When Nature Co-Authors a Song
A song emerged around a campfire in the high forest of Equador where melodies of “echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil” were crucial to the composition. In what would be a first, the co-authors have filed to make the Los Cedros cloud forest a moral author of the song. One of the co-authors, Robert Macfarlane, said: “It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest. This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.”
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