Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Dying So Give Them Rights

29:03And that was when I understood that this cloud forest, Los Cedros, the cedar forest, had been saved from destruction by gold mining interests, imminent destruction and total sort of deep open pit gold mining, total destruction, by a ruling handed down by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court in late 2021, which drew upon the articles in the Ecuadorian constitution that recognized the rights of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist in its vital cycles. And those were inserted into the constitution in 2008 when it underwent radical reform, what I call moral reimagination under the then young government of Rafael Correa, who was elected in 2007.

29:49Those articles went into the constitution. They gained constitutional force and purchase and leverage. They were hardly used. And then in this remarkable ruling in 21, they were used as the foundation of a judgment that caused the mining companies to quit the area and make good the small amounts of damage they'd been able to do. Wow. Someone standing up to mining companies. That takes guts. It takes constitutional basis in this case. And that takes moral imagination. And that takes a philosophical heritage. And I now realize I don't know very much about Ecuadorian history. What's the sort of, if you like, the animating spirit or the kind of the intellectual or metaphysical spiritual tradition, which says let's put rights into nature, into a constitution?

30:34Well, I think before it speaks of rights, it speaks of life and it speaks of nature as alive. And here we move away from the rationalist, as it were, instrumentalist philosophical inheritance of the Western Enlightenment, which is nature as resource, which eventually ends up with water as liquid asset to be sweated and then stripped. And here instead we have river as animating, scintillating, life-giving force and presence and being. And cloud forest, forest as a river maker, river as a forest maker. The living world understood as a web, not as a pinnacle upon which humans are aloofly poised. And to have that recognition of what we might call ecological holism or interconnectedness, central to the constitutional imagination of what nature is, and making the state the guarantor of that recognition.

31:31That is remarkable. When you said a moment ago that we saw nature as a resource and you said that with a sort of implying it was a bad way of looking at things, this idea that nature is there essentially for human extraction. Do you think that that's the kind of idea that underpins a lot of our environmental problems and ecological degradation? Well, it's not either or. We can't function without nature as resource. I mean, the machines of governance that we have built have a predilection to view the living world only as resource. Rivers are fragile and miraculous and rare things. 0.002 % of the world's water flows in rivers.

32:20So wherever they are, they are rare. And yet we've built civilizations on them. Well, they have built our civilization. I'm always looking at ways that we can recognize the agency of rivers and reimagine because what I sometimes call our kind of grammar of deanimation, our grammar, it's the world, it resources the world, it objectifies the world, it materializes it, it strips it often of life and of power. But there's a beautiful line by Barry McCovey, who is the head Yurok fisheries manager for the Klamath River, which flows out of Oregon into California. And there, as you probably know, they've just completed the biggest de-damming project in American history.

33:08Half a billion pound worth projects taken down four dams that have been there for the best part of 100 years from the earliest. and the speed of recovery of the river has been absolutely astonishing and salmon, in fact Pacific salmon such as the one on my label have begun to find their way back up a salmon river that had been blocked to them and Barry McCovey, I was fascinated when I heard this he said the river is healing itself and the idea of the river as the active agent there it's not all human stewards have bestowed healing upon have healed the river is healing itself rivers will heal themselves very actively if we if we give them a chance i think we assume passivity on the part of the natural world when actually what we should be doing is very often giving it greater agency so because of how that mic is situated i can't see this symbol on your lapel and now i know you've got a yellow salmon yep what's that about for people watching this on the iplayer robert why are you sporting that What is that assertion of?

34:11In a very non-purposeful way, it happened to be the last pin badge that was pinned onto my lapel when I was in North America. But I looked at it this morning and I thought, should I take it off? And I thought, no, I'll leave it on. The salmon's there. That's a Pacific salmon. And I was in North America recently speaking a lot about rivers and a lot indeed about the Trump administration's frontal and stealthy assault on the Clean Water Act and on water. What is that assault? I don't know very much about it. Oh, well, almost all of the big executive orders, including the first one, the energy emergency order, have taken aim at federal protections for clean water.

34:58and if a water is designated as an American water it enjoys certain strong federal protections under the Clean Water Act which was a Nixon era initiative and I've come reluctantly and surprisingly to think that Richard Nixon was probably the great environmental president of the post-war era. A lot of people have come to that view. Well Endangered Species Act the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and I think the Clean Water Act all happened under Nixon's watch. And in fact, the founding of the EPA came back because a river caught fire in Cleveland, in Ohio. A river caught fire because it was so polluted.

35:43And this was so shocking to people. It's a hard concept. It's a hard concept. What do you need, right? What do you do? Call the fire brigade? Exactly. Pump water out of the river to put the river out. How does a river catch fire? Oil, basically oil, slicks, just unregulated, just dumping. And that's the Cuyahoga River, I think it is, in Cleveland, Ohio. So you had this conversation with your son on the way home from school, say to your nine-year-old boy, Will, who's really annoyed his siblings by having this wonderful book, essentially named after his answer to a question, is a river alive? And then you go on this journey.

36:18Yeah. Now, it's a provocative question. There's two questions really, but one is, is a river alive? And the secondary element to that question, subsidiary, if you like, is should a river have rights? Yeah. Being the Don that you are and the teacher that you are. You are a Don, aren't you? Well, a teacher. Let's go with teacher. I do not walk around saying John McCarlin isn't that. Don, the godfather, Don Corleone. That's what we used to call you. Being the teacher that you are, if you were to entertain for a moment the argument that a river is not alive in a conventional sense, if you were to answer no because, What would you say?

36:58Because it's H2O plus gravity. I mean, if I inhabit the thought experiment that it is not alive, it contains life, but it is not itself alive. It's not a body, a corpus with a brain. It doesn't share the seven aspects. Exactly, Mrs. Gren. Mrs. Gren. The primary score team. See if you can do it. Come on. Movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. Very impressive. Wow, that's the memory. A mole's committed memory. His energy and his memory are very good. That was my biology teacher at the start of year seven. Goodness me. Anyway, but a river does have those things, but it contains lots of living things in it.

37:42But to contain and house and home living things is not the same as to be alive. What do you make of that argument? Well, what it asks us to do is to think about what we mean by life and what is alive. and what living is and aliveness is. And that is where we recognize that we inhabit a specific philosophical worldview, the we here, which says the river is not alive, in which life is attributed to the body, to the substance, instead of life being seen as something that is lived in relation, that is lived at the interface, that comes into being through the interaction of life forces. And that is a much more familiar so-called relational ontology, a relational way of imagining what it is to be, being as a verb, that is much more familiar from non-rationalist, non -enlightenment traditions.

38:36So when we understand that we exist within a perceptual regime of rationalism, a cognitive empire, if you like, then a radical move is to think, well, what does it look like from outside that? How do we imagine otherwise? And to me, what is one of the many things that is fascinating about the rights movement, the river rights movement, as it begins to wash up on these shores, and perhaps we can touch on some of the ways in which it is, is that it is an attempt to imagine otherwise. It's what's sometimes called prefigurative politics. So how you build the future within the shell of the old. It reminds me of the now ironic phrase that politics is downstream of culture.

39:20Quite literally. Ironic in the sense that culture is meeting what has been released by... Exactly, exactly. But the stream being, in this case, rivers that are absolutely reduced to nothing, and in some cases around the world on fire. But I'm very harmed here. I mean, I didn't actually, I don't know how I missed that catchphrase, that politics is downstream of culture. Yes, I do believe it is, or at least that the convection currents that join politics and culture are very dynamic and very active. Change the culture first, shift the Overton window, whatever you want to say, but change the culture.

39:53Do things that change how people think and feel. Exactly. And then ask them to go. So how do we imagine rivers? What does it mean? And that's the aim of the book, isn't it? Reimagining. It is, but it's also the aim of this conversation. And the book is the book. We don't even need to return to that. What is central here are the rivers, the people, the ideas and the future. And so thinking, so here are some radical ideas for you about how we change, how we imagine rivers. I'll start with very basic stuff. Let's you and me go and get a blue tin of paint from a hardware store. and then let's paint on the pavement and the asphalt of London the buried and lost and forgotten rivers that flow south into the Thames and north into the Thames.

40:45The Fleet, the Mosul, the quaggy south of the river. London is a city built on rivers. Peter Ackroyd's biography of London, which is one of my favourite books, it alerted me to something I had no idea about, which is that London is just literally a bed of rivers, these snaking arteries. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. And they're forgotten. They're invisible. Hidden rivers are forgotten rivers. Forgotten rivers are mistreated rivers. So let's surface the rivers we can't see with beautiful snaking riverine blue paint. So every time we cross a river, we understand that that river is part of what it means to live in a city.

41:19Where we can, we should daylight rivers. Daylighting is where rivers are restored literally to the surface of cities. So that's just happened, a stretch of it, it's happened in Sheffield. Right in the centre, the river Sheaf has been daylighted beautifully right near the castle. People are coming, they're peering in. They're like, I didn't know a river was there. The river is beginning to move differently, more animatedly in its bed. We need to twin every primary school with a river in this country, with its local river. We need children to know what I sometimes call the watershed test. So what is the river that flows past you?

41:56Where does it come from and where does it flow to? I'll give an example of that. The river that flows near me is the Cam, of course. It rises or has one of its sources at Nine Wells Wood, very close to where I live. That flows as Vickersbrook joins the Cam. Cam joins the River Great Oos and the River Great Oos meets the sea at the wash. That is the watershed. We all live in a watershed, even in Cambridge, which is so flat. I'm so ashamed. I don't know. I don't know. Well, yours is pretty easy. yours is the Thames meets the North Sea yeah but there's the River Lee oh yeah the Lee which is in East London which is daylighted in lots and lots of parts and of course the Lee I used to live in a place called Leyton Stone which is the town from Leyton the town built in the River Lee London's second river and it was in this Lee Valley the Lee Valley very industrial grimy Lee and it's where the Olympics took place where the Olympics and where very recently and I won't give the exact location an otter was seen yes an otter in the Lower Lee what?

42:56Hackney Marsh's area, let's just say that. Really? Isn't that amazing? Wow. Such a sign of hope. Such a sign of hope. And again, give rivers a chance. Give the living world a chance. It will pour back. Can I give you, I think, from Peter Ackroyd's biography of London, which is all about rivers, is I think true. If this is, I mean, Lewis can cut this out, but I think he's going to leave it in because I think it's true. One of my favourite etymologies, which is the etymology of the gutter press. Okay. So I worked in newspapers for a long time after I'd finished that wonderful dissertation that you took through.

43:30London City built on rivers. London's second river was the River Fleet, which runs from Gospel Oak, Farringdon down. Almost entirely underground. Almost entirely underground. And in, I'm going to make up the century here. Let's say in the 14th, 15th and 16th century, when the wealthier tenements of West London were being built, they needed to get clean water west from the River Fleet. and so they needed the healing stream of the Holborn. And the Holborn, or Hoban, took clean water west from the River Fleet, which meant that when the presses were set up on the River Fleet, they were set up on a water that had been deprived of its clean water and therefore it was like a gutter, hence gutter press.

44:08Brilliant. If it's not true, it is now. I will check that. Do you know what? I'm going to give myself sort of 85 % chance of that being accurate. I'm pretty sure I remember that from Peter Ackroyd's book and it's brilliant. It shows how our language, our inheritance is built on rivers, even the ones that are underground that we've forgotten about. Exactly. And I think this question of access to rivers, and here is where rivers begin to, in the many ways that they do, ramify out into much broader political context conversations about the ways we relate to and live with the living world. I try not to use the word environment.

44:42In fact, I think that's the first time we've used it possibly in a whole conversation. I find it chilly. I find it externalizing. I find it endorses a kind of separatism where we are humans and the environment is that which is kind of around us, backdrop, wallpaper. The living world. So rivers that are hidden are rivers that are forgotten. Rivers that are forgotten are rivers that are mistreated. I came across an extraordinary architectural detail on the River Irwell in Manchester the other day. I was with somebody who explained to me. They said, you see how this bridge is built, it's a pedestrian bridge, built just so high that you can't see over the edge of it.

45:15And that was an 18th century architectural addition to that particular bridge because the river was deemed to be so polluted and so ugly that pedestrians shouldn't be able to see it. So they built an extra layer on the bridge so that we couldn't see the river. And of course, then the river goes unseen, the pollution gets worse and so on and so forth. But access. In England and Wales, these are two of the countries in the world where it is hardest to get to a riverbank. because of the nature of access in this country and also because of rights of what's called statutory navigation. So very few rivers have fully recognized rights of statutory navigation.

45:55That's where you have access to the channel. And many rivers have highly restricted bankside access because a lot of private land banks onto rivers and private owners become the riparian, the riverbank controllers. So many, many rivers we can't get to. We can't see, we can't meet. The rivers that we can, like the Wai, the Heon Wai, you can get right up close. It has a statutory right of navigation of longstanding and it has lots of customary bankside access as well as rights of way bankside access. That's a stricken river, desperately stricken in terms of ecological health. The Wai is? Oh, yeah.

46:36What's happened to the Wai? Oh, the Wai is dying. I mean, it's so sick. It's become, in a way, the poster child of river sickness in this country, but also, as I'll explain, the poster child of resistance.

47:11find old episodes that way too. So if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert every time we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Right, back to Rivers with Robert McFarlane.

47:29If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

48:11People who do kind of have this reimagining of rivers, you do think about them as, you've talked about them being sick, you've talked about rivers remembering. If they do feel this connection or spiritual affinity or non-spiritual affinity to rivers and they want to do something, what could they learn from the people along the banks of the wire? Oh, wow, amazing stuff. Well, organisation, first of all, I mentioned earlier. Citizen Science. Citizen Science, up and down the length of the river. So people are, you know, testing kits are starting to become cheaper and cheaper and people are beginning to organise on that front.

48:41So E. coli testing, phosphate testing, nitrate testing, that's starting to happen. What do you do? You get a kit, what do you get from anywhere? You can get a kit. You can get a little tab in the river and it comes up, trumps and then you. It's a little bit more complicated, a little bit more expensive than that, but it's basically the principle. and these new young agile groups like River Action, they have a whole sort of page of what's called the River Rescue Kit where they're trying to empower communities where you can find out about the law, about campaigning, about how pollution works, about how testing works.

49:15So this organisation is happening, which is a kind of emergent citizen property. It's a movement, yeah. Yeah, it's a movement. The best phrase I've come up with for it is the River Guardian movement. And this action is born of passion. Without connection, there is no protection. And it is that connection that people feel, both the love and then this something like grief that they feel when they see the stricken why. As I think, you know, when you next go to Hay-on-Wye, get someone to take you down to the river. It might be in better health. I believe that in this country, within 20 years, we are going to have seen a remarkable turnaround in our rivers.

50:00And I believe that not because of the Cunliffe Review. I believe it because change is coming from the water up, from the bank side up. And that is how consequential and durable change is made. So I had, I think, one of the, is it the Henley Mermaids, who is one of the swimmer pressure groups from the Thames, said that the Cunliffe Review was brought into being by women in bathing suits. And I thought, brilliant. And yes, at some level, that is absolutely right. So there's imaginative work going on to change the ways we imagine water from a private asset to really an extension of public space. And I just have one more thing to swimmable cities.

50:45You probably know Sadiq Khan, after his re-election, has vowed to make the Thames swimmable as permanent public swimming spaces within the Thames by 2034, which I absolutely applaud the Seine. It takes some inspiration for Paris, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And Rotterdam has just seen the first swimmable cities sort of symposium. And Rotterdam had some mucky water. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. I don't know where that's got to in London well I think just starting 2034 gives some wriggle room there, the Thames is going to take a lot of cleaning to get to that point my old spot in Chiswick Thames village, that would be a lovely place to do it and people do the upper Thames let's say were you opposite the Io then the island that was in the middle there, the long thin torpedo yes, quite near there, I don't think I knew what it was when I was four years old but I think I was near there.

51:43Yeah, there is a bit of an island. Yes, yes, it was there. Yes, it was the island. My mum was talking about that the other day. That's right. Yeah, an old word for island. But you must have been aware of the tidal nature of the Thames. It's amazing. It's a huge, huge change. That sense of these vast movements that are bigger than you, it's quite good for a kid to get exposed to. The earth breathing. But what you're talking about with the Y is a social, if you like, civic movement. It's got a kind of flavour of citizen resistance. But there is a broader global movement, which is this rights movement you're talking about.

52:12And you'll be extremely familiar with, in fact, you grapple with it in public and have done, not least in the book, the arguments against granting rights to phenomena, let's use that word, that aren't able to articulate their own view of that rights. Now, we already do that with children sometimes. We do that with people who have extreme disability. But the argument against the extension of rights from humans to non-human species to rivers is, A, it doesn't really make sense to talk of rights without talking about a system by which you uphold that rights and the phenomena given those rights can defend themselves.

52:53And B, that you somehow degrade the very idea of rights if you take it away from human beings who invented it. What would you say to those objections? Yeah, I think they're very good objections. And I think that as a movement like this comes into being, it's always testing itself. And that process of kind of erosion or wearing away is a very, very necessary one. And it is. So what would I say? First of all, that we are seeing places in the world. So again, this is not imagining otherwise in terms of a fantasy of a future, but something that is already operational elsewhere. So in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the Whanganui River was recognized as a spiritual and physical entity.

53:40Maybe entity is a better word than phenomena. Entity, not phenomena. With rights and with legal personhood, which is to say the right to have standing in court and indeed to bring suit in court. Really? Yeah. So this river, how do you pronounce it? Because it's spelled with a W, isn't it? There are various pronunciations and the best fit that I have is Whanganui. So it makes sense, it sort of naturally follows that if this entity has rights, this entity can take legal action if those rights are violated. I mean, it would require, maybe AIs could do the work for it, but it would require defence in court.

54:20Okay, so legal personhood has been attributed to rivers. And it's not just New Zealand, is it? No. So, for example, I was looking the other day at this amazing, the Birirung or the Yarra River in Victoria. Do you know the river? No, I've heard of the Yarra. Yeah, yeah, the Yarra. So, again, in 2017, same year as the Te Aote Pua, the Fonganui Act was passed in the Aotearoa New Zealand Parliament. Amazingly, and actually it's very under-discussed, I think, the example of the Yarra and the Birirung, the same river, different languages, was recognised, again, as a legal person. and specifically in this case as a living being.

54:57And I think the way the question of who speaks for the river, which was the first, as it were, objection or question that you had for this, is got around is that a body of river guardians, and that is the word that tends to be used in the legislation, is appointed. And so really what we're seeing there is a devolution of governance away from the highest levels of top-down governance or indeed corporate governance, which is what we have in this country where in effect we have a series of regional monopolies. So capitalism isn't even working in its competitive ways within water as it's currently structured because they are regional monopolies with a supine regulator, which makes them extremely attractive to vulture capital from elsewhere.

55:42But so River Guardians, and I think this is one of the things that the Cunliffe Review, one of the bright spots in the Cunliffe Review is the wish to, for example, appoint public health officials to the new super regulator. That seems like a really, really... So beginning to diversify and devolve the guardianship bodies who do their best to speak for the river. And even that idea that when we do something about or with or to rivers, we consult stakeholders all over the place. We never consult the river. Systems don't even think to consult the river because what would that mean? Who can speak river?

56:19Who speaks for the river? How could we possibly know what the river wants? It's not enough just to abrogate that idea. It needs formalizing and it's beginning to creep in in really interesting ways. And this is where we come back to prefigurative politics and building the future within the shell of the old into district and district council level politics in this country. So back to the River Y. The River Y Nutrient Management Board, which sounds incredibly boring, is actually really important because it governs the kinds of things we were talking about earlier, nitrate, phosphate intake, has appointed someone to be the voice of the river, a vote-bearing presence on the board for two years.

57:02So it's an experimental role and it says you must do your absolute best to speak for what the river wants. And that sounds a small thing, but it's a highly disruptive thing because rivers don't speak within. It's radical. It is radical. It is radical. We've just seen the Lewis District Council agree to champion a charter of rights for the river ooze after years of very careful community consultation, again, growing from the bank up, from the water up. And already that recognition is just starting to impinge upon ways in which local planning is undertaken. So we're just starting to see a rising tide of, yes, very radical change under the sign of rights, but really it's under the sign of relation.

57:46It means what it means to live with rivers and to be allowed to live by rivers. So a reciprocal relationship in which humans and rivers are subjects together flowing into a shared future. Why? You said a moment ago, and it's a nice note on which to end. You said you were hopeful that in 20 years there would be a proper kind of resurgence, that rivers in this country would be in a healthier state and place than they are now. Other than this wonderful citizen group on the banks of the Y, what have you seen? Oh, they're just one. I mean, they're one of thousands. They're one of millions of people.

58:25What I mean is that... In the UK? Oh, yeah, in the UK, in England, in Wales, increasingly in Scotland. So we're seeing change. Guardians. Guardians, we're seeing that change come, as I say, for example, at District County, starting to rise like water up through structures of governance, but also in the ways communities and societies organize themselves. So the reason I'm hopeful for 20 years hence is because the current, the flow of change is so powerful now among people. And we will see that declare itself in power, in the way its water is imagined and governed, and then in a living, revived river system.

59:08And I just want to end, Amol, by just telling you about a river called the Gnar. the Gnar is a Norfolk river it's a chalk stream very globally rare ecosystem and once a year I step into the Gnar and I use it as a path because rivers are paths we talked about that earlier but they're paths for for walkers as well as for boats and and I walk upstream in the Gnar and I feel it pressing against my legs. I feel the chill of it. I see the clarity of it. And that river has been revived by the work of the Norfolk Rivers Trust, River Healers, River Docks, Charles Rangeley Wilson among them. It has come back from a very fractured and parlous state.

59:52And almost every time I go, I see the holy, what would it be? The quadrinity, the holy quadrinity of the chalk I see a kingfisher, I see a wild brown trout, I see a pike, and I see ranunculus, which is a really good indicator species among the chalk stream flora. And I step there back into the past of rivers in this country, but I also step into the future of rivers in this country. And that is part of the geography of hope. the geography of hope lies all around us and so many people now are seeing it and working to realize that as the future when you think back to 2004 that happy moment that i walked into your into your room you'd just written mountain to the mind i think in 2003 yeah that's right it won pretty much every prize in the english-speaking world sold a tremendous number of copies and It's very, very popular.

1:00:52Do you feel that in the last 20 years, as you've written about the natural world, that there's been a rising sense of, I mean, you sound hopeful and optimistic, but also a rising sense of urgency. I don't know if it's to do with watching your kids grow up or something, but do you feel that it's sort of, I'm not going to do that trite thing of saying, you know, is the academic becoming an activist, though I just did. It's more, do you feel this sense of, we've got to act? I have certainly moved in the course of Mansions of the Mind to this book is a river alive from something like beauty to something like urgency but wonder has remained a constant absolutely um the other thing i would say is is i absolutely believe and that despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline we people like me have no right to despair and hope is a discipline because it takes both the dreaming and the working to realize it and i've seen that happening all around the world particularly focused around rivers it's happening in england now it's happening in the united kingdom now so despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline and as my friend rebecca solnit says just because we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything or that anything is not worth saving dr robert mcfarlane I hope it's not 21 years until we're next in a room and you're teaching me to think about things differently.

1:02:19It's such a pleasure and a privilege to speak to you. It really is. Thank you so much for coming in. I absolutely loved it, Amal. So nice to see you again. What was it you said about me in 2008? Energetic and committed. I think you've lived up to your report.

1:02:35Okay, that was an incredible experience because obviously being sat opposite Robert McFarlane, I was transported back to his room 20 odd years ago where he was teaching me about very different subjects. He is someone who wears his learning very, very lightly, speaks with tremendous fluency and erudition and passion. And I've got to say, not to make it sound too trite, I really felt like that conversation flowed a bit like a river. There were upstream moments, there were downstream moments. There was a wonderful fluidity about it. And we just didn't stop. We just didn't stop for the past hour. And that was, you know, that's what the best rivers do.

1:03:13I think some of the things he said that I was very surprised to discover include that stat about 0.02 % of all the water on Earth. Of course, water is 70 % or so of the Earth. The fact that only 0.02 % is accounted for by rivers. And yet it's those rivers that have given us the great civilizations that we see across the Earth. That is truly astonishing. And I think it was nice to hear him say that there is a kind of civic resistance movement around the country, the big society in action, if you like, which goes alongside the political and philosophical movement towards river guardianship and rights.

1:03:52So those are two very different things. And I increasingly think that actually when we talk to people on the Today programme about rivers, we should hear from, as we just have, people who are actively engaged in trying to make those rivers healthier just because they care about them and feel an affinity for them, which is certainly what I felt when I dunked my head into the Ganges a few months ago. So thank you so much to all of you who have sent us your radical ideas, your great suggestions about guests we should have on or your thoughts about the conversations you've been hearing. We are, I should say, on social media and through our inbox getting the most fantastic engagement from you guys.

1:04:27And it suggests that this podcast is going really well. So thank you. We don't take that lightly. Please do keep your suggestions coming in, including voice notes like this one from Peter. Hello, Amol. Just a quick voice note. With regard to your radical program, it's thoroughly interesting. The episodes you've created so far have been fascinating. But I'm contacting you with a suggestion. Dame Stephanie Shirley. She really started the IT industry as we know it today by creating a company specifically designed in the 50s to allow women who were otherwise unable to work because employment laws then were so different, but women with children to work from home and to earn a decent wage.

1:05:24Late in life, she's got to the point where she decided all the wealth that she created, she was going to give away. But even that she's done in a radical way. that is a wonderful suggestion I'm going to put it to the wonderful pod squad on the other side of the glass we'll discuss it at our weekly conflab and I think we'll put Dame Stephanie Shirley into the mix it's worth saying I mean what you've just described is undoubtedly someone who's a pioneer but it sounds Peter like what you're saying is she's been a pioneer twice so a pioneer in terms of women and the chance to get some recognition and pay for domestic work going back to the 1950s when as Brenda Hale who was on this podcast a few weeks ago was saying that was not the norm.

1:06:07But then to be a pioneer in philanthropy towards the end of her life, it sounds like, would suggest that she's doubly interesting, if not more so. So thank you very, very much indeed for that, Peter. We'll definitely put that into the mix. Here is another voice note from Anoushka. Hi, Amal. I think it would be great if you could do something on the desperate struggle to get post-adoption support for families and kids. Again, it all comes down to the idea of supporting kids who have experienced significant trauma and giving them the opportunity to be able to access education and develop healthy and positive relationships.

1:06:41In terms of radical thinkers on this issue, there is Terry Galloway, who is single-handedly going around councils in England, persuading them to make being care experienced a protected characteristic. There's Sarah Naish, who is the guru of therapeutic parenting. Author Lem Cizze is care experienced himself and, of course, the Timpson family. I believe that as a society we have a duty to make sure that those who have suffered childhood trauma in this way are given the early support they desperately need to enable them to thrive just as other children have the opportunity to do. It simply shouldn't be such an impossible battle to get this help.

1:07:21Thank you and I'm really enjoying your podcasts. Anoushka, what a fantastic voice note. Thank you so much. So let me, I've got a big thing about honesty, right? I'm trying to be as honest as possible with you guys. So let me say, I've taken a very close interest in the whole emergence of protected characteristics in British legislation over the last 15 years, because one of the things I looked at a few years ago in a few TV documentaries was how that legislation emerged and whether or not you could make class, i.e. socioeconomic background, a protected characteristic. I hadn't come across, I'm ashamed to say, and I'm saying it in the spirit of honesty, this idea which you just put out there, Anushka, of care experience being a protected characteristic.

1:08:02I'm going to go away and look at that today, including some of the names you mentioned, not least Terry Galloway, I think it was, Lems to Say, whose work I know a bit, and the Timson family who are quite remarkable. I think there's a couple of others there. I'll listen back and make sure I've got that. just on your point about childhood trauma for those of you who haven't heard back we did an episode with Steve Chalk Steve Chalk is a remarkable man a Christian who has been involved in working with very very troubled and often criminal young people for decades now he spoke very very movingly and I know that affected a lot of you about damaged children thank you for all of your brilliant podcasts there's a Freudian slip thank you for all of your brilliant voice notes your messages, your emails.

1:08:43We really love getting them and love getting all of the feedback you guys have come up with. So thank you. WhatsApp us on 0330 123 9480. 0330 123 9480 or email radical at bbc.co.uk and we'll do our utmost, not only to listen to and engage with all of your suggestions, but to genuinely incorporate them into our thinking and turn this as much as possible into a proper community of radicals. Well, that is it for this episode. Hope you really enjoyed that conversation with Robert McFarlane. What a guy. What an interesting bloke. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds.

1:09:30And remember, you can, if you can't get enough of us in your ears, which I know is a hard thing to get your head around, you can watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer And I could just tell you, quite a few people are doing exactly that. And I'm not just talking about me and my family. Right, speak to you next week. Bye.

1:10:10of alternative methods. Paloma's brothers say there's more to the story. They say her decision was influenced by the views of their mum, Kate Gemrani, a vocal British conspiracy theorist who shares misinformation about cancer online, a version of events which she disputes. Join me as I try to find out what happened and what Paloma's case tells us about the mainstreaming of anti-medicine ideas. Listen on BBC Sounds. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.

1:10:53It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.