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Robert McFarlane has this lyrical, meditative writing style that helps him convey his deep engagement with the natural world.

He's written about mountains and forests and caves and root systems, and his books are chronicles of his journeys to these places.

And often he's working through a question.

Now, this latest question is the title of his new book. Is a River Alive? It's about three rivers in a cloud forest in Ecuador, in southeast India, and in the deep wilderness of Quebec. But he begins the book and that question at a chalk stream not far from his house in Cambridge, England.

A river is born twice.

One of those births is always ongoing.

That is the spring that feeds the river that seeks the sea, and that's a continuous process.

But there's a second birth, and that's the singular birth that a river has in time.

Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born.

In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk and flows away.

I lived a mile from this little spring, the waters of which run through the pages of my life. And I at some point just realized,

I want to know when that river was born, the one-off birth, the deep-time birth. And so I began

following the threads back. This spring water fell first as snow. It settled, melted, seeped slow through the bedrock, then surfaced here as a spring, a sleepless flutter of silver movement, rippling the pool it has made with whispers and mutters.

Between 10 and 12,000 years ago, Cambridge was in the grip of permafrost.

So the river was born when the temperature raised enough that rain or snow melting, falling,

could begin to seat down into the rock and could fill the aquifer, could charge the earth as groundwater,

and eventually build up the pressure necessary to emerge as a spring.

Spring becomes stream, becomes river, and all three seek the sea.

And so that spring has been flowing more or less continuously for the best part of 12,000 years.

And I suddenly realized that when you center water in a landscape, flowing water, you realize what a powerful historical agent it has been.

We know that hunter gatherers were drawn there to cook and to nap flints. The Neolithic causeway was built there. A huge Iron Age

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