I’ve mentioned before here the US environmental magazine Orion. It’s dedicated to  what its editor, Jennifer Sahn, calls “the most fundamental of all relationships – the relationship between us and the rest of nature”. Sahn was joined recently by Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit for a discussion of  nature writing and how it’s evolving. It’s a conversation that will be of interest to all those who enjoy reading as much as they enjoy travel — all readers of Deskbound Traveller, in other words.

Macfarlane is a familiar name to British readers, Solnit perhaps less so, though she’s a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. If you’ve not read her work before, try her tremendous piece on the “post-American landscape” of  Detroit,  written for Harper’s Magazine before the city filed for bankruptcy.

The cover of the current print issue of Orion is a photograph of an artwork by Martin Hill, a sculptor who borrows his materials from nature. If you’ve got a spare seven-and-a-half minutes, treat yourself to the video of how he and Philippa Jones created their “Watershed Project”.