I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t captured by nature. Growing up in coastal Devon, UK, I loved immersing myself, sometimes literally, in the landscapes and nature of my surroundings. It was inevitable I would become a biologist, and I think also inevitable that I would be drawn to the field of ecology, the study of the relationships that exist within nature. I have expanded my horizons over the past decade or so, developing a deep love for the landscapes and nature of southern Africa, but the rockpools and lanes of Devon are never far away.
I am a biologist and I have a passion, a deep love indeed, of the natural world. I always have. It boosts me and nurtures me–body, mind and spirit. But at the moment, with everything that is happening to the world, I think it is easy to lose hope.
Feral is everything you would expect from Monbiot–elegant prose and well thought out ideas building on solid knowledge. But it is more than that. It is a book that brings hope and makes me feel that, even if Monbiot’s vision isn’t the way, there most certainly is a way through the mess we are creating.
Positivity, action, hope–these are things we need more of right now.
To be an environmentalist early in the twenty-first century is always to be defending, arguing, acknowledging the hurdles we face in our efforts to protect wild places and fight climate change. But let’s be honest: hedging has never inspired anyone.
So what if we stopped hedging? What if we grounded our efforts to solve environmental problems in hope instead, and let nature make our case for us? That’s what George Monbiot does in Feral, a lyrical, unabashedly romantic vision of how, by inviting nature back into our lives, we can simultaneously cure our “ecological boredom” and begin repairing centuries of…
I have loved insects and other wildlife for all of my life. I am now a professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, UK, specializing in bee ecology. I have published more than 400 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects, plus seven books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers A Sting in the Tale (2013), The Garden Jungle (2019), and Silent Earth (2021). They’ve been translated into 20 languages and sold over half a million copies. I also founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity that has grown to 12,000 members.
EO Wilson died just a few weeks ago, at the age of 92. It was a sad day for me, as he has always been one of my great heroes. “E.O.” was a fantastic scientist, a world authority on ants, and sometimes known as the “father of biodiversity”. In this book, he argues that we have no right to drive millions of species extinct and that our own future depends upon setting aside half the Earth for nature.
History is not a prerogative of the human species, Edward O. Wilson declares in Half-Earth. Demonstrating that we blindly ignore the histories of millions of other species, Wilson warns us that a point of no return is imminent. Refusing to believe that our extinction is predetermined, Wilson has written Half-Earth as a cri de coeur, proposing that the only solution to our impending "Sixth Extinction" is to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the earth. Half-Earth is a resounding conclusion to the best-selling trilogy begun by the "splendid" (Financial Times) The Social Conquest of Earth…
I have loved insects and other wildlife for all of my life. I am now a professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, UK, specializing in bee ecology. I have published more than 400 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects, plus seven books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers A Sting in the Tale (2013), The Garden Jungle (2019), and Silent Earth (2021). They’ve been translated into 20 languages and sold over half a million copies. I also founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006, a charity that has grown to 12,000 members.
Vicki is a fellow insect enthusiast, so perhaps it is inevitable that I would love her new book on the wonders of the ‘bug’ world. Insects are vital, pollinating crops and wildflowers, keeping soils healthy, recycling leaves, dung and dead bodies, and controlling crop pests. Love them or loathe them, we all need them. This book gives lots of practical tips as to what you can do to encourage bugs in your space.
This is a lovely little book that could and should have a big impact....Let's all get rebugging right away! Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Meet the intelligent insects, marvellous minibeasts and inspirational invertebrates that bring life to our planet. Discover how we can 'rebug' our attitudes and embrace these brilliant, essential insects, so that we can avoid an 'insectageddon' and help each other thrive.
In Rebugging the Planet, Vicki Hird shows us that bugs are beautiful, inventive
and economically invaluable. They are also responsible for pollinating plants,
feeding birds, defending crops and cleaning water systems. But with 40% of…
I am an award-winning author of picture books and early readers. I have set my stories in many kinds of locations, including a haunted house, an Eastern European shtetl, an English Renaissance village, and a working cattle ranch. ForWake Up, City, I turned to the setting I know best, the city. I drew on memories of walking to kindergarten in early morning Brooklyn. This book is my love song to cities everywhere. As a lifelong city dweller, I worry about the impact of urban spread on the planet, but I feel hopeful, too, because many cities are becoming more nature and wildlife-friendly. The books I'm excited to share celebrate city wildlife.
A unique and artful blend of poetry, science, and activism, this picture book shows how city dwellers can intervene so that nature can work her magic.
In Oslo, Norway: citizens create a honeybee highway that stretches from one side of the city to the other, offering flowerpots, resting spots, bee boxes, and beehives—even water fountains—every eight hundred feet.
In the Bronx, New York: a community rallies to clean their river and cheers at the return of the long-lost beaver population.
In Busselton, Australia: people make a rope bridge that swings high above speeding cars, creating a safe path for tree-hopping possums and squirrels alike.
Through a mix of lyrical poems, real-life success stories, and bouquet-bright artwork, The City Sings Green explores the environmental impact of humans and showcases the many ways that we can rewild cities across the globe. Together, we can welcome nature back!
The City Sings Green & Other Poems About Welcoming Wildlife
A unique and artful blend of poetry, science, and activism, this picture book shows how city dwellers can intervene so that nature can work her magic. Perfect for fans of The Curious Garden and Harlem Grown.
In Oslo, Norway: citizens create a honey-bee highway that stretches from one side of the city to the other, offering flowerpots, resting spots, bee boxes and beehives-even water fountains-every 800 feet.
In the Bronx, New York: a community rallies to clean their river and cheers at the return of the long-lost beaver population.
In Busselton, Australia: people make a rope bridge that swings high…
Evolution’s Rainbowmade me happy and excited because I write about sexuality and gender in my books. In a time when the LGBTQ+ community is being attacked, especially by criminalizing transgender people, this scientifically based book by a trans woman is a cause for celebration.
She presents numerous compelling examples from nature demonstrating that homosexuality and gender diversity/mutability are not uncommon. In later parts of the book, Roughgarden examines the various genetic and physiological origins of transgenderism in humans and the existence of homosexuality and gender variation across human cultures and eras.
I learned a great deal from this book. It’s a book that every politician and judicial officer should read.
In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science - and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary…
I am an architect, academic, and author, who is passionate about sustainable design. At London Metropolitan University I conduct design research on urban rewilding, and teach sustainable design to architecture and interior design students. I founded the Rewild My Street campaign, which aims to inspire and empower city residents to reverse biodiversity decline by transforming their homes, gardens, and streets for wildlife. My work combines my expertise in sustainable design; architectural-practice experience in housing, building conservation, and urban regeneration; and passion for wildlife. I am driven by designing and helping others design sustainable, biodiverse buildings, and cities.
Many books now address designing low-energy buildings to mitigate climate change, but few focus on designing buildings to benefit wildlife. Given the global biodiversity crisis and modern buildings’ lack of accidental gaps to shelter birds, bats, and insects, more guidance on safely incorporating wildlife habitat within buildings and outdoor spaces is crucial. This was one of the inspirations behind my urban-rewilding campaign, Rewild My Street.
The creation of highly insulated and sealed buildings, necessitated by the shift towards designing and building low-carbon buildings, has had a negative effect on biodiversity. The potential niches for biodiversity such as spaces in open roof voids, generous overhangs and cracks and crevices that can be home for a wide range of birds, bats, insects and plants, are now being designed out through the desire to develop airtight buildings.
The first edition of this book showed how you can make provision for building-reliant species when designing new low or zero carbon buildings. This second edition remains true to that need…
My areas of expertise are museum management and arts administration. More specifically, I study structures of arts organizations and how they are connected or disconnected to their communities and larger societies using the systems theory and concept of mutual causality. In the process, I point out where the systems (i.e., museums) become stagnant and find a leverage point to address that stagnation by bringing in new input and different ways of thinking about the culture and structure of the organization. In most of my research, I try to find blindspots of following or doing “what was just there (i.e., status quo)” instead of evaluating what it did and how it can be improved.
This is a book that got me thinking about how biodiversity is so important in the ecosystem and that includes people and societies we created. We try to separate ourselves from “nature” but this very thinking creates wicked issues. Capra argues that in order to solve the most pressing issues of our society, our way of life must reflect that of nature, leading to an ecologically sustainable future. It helps people think about their positioning and relationships to nature and how interconnected we all are. The value system and hierarchical thinking of humans above nature can be rethought, especially helpful in the times of climate change and subsequent social issues.
A fierce attack on globalism - and a manifesto for change - by one of the world's leading scientific writers.
Recent scientific discoveries indicate that all life - from the most primitive cells, up to human societies, corporations and nation-states, even the global economy - is organised along the same basic patterns and principles: those of the network.
However, the new global economy differs in important aspects from the networks of life: whereas everything in a living network has a function, globalism ignores all that cannot give it an immediate profit, creating great armies of the excluded. The global financial…
Inheritors of the Earth is the best book on biodiversity and conservation I’ve read. That’s because Chris Thomas takes a balanced approach to the survival of the world’s species. He finds reasons for optimism, without ignoring the serious challenges ahead.
Why do I love this book? I discovered it on Shepherd.com and soon found it provided invaluable background for my novel in progress.
But most of all Chris’s writing is so engaging, passionate, and funny. His hands-on research has taken him to far corners of the world and, while his currency is scientific, his views are grounded in a philosophy that humanity is part of nature, and that changes in the environment are both inevitable and not necessarily bad.
THE TIMES, ECONOMIST AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017
It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. Yet what if this narrative obscures a more hopeful truth?
In Inheritors of the Earth, renowned ecologist and environmentalist Chris D. Thomas overturns the accepted story, revealing how nature is fighting back.
Many animals and plants actually benefit from our presence, raising biological diversity in most parts of the world and increasing the rate at which new species are formed, perhaps to the highest level in Earth's history. From Costa Rican tropical forests to the thoroughly…
I’ve always been interested in the natural world. I grew up seeing the birds, raccoons, and deer that lived in the woods near my home in Western Pennsylvania. But over the years I began watching smaller things more carefully: tiny creatures with many legs—or no legs at all! I learned that even though earthworms are blind they can sense light. I realized that among “identical” ants, some behaved differently. I found out that if I was gentle, honeybees didn’t mind being petted. Even if we think they’re icky, we owe these tiny creatures our understanding and compassion.
I admire this lovely book for making a scientific concept both clear and inspiring to young readers.
Manyexplains that we are surrounded all the time by many thousands of kinds of living things. Each one depends on others in a big, beautiful, complicated pattern—a pattern that also makes the world suitable for us. But in too many places we humans are breaking that pattern, and animals and plants are going extinct... Repeated readings will reveal new animals and plants in the colorful illustrations teeming with living things both familiar and exotic.
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After magnifying the beauty of unseen organisms in Tiny Creatures, Nicola Davies and Emily Sutton turn their talents to the vast variety of life on Earth.
The more we study the world around us, the more living things we discover every day. The planet is full of millions of species of plants, birds, animals, and microbes, and every single one — including us — is part of a big, beautiful, complicated pattern. When humans interfere with parts of the pattern, by polluting the air and oceans, taking too much from the sea, and cutting down too many forests, animals and…
As a science journalist I have concentrated on the consequences of climate change. It´s the most frightening as fascinating experiment, we conduct with our planet. In 2018 I wrote a book on extreme weather together with climate scientist Freddy Otto from the University of Oxford (Angry Weather). After this I got immersed in a different climate consequence: How it is affecting biodiversity and with it the foundation of our societies. But what I also love is good storytelling. I quickly get bored with texts that have no dramaturgy or that don't give the reader any pleasure—unlike the fantastic and highly relevant books on this list.
From one day to another nature seems to have gone mad. Even more: The species on the Earth seem to have conspired against humanity—after being decimated and clobbered by us humans. Like a last-ditch counterattack to ensure survival.
I read this thriller while starting to write my book. And it was exciting—not only because Frank Schätzing—a German fiction author—is a master of suspense. But because what he describes is not so far away from what I describe in my nonfiction (!) book: The epic journey of species toward the poles and up the mountains—with all its consequences for the civilized world as well as our irrational handling of it. Schätzing's fictional story is based on a solid ground of facts. But there is another reason, why The Swarm does not seem too absurd: It´s because climate change is altering life on earth in a way that itself seems like a…
Frank Schatzing's amazing novel is a publishing phenomenon with translation rights sold around the world, drawing rave reviews for both pulsating suspense and great scientific knowledge.
The world begins to suffer an escalating and sensational series of natural disasters, and two marine biologists begin to develop a theory that the cause lies in the oceans, where an entity know as the Yrr has developed a massive network of single-cell organisms. It is wreaking havoc in order to prevent humankind from destroying the earth's ecological balance forever.
The Americans, under the ruthless General Judith Lee, take a more pragmatic approach than…
I am a Geography professor at DePaul University with a long-standing obsession with the world, comparing puddle shapes to countries as a small child and subsequently initiating map and flag collections that I cultivate to this day. Having lived in different parts of the UK and the USA, as well as being fortunate enough to travel further afield, I’ve relished the opportunity to explore widely and chat with the people who know their places best. I love books that alter how I look at the planet, and I am particularly intrigued by the subtle ways in which people have shaped our world—and our perceptions of it—both intentionally and inadvertently.
Even prior to reading this book, I casually considered Alexander von Humboldt to be one of my geographical heroes, a workaholic as addicted to adventure as he was obsessed with advancing our understanding of the planet.
However, Wulf’s book opened my eyes not only to the sheer extent of his contributions to how we view the world, from human-induced climate change to the development of increasingly accurate and informative maps and diagrams but also to his cultural and political significance, influencing politicians and inspiring poets to continue fashioning and representing the planet as they see fit.
In placing the founder of ecology and modern environmentalism centre-stage, this engaging biography extols Humboldt’s revolutionary understanding of how the natural and human worlds are interconnected and helps us appreciate how our relationship with the planet can be scientific and emotional simultaneously.
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016
'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson
'Dazzling' Literary Review
'Brilliant' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist
'A superb biography' The Economist
'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.
