{"id":34772,"date":"2018-06-05T06:59:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T11:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34772"},"modified":"2018-06-05T06:59:22","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T11:59:22","slug":"robert-macfarlane-the-metaphors-we-use-deliver-us-hope-or-they-foreclose-possibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34772","title":{"rendered":"Robert Macfarlane: \u201cthe metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Robert Macfarlane: \u201cthe metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

They say you should never meet your heroes.\u00a0 They\u2019re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including \u2018Mountains of the Mind\u2019, \u2018The Old Ways\u2019, \u2018Landmarks\u2019 and, most recently, \u2018The Lost Words\u2019.\u00a0 I have admired Robert\u2019s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep alive, in our minds and our culture, a whole library of words which help us better articulate our place in, and relationship with, the natural world.\u00a0 As well as being a writer, Robert teaches at Cambridge about language and landscape.\u00a0 As he told me, \u201cthe convergences of those two things, along with social justice and environmental justice, are the things I\u2019ve written most about\u201d.<\/p>\n

Robert is one of the most fascinating people to follow on Twitter, and he had recently tweeted a\u00a0quote by Rebecca Solnit where she said, \u201cthe destruction of the Earth is due in part to a failure of the imagination, or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can\u2019t count what matters.\u201d\u00a0 So, I started by asking him how he would assess the state of health of our collective imagination in 2018? [Robert made a few changes to the transcript of our discussion, so you will find the transcript below more accurate, but we know how you love podcasts, so we\u2019ll share the original audio too].<\/p>\n