Imagine being in the remote mountains of northern Ecuador in a cloud forest in the dark of night with a fungus expert, a fabled musician, an activist Colombian lawyer and a celebrated nature writer. All of you turn off your flashlights and see that the trees, stumps and fallen branches glow with a “yellow-silver brightness that comes from deep inside the object it illuminates.” This is the rare sight of living mycelial light made by kilometres of fungal hyphae woven through the wood like a lustrous stream.

So begins the first of three quests on which Robert Macfarlane takes the reader in his latest book, Is a River Alive? Macfarlane, the celebrated writer in the scene above, has spent a storied career putting........

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