★《三千分之一的森林》書迷不容錯過

Could stone – the final, most inanimate object in the natural world – really be alive?

Living Stone by Dr Nicholas Carter is a fascinating, perspective-shifting journey into the surprising vital, complex, and extraordinary world of stone. Carter is a lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Oxford and an expert on stone lichens, particularly their relationship to the physical environment, which led him on this quest to determine that if lichens are alive, could stone itself be too.

Rooted in his pioneering scientific research, Carter takes us on a globe-spanning adventure to some of the most admired UNESCO heritage sites in the world - from the beautiful limestone city of Dubrovnik and the ruined complexes of the Hampi Temples in India, to the Neolithic settlements in Orkney and the grand building blocks of Oxford’s Blenheim Palace.

Weaving in the stories and experiences of scholars, artists, craftspeople, and communities around the world, we learn how different cultures and communities understand stone. Most recently, Carter has been in northern Italy doing research on the Piave River, and seeking out its living stones among the dry riverbed in a place called Le Grave. A lost community of stone gatherers known as the cariòti viewed the stones as living and domestic and used to collect and name them, assigning them to families in a unique form of European animism.

But as the waters dried up the cariòti disappeared and have been absent form Le Grave and the Piave for over 70 years now. In collaboration with an anthropologist at the University of Florence, Carter has located where the stone gatherers lived and has found the stones. In addition, he has discovered some new lichen communities growing on them too; adding an ecological dimension to what is a fascinating anthropological story that will frame a chapter in the book.

Carter’s work promises to be a mesmerizing blend of science and nature writing and will be packaged to sit next to Robert Macfarlane’s Is A River Alive? And Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Nicholas Carter is a biogeomorphologist and lecturer at the University of Oxford. In 2025, he was made a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London in acknowledgement of his work on stone lichens, bio-protection, and nature-based solutions. Carter’s writing has appeared in numerous scientific journals, in the media, on major heritage organization’s websites and on stage. He has been awarded Oxford University’s Environment Prize, the Marcus Sedgwick Inspire Writing Prize and in 2025 he was the runner-up for the inaugural Conversation Writing Prize.