Robert Macfarlane
The George Link Jr. Environmental Awareness LectureThe bestselling nature writer will discuss rivers, rights and his recent book "Is a River Alive?"
From the Elwha to the Klamath: on the lives, deaths and rights of rivers
A contemporary de-damming movement is sweeping Europe and the United States. Last year 542 dams were removed across 23 European countries, and 100 dams came down across 30 US states, reconnecting 4900 miles of waterway: more than in any previous year in history. New Hampshire is part of this shift, with dams coming down on the Cocheco, the Piscataquog and the Merrimack, among others. The de-damming movement has accelerated in tandem with, and often in partnership with, the Rights of Nature movement, which argues for a categorical shift in perception and treatment (legal, structural and cultural-imaginative) of ecosystems from resource to relative, object to fellow subject and use value to intrinsic value –– and proposes recognizing rivers always-already as the bearers of fundamental rights.
This 2026 George Link Jr Environmental Awareness Lecture by the British writer Robert Macfarlane will explore what flows from the recognition of rivers as having lives, deaths and rights. By means of story and reportage as well as history, it will trace some of the complex, contested histories of de-damming and river-rights movements, from the Elwha and Klamath rivers in the Pacific Northwest, the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River) in Nitassinan (north-east Québec), the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, and the resurgent 'river-guardianship' movement in England. It will also argue for the vital roles of storytelling, music and art (or what Arne Naess called 'beautiful acts') in inspiring river-activism and, by extension, wider global currents of change.
Programmed in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology and Department of Environmental Studies. Please also join us for the screening of Underland on Oct 4 in the Loew Auditorium.
photo by Mark Beech
Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, won prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works and films, including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.
He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, and their re-imagining of the field guide, The Book of Birds. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and a Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
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