Robert Macfarlane to challenge humanity’s ‘superiority complex’ in the 2026 BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures

At a time of ecological crisis, extreme weather events and a rapidly heating climate, Robert Macfarlane’s Reith Lectures will examine what is in his view one of the most consequential stories humans tell themselves: that our species stands above and apart from the rest of nature.

Throughout the series, titled The Human Superiority Complex, Macfarlane will argue that this belief has become deeply rooted in Western thought, and has helped bring the planet to the brink of catastrophe.

Drawing on inspiring examples from around the world, the four lectures will also highlight the scientists, artists, activists, lawmakers and communities who are challenging this worldview and opening the possibility of different, more just futures for life on Earth.

One of our most influential writers on landscape, language and the living world, Macfarlane brings more than two decades of acclaimed work to the lectures. A bestselling author, his books have reached readers around the world, while his collaborations across art, film, music and performance connect ideas from literature, science, culture and public life.

Each lecture will take one of the four classical elements as its focus:

• The first lecture, Earth: The Ladder and the Web, traces the rise and consolidation of the ‘human superiority complex’ –– the belief we are perched atop a ladder of life, rather than entangled in a web –– beginning with one of the earliest works of world literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh.
• The second lecture, Air: The Great Thinning, uses birds to examine some of the consequences of human exceptionalism, and shows how recent scientific breakthroughs are disclosing the superpowers of other life-forms, thereby challenging the paradigm of our uniqueness.
• The third lecture, Fire: Deep-Time Thinking, argues for ‘deep-time’ perspectives in both our politics and our story-telling, such that we can become better ancestors to future generations.
• The final lecture, Water: The Geography of Hope, takes rivers and water as its focus, exploring some of the extraordinary ways in which law and democratic structures are being radically re-imagined in order to give voices, votes and even rights to rivers, oceans, whales and mountains.

Robert Macfarlane says “It feels both a great honour and a big responsibility to be this year’s Reith Lecturer, at a time when what is at stake in our relations with the larger living world is nothing less than everything. In my view, the solutions to the crisis we find ourselves in lie in imagination as well as legislation; in stories as well as science. I want these lectures to be urgent, hopeful, vivid and surprising; I hope they will spark debate, touch hearts and open minds.”

Mohit Bakaya, Radio 4 Controller, says: “Few writers have done more than Robert Macfarlane to transform the way we think about nature and our place within it. At a time when humanity’s relationship with the living world has never been more consequential, he will bring urgency, imagination and hope to one of the defining questions of our age. These Reith Lectures promise to challenge assumptions, provoke debate and inspire audiences around the world.”

The 2026 lectures will be recorded in front of live audiences in London, Bangor, Aberdeen and Amsterdam. They will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service later this year and will be available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Audiences can apply for free tickets to the recordings from late September, via the BBC website.

About The Reith Lectures

The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation's first director-general.

John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.

The very first Reith lecturer was the philosopher, Bertrand Russell who spoke on 'Authority and the Individual'. Among his successors were Robert Oppenheimer (Science and the Common Understanding, 1953) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1966). The Reith Lectures have also been delivered by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks (The Persistence of Faith, 1990), Onora O’Neill (A Question of Trust, 2002), Daniel Barenboim (In The Beginning Was Sound, 2006) and Michael Sandel (A New Citizenship, 2009). Most recently the Reith Lecturers have been Stephen Hawking (Black Holes, 2016), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Mistaken Identities, 2016), Hilary Mantel (Resurrection: The Art And Craft, 2017), Margaret MacMillan (The Mark of Cain, 2018), Jonathan Sumption (Law and the Decline of Politics, 2019), Mark Carney (How We Get What We Value 2020), Stuart Russell (Living With Artificial Intelligence 2021), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rowan Williams, Darren McGarvey, Fiona Hill (The Four Freedoms 2022), Ben Ansell (Our Democratic Future 2023), Gwen Adshead (Four Questions About Violence 2024), Rutger Bregman (Moral Revolution 2025).

The full archive of Reith lectures is available on the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures page.

About Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane’s books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, Landmarks, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness and, most recently, Is a River Alive? His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. With the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, as well as The Book of Birds.

He has written albums and songs with musicians including Johnny Flynn, Cosmo Sheldrake, Hayden Thorpe and Julie Fowlis, and collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

RB2

Follow For More