:13,500 So your first books were about mountains, drawing on your own experiences as a climber. 47 00:03:13,600 --> 00:03:15,580 Later, you wrote about underground environments. 48 00:03:16,320 --> 00:03:18,820 And now you've written about rivers. 49 00:03:18,860 --> 00:03:25,380 And not just rivers as a different feature of the landscape, but really the question of whether rivers are alive. 50 00:03:25,880 --> 00:03:27,360 What led you to that question? 51 00:03:27,360 --> 00:03:42,320 Well, I've been, I think, moving in that direction over 21 years, I suppose. And this is the sharpest confrontation of the question of life, which is really the spring source of all of this, all of these questions. 52 00:03:42,320 --> 00:03:45,720 I think I was first moved in that direction by the question of rights. 53 00:03:46,280 --> 00:03:54,440 In 2017, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, New Zealand, was recognized as a living being, 54 00:03:54,800 --> 00:03:59,060 a spiritual and physical entity, to use the phrase from the Parliamentary Act. 55 00:03:59,260 --> 00:04:03,060 And when you say recognized, you're talking about you're recognized in a legal sense. 56 00:04:03,300 --> 00:04:08,820 Yeah, this is a parliamentary act passed in Wellington in Parliament House there, 57 00:04:09,400 --> 00:04:17,100 And it recognized the Whanganui River as a spiritual and physical entity, a living being, and as a rights-bearing being. 58 00:04:17,100 --> 00:04:20,940 So this was a kind of global gong strike, and it certainly caught my ears. 59 00:04:21,460 --> 00:04:26,500 So where do you go with that? I mean, how do you sort of explore that question? 60 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:33,180 Well, in my country, the question of whether rivers are alive is very urgent because many of our rivers are dying. 61 00:04:33,360 --> 00:04:37,300 Dying in part because of a failure of imagination as well as legislation. 62 00:04:37,300 --> 00:04:45,120 So we have told one story about our rivers really successfully, which is that they are a kind of matter to be used. 63 00:04:45,380 --> 00:04:50,780 Their inanimate brute matter is Isaac Newton's phrase from a late 17th century letter. 64 00:04:51,400 --> 00:04:54,600 And so, you know, they fill our glasses, they take our waste away. 65 00:04:54,980 --> 00:05:00,960 We can move them around, we can dam them, we can forget about them broadly as long as they provide our ecosystem services. 66 00:05:01,660 --> 00:05:05,920 But there are other ways of imagining rivers, of relating to rivers. 67 00:05:05,920 --> 00:05:11,160 and I was interested in traveling to places where rivers are being imagined radically 68 00:05:11,160 --> 00:05:15,700 and in some way bringing back that old story to my landscape. 69 00:05:16,420 --> 00:05:18,900 So you, as you say, you travel around the world 70 00:05:18,900 --> 00:05:22,680 and talk to a lot of people who live very close to the natural world 71 00:05:22,680 --> 00:05:24,940 and you say they had a recurring question, 72 00:05:25,660 --> 00:05:27,000 what is the river saying? 73 00:05:27,900 --> 00:05:28,700 Yeah, yeah. 74 00:05:28,700 --> 00:05:32,380 Which is such a provocative question to ask. 75 00:05:33,040 --> 00:05:35,000 It is a, well, so I would ask that 76 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:37,620 because I really wanted to know the answer. 77 00:05:38,060 --> 00:05:39,400 And there is no one answer. 78 00:05:39,840 --> 00:05:41,800 No river speaks with a single voice. 79 00:05:41,880 --> 00:05:42,760 A river is a gathering. 80 00:05:43,460 --> 00:05:45,320 It's a braiding of tributaries. 81 00:05:45,460 --> 00:05:47,920 A river is a watershed as well as that main channel. 82 00:05:48,140 --> 00:05:51,120 So every river had a different answer. 83 00:05:51,340 --> 00:05:53,820 Every community had a different answer. 84 00:05:54,060 --> 00:05:55,220 Yeah, I traveled with people. 85 00:05:55,220 --> 00:05:58,640 I traveled with rivers for four years or so. 86 00:05:59,260 --> 00:06:01,480 And so, I mean, in modern Western culture, 87 00:06:01,480 --> 00:06:05,620 we have a very sharp distinction between life and non-life. 88 00:06:05,760 --> 00:06:07,940 I mean, animals are alive, plants are alive, 89 00:06:08,080 --> 00:06:11,160 but water would seem to be inanimate. 90 00:06:11,400 --> 00:06:14,040 So what's a different way of thinking about a river? 91 00:06:14,720 --> 00:06:17,900 Well, I think really we have to think what we mean by life 92 00:06:17,900 --> 00:06:20,920 and what we mean by living. 93 00:06:21,940 --> 00:06:25,040 And for some of the people I spent time with, 94 00:06:25,120 --> 00:06:29,640 let's take the example of this extraordinary Inuit poet and activist, 95 00:06:29,640 --> 00:06:35,680 Rita Mestakosho up in northeastern Quebec, or Natasnan, as she would call it. To her, 96 00:06:36,220 --> 00:06:44,220 life is lived fully in relation with the life of rivers. Rivers have flowed through the life of 97 00:06:44,220 --> 00:06:50,280 her and her people for the best part of 8,000 years. They are highway, larder, pharmacy, 98 00:06:50,680 --> 00:06:57,160 laboratory, schoolroom. They are all of these things. Life is unimaginable without rivers. 99 00:06:57,160 --> 00:07:17,660 And that makes intuitive sense to me. My own life has been lived in relation with rivers. I think with them. I remember with them. When I grieve, I go to the banks of the little spring near my house. I lost a friend two weeks ago really fast. And I wanted to be with the water and think about him there. 100 00:07:17,660 --> 00:07:27,380 So, to me, that definition of life, of life-giving, of life-making, of life-shaping, is a form of aliveness. 101 00:07:27,800 --> 00:07:31,140 But my sense is you're not just talking about the water itself. 102 00:07:31,200 --> 00:07:39,060 You're talking about the whole piece of the – I mean, the plants living around it, the animals that come to visit the river, the people who come there. 103 00:07:39,120 --> 00:07:41,580 I mean, that's all the river in a way. 104 00:07:41,600 --> 00:07:42,400 Yeah, it is. 105 00:07:42,540 --> 00:07:43,100 Yeah, exactly. 106 00:07:43,100 --> 00:07:50,400 river is a great a great group noun let's say a beautiful group noun we in in english i sort of 107 00:07:50,400 --> 00:07:57,760 realized with a with a dull of a moment we have no verb to river really we don't use river as a 108 00:07:57,760 --> 00:08:03,340 verb in the end i i do use it in the book and as a verb because what could be more of a verb than 109 00:08:03,340 --> 00:08:10,640 a river but we we it our rivers we that and which are rivers but in the i began to think of rivers 110 00:08:10,640 --> 00:08:19,480 who flow and rivers who reach the sea. And I just began in small and large and acute and chronic 111 00:08:19,480 --> 00:08:26,640 ways to try to fall into a neighborliness with rivers. You said to be able to really dive into 112 00:08:26,640 --> 00:08:31,820 the subject, to write this book, there was a lot of unlearning that you had to do, a lot of unlearning 113 00:08:31,820 --> 00:08:37,580 of your assumptions, I guess, sort of this divide between life and non-life. What did you have to 114 00:08:37,580 --> 00:08:44,780 unlearn? Well, the rationalist definition of a river is H2O plus gravity, which I think is for 115 00:08:44,780 --> 00:08:54,600 many of us what it is. I had to think about what agency is, what will might mean. In the little 116 00:08:54,600 --> 00:09:00,320 springs I live near here on the 99 million year old chalk of South Cambridge, they have exerted 117 00:09:00,320 --> 00:09:08,660 an extraordinary agency and will on life around themselves. There is Mesolithic flint scatters 118 00:09:08,660 --> 00:09:14,480 from 8,000 years ago found by these springs, Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, all the 119 00:09:14,480 --> 00:09:21,240 way through to my city of Cambridge, which was in effect irrigated and nourished and kept alive 120 00:09:21,240 --> 00:09:26,800 during the early modern period by this flowing fresh water. But most people would say that 121 00:09:26,800 --> 00:09:31,580 you know, what you're describing are the people who lived along that river for, you know, over 122 00:09:31,580 --> 00:09:36,460 the millennia, not the river itself. It's a different frame of reference. 123 00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:41,740 It is a different frame of reference. And I suppose what I'm doing there is trying to think 124 00:09:41,740 --> 00:09:47,880 about the ways in which grammatically and conceptually we have rendered rivers as passive 125 00:09:47,880 --> 00:09:53,840 presences. I mean, we now have such control over rivers. We can pick up whole watersheds 126 00:09:53,840 --> 00:10:00,520 and reorganize them. We have impounded so much water in the Three Gorges Dam project that we've 127 00:10:00,520 --> 00:10:07,480 measurably slowed the rotation of the earth. So water has, river has become stuff. It has become 128 00:10:07,480 --> 00:10:14,700 thing to be organized. And that organization has brought incredible flourishing, incredible human 129 00:10:14,700 --> 00:10:24,820 benefits, but it has become a form of story about water which removes its life, its life-giving 130 00:10:24,820 --> 00:10:31,180 powers, its life force, its agency, its will, depending on how you want to use these words. 131 00:10:31,180 --> 00:10:36,820 So, yeah, I wanted to turn all of these words around and see what happened when we look 132 00:10:36,820 --> 00:10:38,440 through them from different angles. 133 00:10:39,160 --> 00:10:40,580 So we should talk about some of your travels. 134 00:10:40,580 --> 00:10:49,260 I mean, you've constructed your book around three big trips, and the first one you write about is down to Ecuador, to the Ecuadorian cloud forest. 135 00:10:49,740 --> 00:10:50,040 Yes. 136 00:10:50,540 --> 00:10:51,660 Why did you decide to go there? 137 00:10:52,320 --> 00:11:01,460 Oh, well, because in 2008, Ecuador revised, reimagined its constitution after the election of Rafael Correa there. 138 00:11:01,920 --> 00:11:10,200 And into that new constitution, it inserted these four astonishing articles, which are now generally known as the Rights of Nature articles. 139 00:11:10,200 --> 00:11:16,560 And in so doing, it became the first modern democracy, nation, state to recognize the rights of nature. 140 00:11:16,780 --> 00:11:31,220 And just to be clear about what that means, the first of those articles recognized nature, rivers, mountains, cloud forests, as having the right to exist, to flourish and to persist. 141 00:11:31,220 --> 00:11:39,220 It also recognized the respect, what we might know from human rights, as dignity of and for nature. 142 00:11:40,140 --> 00:11:45,380 And in the final article, it made the state the guarantor of those rights. 143 00:11:45,980 --> 00:11:48,220 And this is pretty extraordinary. 144 00:11:48,520 --> 00:11:53,220 We're used to thinking of human rights, but yeah, in the Constitution, man. 145 00:11:53,860 --> 00:11:56,720 So did that make a difference? Did anything change because of that? 146 00:11:56,720 --> 00:11:58,500 Yeah, such a good question. 147 00:11:58,500 --> 00:12:02,220 And for a long time, I mean, for a long time, relatively little did. 148 00:12:02,380 --> 00:12:07,780 But then in 2017, a mining concession was granted, a gold mining concession was granted 149 00:12:07,780 --> 00:12:11,820 for this extraordinary area of cloud forest called Los Cedros, the cedar forest. 150 00:12:12,380 --> 00:12:17,700 And this is a place of staggering abundance, diversity, and domesticity of life. 151 00:12:17,860 --> 00:12:22,700 Would have been completely eliminated by open pit gold mining. 152 00:12:23,360 --> 00:12:25,140 And a case was brought. 153 00:12:25,140 --> 00:12:31,760 the case asked the court system to recognize that gold mining would violate the rights of 154 00:12:31,760 --> 00:12:38,540 the river and the forest. And that case escalated up the court system and finally reached the 155 00:12:38,540 --> 00:12:43,900 constitutional court at the height of the pandemic in 20 to 2021. And at the end of 21, 156 00:12:44,020 --> 00:12:51,240 this incredible ruling came down and it asserted the rights of the forest and the rivers to exist, 157 00:12:51,240 --> 00:12:52,580 to flourish and to persist. 158 00:12:52,820 --> 00:12:54,740 And it caused the state mining company 159 00:12:54,740 --> 00:12:55,980 and Canadian mining company 160 00:12:55,980 --> 00:12:58,220 to be banished from the area 161 00:12:58,220 --> 00:13:00,200 and save the forest. 162 00:13:00,480 --> 00:13:01,500 Simple as that. 163 00:13:02,240 --> 00:13:02,600 Astonishing. 164 00:13:02,880 --> 00:13:04,280 The mining company's still circle, 165 00:13:04,360 --> 00:13:04,780 I should say. 166 00:13:04,900 --> 00:13:07,140 It's not like a happy ending forever after. 167 00:13:07,400 --> 00:13:10,200 But it was another of these gong strike moments 168 00:13:10,200 --> 00:13:13,040 in what might be called legal moral imagination 169 00:13:13,040 --> 00:13:14,560 around particularly rivers. 170 00:13:15,040 --> 00:13:15,760 So you went there. 171 00:13:15,760 --> 00:13:17,940 I mean, you went to this cloud forest, 172 00:13:18,040 --> 00:13:19,060 the Cedar Forest. 173 00:13:19,400 --> 00:13:21,100 And first of all, what is a cloud forest? 174 00:13:21,240 --> 00:13:23,600 Like what's the difference between a cloud forest and a rain forest? 175 00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:24,800 Yeah, higher. 176 00:13:25,140 --> 00:13:26,460 So they're higher altitude. 177 00:13:27,080 --> 00:13:28,700 They tend to be on steeper ground. 178 00:13:28,840 --> 00:13:29,680 They form on mountains. 179 00:13:30,080 --> 00:13:31,800 So they have faster flowing rivers. 180 00:13:32,420 --> 00:13:33,800 And they are river makers. 181 00:13:34,800 --> 00:13:38,620 River and forest live in this beautiful mutualism in a cloud forest. 182 00:13:39,140 --> 00:13:44,640 So in this case, heavy moisture-laden air comes in off the Pacific, rises. 183 00:13:45,260 --> 00:13:48,720 And as it rises, of course, the moisture condenses into the form of mist. 184 00:13:48,820 --> 00:13:51,140 So it has a heavy kind of year-round mist. 185 00:13:51,240 --> 00:13:53,940 And that mist moves through the forest. 186 00:13:53,940 --> 00:13:59,280 When you walk in a cloud forest, you're in this kind of socket of mist the whole time. 187 00:13:59,280 --> 00:14:06,440 But it also condenses on the immense surface area of this epiphytic forest and then rolls 188 00:14:06,440 --> 00:14:13,220 off in this beautiful process known as continuous fog drop to drip from the end of millions 189 00:14:13,220 --> 00:14:14,720 and millions of leaves. 190 00:14:14,720 --> 00:14:19,240 And that water combined with rain gathers and gathers and gathers in these many watersheds 191 00:14:19,240 --> 00:14:20,360 to create rivers. 192 00:14:20,360 --> 00:14:27,200 And that's just astonishing that actually, like, dripping water from leaves can create a river. 193 00:14:27,540 --> 00:14:29,640 I mean, I just sort of like, wow, I didn't know that was possible. 194 00:14:30,180 --> 00:14:31,700 Yeah, yeah, in that volume. 195 00:14:31,880 --> 00:14:35,260 And it does rain there, but it is more cloud than rain. 196 00:14:35,360 --> 00:14:39,360 I mean, that's one of the differences to the rainforest is a rainfall count. 197 00:14:39,620 --> 00:14:44,940 So you traveled with also some people who live very close to the natural world, 198 00:14:44,940 --> 00:14:48,840 and they see things, they notice things that I would never notice. 199 00:14:48,840 --> 00:15:01,140 And I mean, I was particularly struck by a mycologist named Giuliana, who talks about not just seeing mushrooms, but hearing mushrooms, you know, feeling when they're nearby. 200 00:15:01,340 --> 00:15:05,340 And I'm just trying to think about what that's like. 201 00:15:05,400 --> 00:15:07,220 I mean, what was it like to travel with her? 202 00:15:07,580 --> 00:15:08,980 It was wild, Steve. 203 00:15:09,060 --> 00:15:10,060 It was truly wild. 204 00:15:10,060 --> 00:15:14,780 And I just before anyone thinks I'm, I mean, she is a hardcore field mycologist. 205 00:15:14,780 --> 00:15:22,200 she's the author of the two definitive volumes of Chilean mycology. So she's serious. But whether 206 00:15:22,200 --> 00:15:27,840 we see this as a kind of internalized knowledge that takes the form of instinct, but we were 207 00:15:27,840 --> 00:15:34,140 looking, she was looking for two species of fungi, tiny brown psilocybe species that had had one 208 00:15:34,140 --> 00:15:38,620 collection there many years before. And the finding of those would fortify the protection of the 209 00:15:38,620 --> 00:15:44,900 forest so there was a very this was a purposeful journey but she would say the two times she found 210 00:15:44,900 --> 00:15:50,000 them she found both them she would say and this is after days she would say oh they're near now 211 00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:56,640 i can hear them she calls it a fuzz in the matrix i love that phrase yes me too i want it on a t-shirt 212 00:15:56,640 --> 00:16:02,320 because i don't know what that means to experience but boy was she right we would go around two 213 00:16:02,320 --> 00:16:07,340 corners she would suddenly fall to the ground as though she'd been shot i thought you know a sniper 214 00:16:07,340 --> 00:16:13,760 a howler monkey dropped a nut on her head, flopped down onto her belly, woohoo! And there was this 215 00:16:13,760 --> 00:16:19,700 tiny brown mushroom in this vast brown forest floor. So the mushrooms, these specific mushrooms, 216 00:16:19,840 --> 00:16:25,140 these individual mushrooms were calling to her in some way. In some way. I just said, 217 00:16:25,520 --> 00:16:29,820 don't try and explain to me how you do this. Just tell me what it feels like. And actually, 218 00:16:29,820 --> 00:16:36,720 that's the same answer. Yeah. So yeah, the fuzz in the matrix. What was most surprising to you 219 00:16:36,720 --> 00:16:39,200 about these weeks in the cloud forest in Ecuador? 220 00:16:39,600 --> 00:16:41,400 Did any of your sort of basic assumptions 221 00:16:41,400 --> 00:16:43,200 about how the world works change 222 00:16:43,200 --> 00:16:44,400 because of that experience? 223 00:16:45,080 --> 00:16:46,680 Well, I think I saw what happens 224 00:16:46,680 --> 00:16:49,140 when a society at least attempts 225 00:16:49,140 --> 00:16:52,380 to organize some of its moral imagination 226 00:16:52,380 --> 00:16:55,240 along ecocentric lines, let's say. 227 00:16:55,680 --> 00:16:56,820 That was fascinating. 228 00:16:57,140 --> 00:17:00,540 And then also I just began to understand 229 00:17:00,540 --> 00:17:02,820 and that then intensified with the other journeys, 230 00:17:02,820 --> 00:17:11,240 just the sheer courage and determination that is necessary to protect places like that in the face 231 00:17:11,240 --> 00:17:17,580 of the demands of, let us at best say, global capital. I mean, the spot price of a troy ounce 232 00:17:17,580 --> 00:17:25,280 of gold back then was $1,517. It's way beyond that now. For many reasons, economic volatility, 233 00:17:25,280 --> 00:17:30,620 at times of volatility, money flees to safe places and gold is the safest place of all. 234 00:17:30,620 --> 00:17:42,480 So the pressure on that remarkable forest to be cracked open, to have the marrow, the gold slurped out of its innards by capital, by us, is immense. 235 00:17:42,880 --> 00:17:49,120 But in that valley, the Integg Valley, they have 30 continuous years of holding mining companies at bay. 236 00:17:49,900 --> 00:17:51,340 And it's not glamorous work. 237 00:17:51,560 --> 00:17:51,900 It's hard. 238 00:17:51,900 --> 00:17:56,500 And my sense from the way you write about this is it's often – it's a few individuals. 239 00:17:57,480 --> 00:18:03,440 I mean, it's not like the national government is deploying an army to, you know, stave off the mining company. 240 00:18:03,640 --> 00:18:10,960 It's like it's a few activists who've devoted their lives and, you know, who live there year after year as the guardians of the forest. 241 00:18:11,440 --> 00:18:12,380 That's right. Yeah. 242 00:18:12,380 --> 00:18:23,680 So the Cedar Forest has this mythic counterpart in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written work of world literature we have, at the heart of which is a sacred cedar forest. 243 00:18:23,680 --> 00:18:46,220 This is about 4,400 years old in the Sumerian form, and that story ends with the sacred cedar forest being destroyed by, in effect, extractivist forces. Gilgamesh and Enkidu turn up, they cut down the forest, they take all the timber and they slaughter Humbaba, the guardian of the forest, and take his head out on the raft on the Euphrates. 244 00:18:46,220 --> 00:18:51,760 But here in Ecuador, another story is being told about another sacred cedar forest. 245 00:18:51,840 --> 00:18:55,680 But this one so far ends with the forest's salvation. 246 00:18:56,700 --> 00:18:58,920 So I want to pause here for a short break. 247 00:18:58,960 --> 00:19:06,360 And when we come back, Rob will tell us about an ancient river city in India and a truly wild kayaking experience in Canada. 248 00:19:06,960 --> 00:19:10,280 Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. 249 00:19:10,640 --> 00:19:15,160 We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and I'm really excited about them. 250 00:19:15,580 --> 00:19:21,120 And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, 251 00:19:21,360 --> 00:19:26,760 those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. 252 00:19:27,180 --> 00:19:28,060 I hope you like it. 253 00:19:28,060 --> 00:19:38,920 this is wonder cabinet i'm steve paulson let's get back to my conversation with robert mcfarland 254 00:19:38,920 --> 00:19:45,560 about his book is a river alive so the next big trip that you took was to india to the city of 255 00:19:45,560 --> 00:19:51,840 chennai where the river is dead i think it's legally been declared dead right yeah well in 256 00:19:51,840 --> 00:19:56,420 the in the press yeah there's three rivers three main rivers the costa stelaya the kum and the 257 00:19:56,420 --> 00:19:59,080 Adyar, they run in through Chennai. 258 00:19:59,200 --> 00:20:02,580 Yeah, and for parts of the year, much of those rivers, 259 00:20:02,820 --> 00:20:06,920 for the length of their city stretches, are functionally dead, biologically dead. 260 00:20:07,460 --> 00:20:08,320 So why did you go there? 261 00:20:09,700 --> 00:20:12,460 Well, the chapter's called Ghosts, Monsters, and Angels. 262 00:20:12,460 --> 00:20:18,720 And the ghosts are the kind of suppressed and dying and vanished rivers of that region. 263 00:20:18,920 --> 00:20:20,420 Chennai was a water city. 264 00:20:20,620 --> 00:20:26,260 You know, the British who began, I think, some poor hydrological literacy in the region, let's say. 265 00:20:26,420 --> 00:20:31,800 kind of dreamed of it as a Venice of India. So there's a sort of romance of water to its past, 266 00:20:31,960 --> 00:20:37,280 but actually the whole city now has been built on marsh over river. And so the rivers have become 267 00:20:37,280 --> 00:20:44,060 ghosts. But during the monsoon and particularly during the cyclone season, which hit every three 268 00:20:44,060 --> 00:20:49,020 or four years, they come back as monsters because rivers remember. That's one thing I learned there, 269 00:20:49,100 --> 00:20:53,880 rivers remember. What do you mean, rivers remember? Well, they remember where they once were, 270 00:20:53,880 --> 00:21:10,220 Where they once ran, so where they have been built over, where they have been culverted, where they have been subdued, they roar back into their memorious places and reoccupy them and they flood the city catastrophically very often. 271 00:21:10,220 --> 00:21:16,260 And so Chennai lives in this double life of drought and flood pretty much every year. 272 00:21:16,260 --> 00:21:18,300 And that alone made it fascinating. 273 00:21:18,460 --> 00:21:25,560 But I went because I have a long-standing friendship with a remarkable young Indian Tamil activist there called Yuvan Aves, 274 00:21:25,800 --> 00:21:32,340 who is a sort of river healer, river dreamer, and who himself has been healed by rivers as well. 275 00:21:32,760 --> 00:21:33,940 How is he healed by rivers? 276 00:21:34,680 --> 00:21:38,240 Well, I mean, when you write a book over many years, you'll know this, Steve, 277 00:21:38,240 --> 00:21:43,240 but you set out with all manner of intentions and ideas, and then places and people surprise 278 00:21:43,240 --> 00:21:49,020 you profoundly. And one of the, I think, central surprises of this book for me was that each place 279 00:21:49,020 --> 00:21:55,820 I went, I found and traveled closely with somebody who had suffered death, who had lost someone. 280 00:21:56,020 --> 00:22:01,260 Giuliana lost her father in terrible circumstances shortly before we went to the forest. Yuvan 281 00:22:01,260 --> 00:22:06,360 and was brought up in a very physically abusive household, 282 00:22:06,660 --> 00:22:10,160 was beaten pretty much daily by his stepfather for years. 283 00:22:10,800 --> 00:22:12,140 He ran away from home. 284 00:22:12,600 --> 00:22:17,200 He lost his younger sister, Jolini, to illness very suddenly. 285 00:22:18,260 --> 00:22:21,600 You know, he has suffered a great deal in his young life, 286 00:22:21,600 --> 00:22:28,600 and he really remade himself out of that oppressive, violent place. 287 00:22:28,600 --> 00:22:36,520 place he moved to a school that was set in in marshland and water and he crystallized himself 288 00:22:36,520 --> 00:22:43,700 there and the creaturely life the people the books the land the water there taught him a different 289 00:22:43,700 --> 00:22:50,180 way of being to the one he had been sort of brutalized into by his stepfather so i mean 290 00:22:50,180 --> 00:22:54,840 rivers for some people i mean they truly are life-giving i mean they don't just give life to 291 00:22:54,840 --> 00:23:01,240 the animals and the plants that live nearby, to the people, and restore purpose, why we want to 292 00:23:01,240 --> 00:23:09,060 live. Totally, totally. There's a line by Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, I think he 293 00:23:09,060 --> 00:23:15,080 says, sometimes when it hurts, we return to the banks of certain rivers. In a way, the book is 294 00:23:15,080 --> 00:23:19,660 nothing a Buddhist couldn't tell you before breakfast. It's a theorization of something 295 00:23:19,660 --> 00:23:26,660 that is in many ways intuitive that water is life rivers are life givers um juliana you know 296 00:23:26,660 --> 00:23:33,100 watching her heel within the embrace of the cloud forest and and the waters watching her powers 297 00:23:33,100 --> 00:23:40,440 of fungal perception come back to her was was a was a second order miracle really so even yeah he 298 00:23:40,440 --> 00:23:46,440 now works as a river activist and he's dealing with some of the yeah some of the deadest stretches 299 00:23:46,440 --> 00:23:51,960 of water that i've ever seen i mean you can barely we can't breathe through your nose around them and 300 00:23:51,960 --> 00:23:58,500 you you don't want to touch them water is certainly undrinkable certainly unswimmable almost 301 00:23:58,500 --> 00:24:04,700 untouchable so but he's trying to imagine a just future for rivers and all those who live with and 302 00:24:04,700 --> 00:24:12,060 on and around rivers very moving the the last river you went to to spend time on is in eastern 303 00:24:12,060 --> 00:24:16,880 Canada, near the border of Quebec and Labrador. Tell me about that place. 304 00:24:17,440 --> 00:24:22,480 Oh, wow. I have known some rivers in my time, but I've never known one like this one. That 305 00:24:22,480 --> 00:24:27,620 section's called the Living River. And yeah, so its name in Inuit is the Mutehekau Shipu. 306 00:24:28,100 --> 00:24:33,820 And that translates as the river who flows between square blocky cliffs. And that gives 307 00:24:33,820 --> 00:24:41,200 you some idea, right? It's a wild, wild river. And we were dropped by float plane about 100, 308 00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:48,960 120 miles up the system. And then we had to paddle out in kayaks over the best part of a couple of 309 00:24:48,960 --> 00:24:56,880 weeks. And it buried me. It pummeled me. It scared the hell out of me. It thrilled me. It made me 310 00:24:56,880 --> 00:25:03,720 cry. It was running big. It was about 275 cubic meters a second at a time of year when the average 311 00:25:03,720 --> 00:25:09,640 is more like 120. We're talking major rapids here. Well, to me, absolutely. I mean, six-foot 312 00:25:09,640 --> 00:25:14,500 but Standing Wave was the biggest we ran, and that buried me good and proper. 313 00:25:14,700 --> 00:25:17,380 But I should just explain that the reason I was drawn there 314 00:25:17,380 --> 00:25:20,860 is because the Mutehekau Shipu became, again in 2021, 315 00:25:20,860 --> 00:25:25,960 the first river in Canada to have its rights declared. 316 00:25:26,740 --> 00:25:30,720 And that happened in this beautiful so-called Mirror Resolution 317 00:25:30,720 --> 00:25:34,300 between a regional council and the Inuit community 318 00:25:34,300 --> 00:25:36,240 at the little township of Equanishd, 319 00:25:36,480 --> 00:25:39,400 led by this extraordinary poet called Rita Mestakosho, 320 00:25:39,400 --> 00:25:44,960 who I have become friends with and who really primes me for that. 321 00:25:45,160 --> 00:25:46,280 I went to see her basically to say, 322 00:25:46,340 --> 00:25:48,380 can I have your permission to travel down the river? 323 00:25:48,500 --> 00:25:49,820 And she just laughed at me and she said, 324 00:25:49,900 --> 00:25:51,700 yeah, you don't need my permission. 325 00:25:51,780 --> 00:25:52,980 You need the river's permission. 326 00:25:53,660 --> 00:25:54,980 I was like, how do I get that? 327 00:25:55,060 --> 00:25:56,180 Do I apply in triplicate? 328 00:25:56,700 --> 00:25:58,860 She said, you'll know, you'll know. 329 00:25:58,860 --> 00:26:01,120 So she set me off on that river journey 330 00:26:01,120 --> 00:26:03,060 with a series of very clear instructions. 331 00:26:03,360 --> 00:26:07,140 And she told me I had one question I could ask the river, one. 332 00:26:07,440 --> 00:26:09,360 And if it was the right one, the river would answer. 333 00:26:09,400 --> 00:26:11,420 and Boyd did it. 334 00:26:12,120 --> 00:26:13,980 What were the instructions she gave you? 335 00:26:14,760 --> 00:26:18,280 Well, so she's very decisive and forceful. 336 00:26:18,360 --> 00:26:20,120 She looked me up and down when we first met 337 00:26:20,120 --> 00:26:21,000 before I went on the river. 338 00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:24,680 She was like, you, you look too much with your eyes. 339 00:26:25,040 --> 00:26:26,280 You live too much in your head. 340 00:26:26,420 --> 00:26:28,120 You don't feel enough with your heart. 341 00:26:29,060 --> 00:26:30,000 When you're on the river, 342 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:32,420 she wanted me to collect water from a place 343 00:26:32,420 --> 00:26:36,160 where one of her family members had hunted 344 00:26:36,160 --> 00:26:38,180 and he'd recently died, William. 345 00:26:38,180 --> 00:26:43,760 i had to gather labrador tea for her at another place i had to always pitch my tent facing east 346 00:26:43,760 --> 00:26:48,380 so i greeted the sun each morning i had to keep my eyes peeled for a sacred tree she was like 347 00:26:48,380 --> 00:26:51,840 you'll you'll you'll see it there'll be one in the forest you'll know it when you meet it 348 00:26:51,840 --> 00:26:58,700 it absolutely knew it when i met it it was only six inches high but it was it was a tree it was 349 00:26:58,700 --> 00:27:04,500 a tree so she was amazing and and then just this real existential challenge or epistemological 350 00:27:04,500 --> 00:27:11,880 challenge uh about the river knowing something about me that i did not know about about myself 351 00:27:11,880 --> 00:27:17,060 but that it would it would declare to me if i read the river open-hearted steve she told me 352 00:27:17,060 --> 00:27:21,400 one other she gave me one other instruction that chilled me to the bone as well leave your notebooks 353 00:27:21,400 --> 00:27:29,860 behind oh for a writer yeah how would you feel about that if you were told leave my recorder 354 00:27:29,860 --> 00:27:36,820 behind. It struck to the heart. We came to a negotiated settlement, which was that I could 355 00:27:36,820 --> 00:27:41,320 take the notebooks, but I was not to write in them when I was actually on the water. I could 356 00:27:41,320 --> 00:27:47,940 write when I was on land. So fair enough. Well, you have some wonderful descriptions in your book 357 00:27:47,940 --> 00:27:55,440 of the river as alive, I would say. And part of it is because it's like, it sounds really dangerous, 358 00:27:55,440 --> 00:27:58,300 some of your days on the river kayaking. 359 00:27:58,460 --> 00:28:01,120 And I'd love to have you read one passage 360 00:28:01,120 --> 00:28:03,720 that just really brought it to life to me, 361 00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:07,320 and that's the passage that starts at the bottom of page 257. 362 00:28:08,640 --> 00:28:10,100 Yeah, I'd love to. 363 00:28:10,400 --> 00:28:10,820 Yeah, okay. 364 00:28:11,080 --> 00:28:13,360 So one thing that happens over the course of the book 365 00:28:13,360 --> 00:28:15,160 is that language begins to liquefy. 366 00:28:15,660 --> 00:28:16,920 The language gets rivered, 367 00:28:16,980 --> 00:28:18,760 so you'll hear a little bit of that here. 368 00:28:20,120 --> 00:28:23,880 And then I'm into the rapid, hard into it, 369 00:28:23,880 --> 00:28:28,560 the water now vinyl-tight under my boat, and I'm accelerating as the river enters the channel 370 00:28:28,560 --> 00:28:33,580 before the block. The golden rocks on the bed of the river are fleeting beneath me, and time 371 00:28:33,580 --> 00:28:38,380 is stretching in the way it does at certain moments of terror and exhilaration, so that in 372 00:28:38,380 --> 00:28:44,980 the thirty or so century-long seconds it takes to run the rapid, I can see in isolated and shining 373 00:28:44,980 --> 00:28:51,460 detail each water droplet and boiling pool, and I slip nose-first over the sill and skim like a 374 00:28:51,460 --> 00:28:54,920 ball bearing on a metal slide down the slope of the tongue 375 00:28:54,920 --> 00:28:58,520 and bang, straight into that big polar bearish standing wave. 376 00:28:59,000 --> 00:29:02,180 And the nose of my craft crashes into its snowy front face, 377 00:29:02,220 --> 00:29:03,980 which fills it and me with river. 378 00:29:04,260 --> 00:29:06,400 And I must surely be flipped or buried by the wave. 379 00:29:06,480 --> 00:29:09,100 But somehow, perhaps because I've hit it so straight, 380 00:29:09,180 --> 00:29:11,900 the nose of the kayak shakes itself free of the impact. 381 00:29:12,400 --> 00:29:15,420 And the boat bucks beneath me and begins to rise right up and over, 382 00:29:15,420 --> 00:29:17,400 first the point, then the ridge of the big wave. 383 00:29:17,680 --> 00:29:20,620 And surely I must fall backwards out of the boat or be flipped. 384 00:29:20,620 --> 00:29:25,840 and then I am punched full in the face by a fist of water but it is the standing wave's 385 00:29:25,840 --> 00:29:30,560 valediction and I'm through and upright and the elastic curve of the current pulls me around a 386 00:29:30,560 --> 00:29:36,020 hundred and fifty degree bend and I can hear Danny yelling something behind me and Wayne is whooping 387 00:29:36,020 --> 00:29:41,060 great belts of sound that rise over the roars of the rapid and I'm thumping over the smaller green 388 00:29:41,060 --> 00:29:46,120 cream bronze waves and then I'm under the flat-faced rock wall god damn it but this last wave isn't 389 00:29:46,120 --> 00:29:50,660 going to flip me if the biggest one didn't and I plant the paddle as Danny told me and I pull on 390 00:29:50,660 --> 00:29:55,640 it like I'm trying to uproot an iron fence post and the pull boosts me into the last standing wave 391 00:29:55,640 --> 00:30:00,460 the sneak wave right under the rock wall but I don't hit it at the perpendicular as I had the 392 00:30:00,460 --> 00:30:05,560 biggest one and so it shrugs me off its right hand slope and the boat cants sideways and my stomach 393 00:30:05,560 --> 00:30:10,960 lurches and I call out and begin to roll sideways but some amygdala and part of my brain tells me 394 00:30:10,960 --> 00:30:16,760 to lean uphill not down and i rewrite and i'm over the blast wall and into the long black pool below 395 00:30:16,760 --> 00:30:22,560 the rapid where the boss and the bear already wait grins on their faces and shouts of congratulations 396 00:30:22,560 --> 00:30:27,680 and wayne is through it too without flipping and the salmon swims up to us and my heart is 397 00:30:27,680 --> 00:30:33,740 piston block pumping and wayne says something like living right my friend living right with 398 00:30:33,740 --> 00:30:44,480 a manic smile on his face shocked and exhilarated and enlivened we flow on that is so beautiful and 399 00:30:44,480 --> 00:30:50,720 we flow on i mean that's what rivers do they have a purpose and they flow from one place to another 400 00:30:50,720 --> 00:30:57,020 and to sort of bring this back to the political piece of this story or maybe the economic piece 401 00:30:57,020 --> 00:31:03,520 is there are groups that want to damn the river and it's really complicated in an ethical sense 402 00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:06,740 I mean, you know, there are definite benefits that come from damming. 403 00:31:06,840 --> 00:31:09,000 I mean, they supply hydroelectric power. 404 00:31:09,220 --> 00:31:11,180 They give jobs to local people. 405 00:31:11,700 --> 00:31:14,900 How do you sort of weigh that with the wildness of the river? 406 00:31:15,640 --> 00:31:18,660 Yeah, it's, no, dam is a simple question, I think. 407 00:31:18,920 --> 00:31:25,660 And Hydro-Quebec, the state, the regional hydro company, state-owned really enterprise, 408 00:31:25,660 --> 00:31:34,380 has converted the majority or much of Quebec, huge land mass into a machine for the generation 409 00:31:34,380 --> 00:31:39,360 and the storage and the transmission of electricity. And that has brought, as you say, 410 00:31:39,580 --> 00:31:46,280 vast, vast benefits, but it has also drowned rivers. And you can drown a river if you build 411 00:31:46,280 --> 00:31:50,840 a dam wall big enough. A reservoir is the thing that can drown a river. So the Romaine River, 412 00:31:50,840 --> 00:31:58,580 which was the next vast river to the east, had a multi-dam project on it. And now I think eyes, 413 00:31:58,700 --> 00:32:04,600 well, eyes did turn to the Mutehekau Shipu. And that began this resistance campaign, 414 00:32:05,100 --> 00:32:09,860 which was a campaign of the imagination. And here's where we sort of eddy back to the question 415 00:32:09,860 --> 00:32:18,360 of life, because the rights declaration recognized the river as a living entity and as a rights 416 00:32:18,360 --> 00:32:25,800 bearing entity the right to flow so you know i'm i'm a storyteller i'm a writer i'm a as it were a 417 00:32:25,800 --> 00:32:32,520 reporter at some level so i i don't judge in in this chapter but i am fascinated by the way 418 00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:41,000 imagination legislation and river all tangle in that place so what is the legal status then of 419 00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:46,440 this river i mean there are these at least on the books these protections but is that enough to keep 420 00:32:46,440 --> 00:32:53,620 the river wild? No, very fragile, very fragile. I mean, we've talked about the two jurisdictions 421 00:32:53,620 --> 00:33:01,860 where the protection, a rights-based, life-based protection for rivers is powerful. And that's 422 00:33:01,860 --> 00:33:09,020 Aotearoa, New Zealand and Ecuador. But this declaration is in many ways a beautiful 423 00:33:09,020 --> 00:33:17,700 metaphysical fiction, as it were, in the sense that it has no real force and consequence within 424 00:33:17,700 --> 00:33:24,520 existing legislation. And I think what it does is throw an imaginative force field around the 425 00:33:24,520 --> 00:33:29,560 river. So if Hydra-Quebec does come for the Muteshikar ship, they will have to get through 426 00:33:29,560 --> 00:33:37,780 this imagining. And the imagination can be a very, very powerful force and barrier, as we know. So 427 00:33:37,780 --> 00:33:46,480 So I know that I will join Rita and join her community in the defense of that river if the power company comes. 428 00:33:47,320 --> 00:33:53,680 There's a quote you have in the book, and I'm not sure who you were quoting, but I sort of love this, where the person said, 429 00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:59,620 the river is like a person in between who makes connections in time and space. 430 00:33:59,620 --> 00:34:08,520 Oh, yeah. That's Lydia, Lydia Mastikosho Paradis, who is Rita's niece, another member of the Inuit community. 431 00:34:08,520 --> 00:34:35,700 Yeah. I mean, so what that evoked for me is, I mean, the river is movement and, you know, and life is movement. And I mean, in some sense, we're constantly moving between past and present and that, you know, in both the literal sense, I mean, the physical sense of what the natural world does, but also in the, as you would put it, in our imaginations too. I mean, that's how we construct our own lives is we also move between past and present. 432 00:34:35,700 --> 00:34:43,760 yeah yeah rivers relate um that that's what they do they tell and they join and the metaphor of 433 00:34:43,760 --> 00:34:51,260 river as life life as river is is the oldest i think the second oldest is probably life as path 434 00:34:51,260 --> 00:34:56,880 but life as river is is is about the oldest and and i think one of the things that happened to 435 00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:03,140 me over the years of river travel and river thinking is that i i came to understand myself 436 00:35:03,140 --> 00:35:11,700 as always in the flow that time was not something i spectated notebook in hand dry footed on the 437 00:35:11,700 --> 00:35:17,240 bank which is perhaps how one especially when a little younger you think that time has no 438 00:35:17,240 --> 00:35:25,020 no claim on you right and i'm pushing 50 now and my my bones are older they get colder the river 439 00:35:25,020 --> 00:35:26,920 The river beat me up hard. 440 00:35:27,600 --> 00:35:32,580 And, yeah, I think time has changed forever for me now. 441 00:35:33,080 --> 00:35:33,860 It's been rivered. 442 00:35:34,720 --> 00:35:36,040 One final question. 443 00:35:36,820 --> 00:35:41,500 You've been talking about kind of the emergence of this rights of nature movement. 444 00:35:41,600 --> 00:35:44,960 I mean, it's really trying to make this a legal movement. 445 00:35:45,520 --> 00:35:48,240 Are we still in the early stages of this movement? 446 00:35:48,740 --> 00:35:50,700 Or, I mean, do you think there's more to happen? 447 00:35:50,840 --> 00:35:53,480 Will more countries take on this kind of legislation? 448 00:35:54,060 --> 00:35:58,720 Oh, I mean, every year we see more and more examples of this. 449 00:35:58,840 --> 00:36:00,460 The momentum is growing. 450 00:36:00,800 --> 00:36:02,340 The ubiquity is growing. 451 00:36:02,340 --> 00:36:12,480 Here in England, we've just had the first district council champion the charter, a charter for the rights of the River Ouse in the south of England, all across North America. 452 00:36:12,600 --> 00:36:15,500 I mean, North America is an absolute ferment of this stuff. 453 00:36:15,600 --> 00:36:16,980 It's really, really interesting. 454 00:36:16,980 --> 00:36:26,380 So, yeah, I think what we are seeing are necessary challenges to fundamentally anthropocentric ways of organizing the planet. 455 00:36:26,760 --> 00:36:30,080 And they have brought us to the brink of disaster. 456 00:36:30,640 --> 00:36:38,340 And the book is a love letter to rivers, but it's also a celebration of people who are trying to imagine otherwise. 457 00:36:39,280 --> 00:36:43,200 It is a beautiful book. Thank you, Rob. Thank you for this conversation. 458 00:36:43,960 --> 00:36:45,540 Thanks, Steve. Thanks so much. 459 00:36:46,300 --> 00:36:50,200 That's Robert Macfarlane speaking to us from his home in Cambridge, England. 460 00:36:50,660 --> 00:36:52,960 His book is called Is a River Alive? 461 00:36:53,580 --> 00:36:57,480 Wonder Cabinet is produced in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont. 462 00:36:57,980 --> 00:36:59,860 Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher. 463 00:37:00,180 --> 00:37:02,020 Our digital producer is Mark Riechers. 464 00:37:02,400 --> 00:37:03,380 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 465 00:37:03,720 --> 00:37:04,640 And I'm Steve Paulson. 466 00:37:04,960 --> 00:37:06,520 We would love to hear from you. 467 00:37:06,700 --> 00:37:12,000 Send your questions and comments and sign up for our newsletter at wondercabinetproductions.com. 468 00:37:12,000 --> 00:37:15,760 You can subscribe to the show there or wherever you get your podcasts. 469 00:37:16,280 --> 00:37:17,520 And a quick word about what's ahead. 470 00:37:17,940 --> 00:37:20,780 Wonder Cabinet will take a short break for the next couple of weeks 471 00:37:20,780 --> 00:37:25,440 so we can go record more interviews at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Italy. 472 00:37:25,680 --> 00:37:29,440 The topic this time is rational mysticism, which sounds very exciting. 473 00:37:29,860 --> 00:37:32,720 So you can look forward to those conversations in the coming months. 474 00:37:32,940 --> 00:37:35,180 Until then, be well and thanks for listening.