A while back, we were properly moved by Michael McCarthy’s masterful Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo. The book arrived at a time when the three of us behind Caught By The River started to bring in things into the site from outside our usual comfort zones, at a point where we started to run a good deal of ‘natural activism’ as it were. Back then, we asked McCarthy – the Independent’s environment editor – to read for us from the book at our first ever London event at the Purcell Rooms on the South Bank, a talk that proved both inspiring and more than a little terrifying (read the book if you’re in any doubt as to why that would be). If you’re interested in the natural world – and if you’ve made it to this site you probably are – there’s a whole bunch of McCarthy’s exemplary pieces archived over on The Indepenent’s website – click here to read. Always impassioned, his writing never fails to get the green bit of the old grey matter properly working. Worth bookmarking.

Robin