Underland is a profound journey into the mirror world of the lifeless

An emotional and mental voyage into an underground legendary world imagined by the Sami folks reveals truths about our collective future

By Fred Pearce

LANDSCAPE essayist Robert Macfarlane has gone subterranean along with his newest guide, digging deep to know our planet’s previous and future and, he guarantees, to plumb the very depths of the human coronary heart.

In Underland, he travels the world in quest of “deep time” in deep locations. That is mythology as a lot as geology, anthropology as a lot as climatology. He goes not underground or to the underworld, however to the underland, a legendary world of the Sami folks of Scandinavia, a …