The BBVA Foundation honors Robert Macfarlane for giving global currency to a re-imagining of nature that recognizes the rights of entities such as rivers, mountains and forests

His work, which also encompasses film and music, has translated scientific knowledge into compelling narratives that explore concepts like “deep time,” and the associated need to extend our moral responsibilities forward in time with a long-term geological and ecological perspective, so we become “good ancestors” to future generations.

The jury also hailed his outreach endeavors to recoup “the lost vocabularies of landscape” through a series of educational books focused on nature literacy: educating society in an understanding and love of nature, and thereby fostering a commitment to protect all forms of life at a time of climate emergency and biodiversity breakdown.

The BBVA Foundation Biophilia Award, funded with 100,000 euros, distinguishes contributions from the realms of the humanities, social sciences and communication that help reframe humankind’s relationship with nature. Its aim is to recognize narratives and interpretations which, while being reliant on or compatible with environmental science knowledge, contribute from these disciplines to shaping the perspectives, conceptual frameworks and values of society as a whole with regard to the environment.

The award has now been incorporated into the wider family of the BBVA Foundation Biodiversity Awards, which as of this 21st edition consists of seven rather than four categories, with a total prize fund of 1,300,000 euros. Established in 2004, the goal of the awards is to recognize individuals and organizations capable of translating scientific research findings into actions that yield relevant and measurable results of lasting impact.

The name of the award alludes to the “biophilia hypothesis” proposed by naturalist Edward O. Wilson, 2010 Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Ecology and Conservation Biology, to denote the deep connection that we as humans instinctively feel with nature and all forms of life.

The rights of nature and the legal personhood of rivers, mountains and forests

“The Western tradition has framed the larger living world as object. It has framed it typically as a property to be owned, or a service provider to be managed. And there are necessary virtues to that approach, but it fundamentally disenfranchises the wider web of life from its correct status as subject. The legal movement to recognize the legal personhood, and the rights and even the votes of nature, broadly understood, is a disruption to that status quo; the epistemological status quo that sees nature as an object to be owned or to be managed.” Macfarlane (Oxford, 1976) sums up thus one of his work’s central messages, laid out in his 2025 book Is a River Alive?

Based on a five-year research project involving field studies with communities and associations around the world fighting to defend nature, the book looks at how this social movement is reinventing and reshaping our relationship with the natural world by according legal personhood to entities such as rivers: “The question deep down is how we imagine more than human life, and where we draw the boundary between life and not life, the justiciable and the non justiciable and between what are and are not rights-bearing presences. Of course, the twenty-first-century rights of nature movement is merely giving legal expression to ideas and practices that have been central and self-evident to Indigenous communities for thousands of years.”

The writer himself cites Spain’s Mar Menor as an illustrative example. In 2022 a citizen-led movement achieved a ruling that made the lagoon Europe’s first ecosystem to be recognized as possessing legal personhood, such that any individual or organization can act on its behalf before the courts of law. This recognition Macfarlane describes as “a real landmark in modern law and the politics of the modern human.”

The book was a bestseller in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and its international success has inspired similar actions by groups advocating for nature rights in other countries, as Macfarlane points out: “It has, for instance, led directly to the formal adoption by local government of a Charter of Rights for the pollution-ravaged River Wye – the fourth biggest river in the UK. And it has also become a force and focus in the ongoing protection of the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, whose rights to exist, thrive and flourish were recognized in a landmark 2021 Rights of Nature ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court.

The Professor of Environmental Humanities talks of how recognizing the legal personhood of entities like rivers goes a step beyond the demands of animal rights groups. Such entities may not be sentient beings like humans, with the capacity to feel pain, but they are vital components of the Earth’s web of life and, as such, deserving of protection: “This is not an anthropomorphic attempt to recognize that which is human in a river and then reward it with rights or personhood. Rather, the first step is recognizing the absolute alterity of rivers, how radically different they are to us, while at the same time re-imagining, reframing and recognizing them more accurately as life forces, and not as resources. I find that exciting, because it challenges the conventional, rationalist frames that are so embedded in Western thought as to become naturalized and invisibilized.”

Macfarlane has taken his work in this field beyond the literary genre as the screenwriter of River, a 2022 film on the protection of the Earth’s rivers narrated by the actor Willem Dafoe which won two Australian Academy Awards; and also as librettist of The World Tree, a choral work about the interweaving of human and arboreal life across 10,000 years, performed by the Grammy-Award winning Helsinki Chamber Choir.

Awareness of “deep time” and an ethics of responsibility toward future generations

Another of Macfarlane’s contributions remarked on by the Biophilia jury is his analysis of “deep time,” the subject of his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). This 500-page essay, which draws on the research done by geologists, climatologists and mycologists, explores the chronology of Earth history: the dizzying expanses of geological time that stretch away from the present into both past and future. “Deep time,” explains Macfarlane, “is measured in units that humble the human instant – epochs and aeons, not minutes and years – and it is kept by rock, ice, stalactites and sediments.”

In Underland’s pages, human existence becomes part of an ecological web that extends millions of years into the past and millions into the future, “compelling us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us,” its author reflects. It challenges us to become “good ancestors” for later generations not just of humans but of all the living beings with whom we share the planet.

For Macfarlane, “to be a good ancestor is harder than being a good parent or grandparent, for it means extending our moral horizon temporally, as well as spatially, to include the wellbeing and right to a healthy environment of those as yet unborn. And that is hard moral work. In certain Indigenous communities this is sometimes known as seven generation thinking. In Europe, it has been called cathedral thinking, because the builders of the first cathedrals knew that they would not live to see the completion of the project. So it is a moral challenge to extend the horizon of responsibility forwards, recognizing that while we are the inheritors of a legacy of life, we are also legacy leavers, the ancestors of generations to come.”

At the core of the book – translated into over 20 languages and likewise an international bestseller – is the message that today’s world of climate emergency and biodiversity crisis requires individuals, organizations and governments to embed “an ethics of deep-time responsibility at the heart of their ways of being and doing.” Also adapted for the big screen, with Macfarlane as co-writer and executive producer, Underland the film had its premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

“Nature literacy” to recover the “lost vocabularies of landscape”

Finally, the Biophilia Award recognized Macfarlane’s work in education, focused on promoting “nature literacy” among both children and adults through a revival of “the lost vocabularies of landscape.”

“The literacy of everyday nature,” Macfarlane laments, “is slipping from our common wealth, our shared knowledge. Online culture and screen time have soared, access to green and blue space has diminished, and what writer and environmentalist Richard Louv christened ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ has patently increased.”

The awardee’s interest in this subject was sparked by a study published in Science in 2022, in which Cambridge researchers documented children’s inability to name even common examples of everyday wildlife, and pointed to evidence linking loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it.

Macfarlane relates how for over a decade he has sought to reduce this deficit by “reforming early-years education in respect of nature literacy, and providing a vibrant new-old lexis for the living world.”

In 2015 his book Landmarks arguing for the revival of a richer nature literacy rose to become the number one bestseller in the UK. He followed this up with 2017’s The Lost Words, co-created with artist Jackie Morris: a collection of poetry and art which set out to re-teach twenty common nature words – from ‘acorn’ to ‘willow’ – to children and adults alike. Along with its sister publication The Lost Spells (2020), the book has now sold more than 650,000 copies worldwide.

“All this is part of a cumulative project to find ways to replenish and recover an everyday literacy of nature,” Macfarlane explains. “I am particularly pleased that they have been successfully embedded in the UK education system, particularly at primary school level, and have also gained widespread recognition in North America and Europe.”

Despite the scale and complexity of the environmental crisis, Macfarlane is hopeful about our species’ ability to recognize what is at stake, and believes that the environmental humanities can and should play a central role in moving things forward: “Right now, the challenge is to tell stories and to do work that causes everyday people, tired everyday people, to fall back into love with this extraordinary earth on which we live and then to commit to its defence. And that is the work that will then translate into politics.”

Academic bio sketch

Robert Macfarlane holds a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree in English literature from the University of Cambridge and currently occupies the first and only chair in Environmental Humanities at the British university. His work has helped shape the course of this field of study as it has developed in the United Kingdom and other countries over the past few decades. In 2025, he was appointed to the Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Environment at the University of Oslo, a distinction awarded annually to an internationally renowned scholar, leader or activist. In addition, he has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Aberdeen, Sheffield Hallam, and Gloucestershire, as well as an honorary fellowship from Pembroke College, Cambridge.

About the BBVA Foundation Biodiversity Program

For more than two decades now, nature conservation has been a priority focus area for the BBVA Foundation, with efforts centering on three key areas: scientific research to expand understanding of the natural environment, direct actions on the ground pursuing its increased protection, and the building of social awareness around the importance of the challenge. This concern for the defense of the environment finds expression in the BBVA Foundation Biodiversity Program, encompassing Biodiversity Awards and the full suite of the Foundation’s activities to further the preservation of all forms of life with which we share the planet.

As part of the program, in addition to the Biodiversity Awards, the Foundation annually presents the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Climate Change and Environmental Sciences, positioning this research area on an equal footing with other scientific and artistic disciplines like basic sciences, biology and biomedicine, information and communication technologies, and music. Additionally, since 2001, the BBVA Foundation has supported research projects in the environmental sciences, especially ecology and biodiversity conservation, through its Fundamentos Program, Prisms & Problems Program, and Leonardo Grants for Scientific Research and Cultural Creation. The strategic reach of the BBVA Foundation Biodiversity Program accordingly extends across all the main resources to address the environmental crisis, from scientific research – including the humanities and social sciences – to actions in nature conservation and the raising of social awareness on the scale of the challenges ahead.

The jury

The judging panel in this edition was chaired by Mathias Thaler, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom). Remaining members were: Peter Alagona, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (United States); Irus Braverman, Distinguished Professor and Dr. Teresa A. Miller Professor of Law at the State University of New York, SUNY; Heather Houser, Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp (Belgium); Adeline Johns-Putra, Professor of English Literature at Queen’s University (Canada); and Mercedes Pardo, Professor of Sociology at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain).