we’re talking about the best books written on “global conservation” in the last year, all shortlisted for the 2021 wainwright prize. could you start by telling me a bit about what that means? Does it refer to the conservation of our environment? what does it cover?
I think it’s deliberately wide. yes, it is conservation of the environment or conservation of something more particular. suggests that it’s not ‘here are some pretty boring and improved books you should read!’ I really hope people see that the books on the short list are actually good reads on a really important topic, rather than lectures designed to make you feel even more depressed about the state of the world.
You are reading: Best books on conservation
I guess 10 years ago, I might have thought of conservation as a niche topic for someone who is focusing on that. but now, it is very important and vital that we all understand these issues. I looked at last year’s short list and this year’s short list. these are all fantastic, informative and interesting books that we need to read.
I’m glad you say that because I’m worried people will think, “oh god, this sounds like hard work.” yes, it is a serious matter. and yes, there are points in these books where you will feel desperate. but there are also points in all these books where you will feel hopeful and feel like you can do something. they are fundamentally good books.
Let’s go through the books individually and you can tell me what you liked about each of them. the first is by david attenborough, and it’s called life on our planet. it is a witness statement, a kind of memory and a vision for the future. his general opinion, I guess, is that it’s all pretty catastrophic, but can we still save the world?
yes, exactly. he’s really powerful, in part because he starts out as a child. the first part is about when he was 11 and by the end of the book he’s 94. my own dad is 90, so i’m aware, in a really visceral sense, of everything they’ve seen in their lives. when I talk to my dad, sometimes it’s like a history lesson and you can’t believe he was there for that. you get the same feeling with this book with sir david attenborough. he just writes so well and so clearly about what he was and what he is.
so the second part of the book is “that’s the problem”. those are my memories. This is the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and this is what we can do about it.” so, in the end, it’s a hopeful book.
I must say that the book is written with another person, jonnie hughes. sorry for jonnie hughes because it’s from sir david attenborough. we should mention johnnie because sir david says, “look, i didn’t do this on my own.”
I often look at amazon reviews because they can give me an idea of what a variety of people are saying about a book. one of them wrote about a life on our planet, “everyone on this planet should read this book”, so it obviously hit them pretty hard.
Yes, this book is really accessible. it is very readable. i think its because both sir david and johnnie write tv scripts. a television script is quite sparse compared to writing a novel or a book, you have far fewer words. it really benefits from that because it’s readable and clear. I liked it a lot.
The next of the conservation books on the 2021 Wainwright Prize shortlist is a bit more specific in its approach. this is life entangled: how fungi create our worlds, change our minds & shaping our future, by british biologist merlin sheldrake. that’s quite a statement.
this is an amazing book. it opened up a whole new world that I knew nothing about. well i knew a little because some farmers talk about fungal roots under the soil but i didn’t know enough. It’s really interesting. it’s a complex subject and he navigates through it deftly. the book is quite accessible, i would say, and totally absorbing.
and the general theme is that mushrooms aren’t just mushrooms we could have for dinner, they are much, much broader and absolutely vital to all sorts of things?
See Also: The Best & Most Useful Dry Curing Meat Books I have Read | Eat Cured Meat
There’s a whole thing called the “wood wide web”. the illustrations in the book are beautiful and there’s a fantastic diagram of a tree and it has all these roots that go down and have a symbiotic relationship with these fungal things. I’m really simplifying this: if merlin reads this, he will have a seizure, but basically, the fungi and the roots of the tree have a symbiotic relationship and then ‘communicate’ with other trees.
so yes, there is more to mushrooms than you ever thought possible.
let’s move on to the other book on the short list which is also very focused. this is fathoms by rebecca giggs, which is about whales.
this is beautifully written, really elegant. It is a disturbing book, I would say. It made me think a lot about whales in a way that I hadn’t before. it is convincing. there is a lot of information and it is quite dense in parts, but it is clearly expressed.
“we have talked a lot and we have not done much”
Some of the things you read are shocking, others are absolutely fascinating. there is a world in the stomach of a whale: they found pots and all kinds of things. again, a bit like Tangled Life, it’s about the interconnectedness of things. the book talks about a whale fall, which is when a whale dies and falls to the bottom of the sea, and the process of that, but also about all the other things that happen that depend on that whale being there and dying. it’s about the interconnections in nature that you don’t really think about. if they are broken, then we have to think about them because we have broken something.
And you’re looking at all aspects of the whales?
yes, from hunting them, to where they are now, eating them and not eating them. it’s amazing.
let’s move on to the next book, islands of abandonment, about places like chernobyl that humans have left behind. This is from author and journalist Cal Flyn, who is also our deputy editor.
This is very well written, it’s poetic. she takes us to a variety of places that, frankly, we’ve dirty and then abandoned, or just abandoned. so, chernobyl, where we screwed it up and then ran away; Detroit, where the economy crashed, and there’s just all these empty properties; Scottish slag heaps, ‘bings’ they call them, and are made from ‘blaes’, which are small pieces of shale gravel; a Scottish island from which the last inhabitants left in 1974, leaving behind their cattle.
then plots a graph of what happened next, how nature recovers and copes and in some cases invents something else, something that will withstand radiation, for example. she won’t let us go. there is no suggestion that “it’s okay, whatever we do, nature will survive.” you realize that it is very bad, but it is a beautiful book.
let’s go to net zero: how we stop causing climate change. this is from an economist, dieter helm. I noticed that last year he also had a practical book on climate change. what is this about?
The book is a kind of “here’s the problem, this is how we got into this mess and here’s professor dieter helm’s idea of how we get out of it”. we’re getting to cop26 and he pretty much downplays all the international efforts we’ve made so far and says “this is what the uk could go on and do”.
At this time, we do not count the true cost of contamination. the person or company that created it does not pay for it. We are also not correctly counting the amount of emissions we create on the high seas, which is pertinent at a time of free trade agreements. we say, ‘okay. we are not raising chickens (or whatever), we are importing them. we can rule out all those emissions because they occur in australia. his point is, ‘yes, but they only happen because of us, so we should count them.’ I am not an economist, but it is very readable and very clear, and quite angry. he is not happy. there’s a real sense of ‘argh!’ throughout.
See Also: 20 Press Release Examples to Draw Inspiration From in 2022
Do you feel personally empowered after reading the book, ‘I’m going to do this, this and that,’ or are you more at the level of what our governments should do?
It’s more at the policy level and the big picture. there’s a whole set of takeaways and it talks about having to go electric and the electric future, for example. certainly there are things you can do. he will not accept any nonsense; I don’t think he has much time for ‘wait, I just need to…’ he’d say, ‘no! you don’t just have to get down to work.”
We’re not in the final book on the list of the best conservation books of 2021. This is Under White Skies by environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her previous book, The Sixth Extinction. what is it about?
under a white sky has to do with our attempt to control nature and then repair the impact of what we have done. it’s a book about how to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems, as someone said quite clearly. it’s really fascinating. it’s the law of unintended consequences: ‘we have a problem with this. so we’ll dam it and divert the river like this’ and then, ‘oh wait, all these weird fish are dying because we’ve stolen their water.’ and then we create a completely fake place for them to live to survive. there’s a really nice part, when it’s in the valley of death in the united states. she stays in las vegas that night, at the hotel with the eiffel tower outside, paris las vegas. and she’s like, ‘i’m in my fake french room, and i’m looking at the fake eiffel tower.’ she could go to the fake French bar. maybe that’s how those fish feel. they’re in this completely fake environment, to try to keep them alive because we were doing something else and messed up their real habitat.”
is there a part about coral reefs?
there is, with a british academic who was working in the states, in hawaii. I realized in the acknowledgments that she died. she discovered that for some reason, they don’t really know why, some types of coral are surviving. quite pragmatically, they are trying to breed that type of coral because they are not convinced that we will act together.
It’s a really interesting look, as all these books are, at what we’ve done when we weren’t trying to. like fathoms: no one set out to rid the world of whales, and all things that depend on whales being there. nobody set out to alter a very complicated fungal system that we didn’t know was there. but our efforts have an impact and that is what these books are about.
You said at the beginning that books give hope. Is Kolbert’s book also hopeful?
It’s probably more pessimistic, I’d say. all books have hope, but with many of them you feel the author’s frustration. all of them are, in their own way, experts in what they speak. you feel the complexity of the solution because the problem is so complex now that the solutions are complex. as dieter helm would point out, we’ve talked a lot and not done much.
I love what you mentioned last year, that one of the reasons you wanted to judge this award was that books would teach you things you didn’t know. reading these books is a great way to do it.
I’m not an environmental journalist, but I do rural journalism and the depth of my ignorance shocks me. I didn’t know anything about mushrooms or whales, I didn’t know about abandoned islands. I knew a bit more about Net Zero because I interviewed Dieter Helm. but there’s a moment where you just think, ‘wow, everyone should know this.’ I was reading the book about whales, fathoms, on vacation. and I kept saying, ‘oh, did you know?’ and read it aloud. all of these books are a bit like that, there are parts where you will find yourself quoting them in a slightly irritating way to your friends and family because everything in them is so interesting.
We have the meeting tomorrow when we have to choose the winner and I have no idea which one will win. I would really like everyone to read the list and not just the winner. Whichever book wins, there will be others they could/should have. they are all strangely hopeful and worth reading.
On Tuesday, September 7, the winner of the Wainwright Prize, sponsored by James Cropper, was announced.
part of our best books of 2021 series.
See Also: The 10 Best Spanish Novels to Stir Your Heart and Open Your Mind | FluentU Spanish