Interview with Florence Wilkinson, author of Wild City: Encounters With Urban Wildlife
Florence Wilkinson, author of Wild City: Encounters With Urban Wildlife recommends some excellent books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Florence's book:
Review from Book Depository:
The badgers of Brighton's most exclusive postcode. The water voles of Glasgow. The Black Country bats who have found a haven in old industrial tunnels. The peregrine falcons nesting on the ledges of tower blocks. The mosquitoes found on the London Underground and nowhere else on earth.
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Wild City: Encounters With Urban Wildlife
In Wild City Florence Wilkinson takes us on a fascinating journey into why we should engage with our fellow urban species. What we might see - if we only take the time to look - and how nature is adapting to human-engineered environments in unexpected and ingenious ways.
As more and more of our planet is urbanised, we humans still feel that primal pull to connect with our wilder roots. This gorgeously lyrical book invites us to celebrate the natural world, while also offering a clear-eyed glimpse into the challenges faced by urban plants and animals as cities grow and sprawl.
Wild City proposes a compelling manifesto for city wildlife, suggesting how we might take action to protect the often-overlooked residents who live alongside us.
City-dwellers, it's time to meet your neighbours.
Buy On:
Easons €23.79
Book Depository €13.92
Waterstones £16.99
Wordery $15.76
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
This is a really tricky one, so you'll have to forgive me because I'm not sure I could narrow it down to just one book – I read a lot of non-fiction. (Smart thinking isn't confined to non-fiction, of course, but if I include fiction too that will make it even harder!) Review From Book Depository:
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
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Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone is the most influential and talked-about book on society in the last decade - now updated with a new chapter on the controversy the book has ignited.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
A major book about the future of the world, blending natural history, field reporting and the history of ideas and into a powerful account of the mass extinction happening today
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There are a few titles, though, that have truly influenced my view of the world. These include This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein on what we're doing to the planet, The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson on why inequality harms us all, and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, which argues that humans are in the process of causing a sixth extinction event. (Sorry for picking such serious topics, but this is the world in which we find ourselves right now.)
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate.
You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it - it just requires breaking every rule in the "free-market" playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies and reclaiming our democracies.
You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back for the next economy is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.
Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It's about changing the world - before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe.
Either we leap - or we sink.
Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. This Changes Everything is about to upend the debate about the stormy era already upon us.
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Easons €10.49
Book Depository €15.14
Waterstones £12.99
Wordery $14.99
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Australians? The answer: inequality.
This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show:
How almost everything - from life expectancy to mental illness, violence to illiteracy - is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is
That societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-off
How we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future
Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.
Buy On:
Easons €12.32
Book Depository €11.94
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $12.21
TThe Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions of life on earth.
Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Elizabeth Kolbert combines brilliant field reporting, the history of ideas and the work of geologists, botanists and marine biologists to tell the gripping stories of a dozen species - including the Panamanian golden frog and the Sumatran rhino - some already gone, others at the point of vanishing.
The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy and Elizabeth Kolbert's book urgently compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
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Easons €12.69
Book Depository €14.63
Waterstones £12.99
Wordery $14.38
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I recently read Isabella Tree's Wilding – a beautifully written story of hope about how she and her husband returned their farm to nature. They left 1,400 hectares of land at the Knepp estate to grow into a spectacular living, breathing, evolving 'mess', bursting with life – both common, like yellow-flowered ragwort, and rare, like the nightingales and turtle doves that have flocked to Knepp despite their populations crashing elsewhere. I'd urge anyone who cares about wildlife and conservation to read it!
Review From Book Depository:
In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the 'Knepp experiment', a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.
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Wilding
Winner of the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Book Shop Literary Prize.
Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer - proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain - the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.
Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells' degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life - all by itself.
Personal and inspirational, Wilding is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature, when it is given as much freedom as possible.
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Book Depository €11.14
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $11.75
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Again, it's really hard to single out one book. As a child, when it came to reading I was into the whimsical, fantastical, and at times downright bizarre. An Australian children's book called The Magic Pudding springs to mind, or to name its full title, The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. Naturally, it's about a magic talking pudding called Albert who regenerates every time he's eaten...
Review From Book Depository:
"The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his Friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff" is an Australian children's book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, and a classic of Australian children's literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves.
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The Magic Pudding : Being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and His Friends
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Book Depository €8.44
Waterstones £4.95
Wordery $8.36
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper. It may sound a bit cliche, but there's something about holding a book, the crack of the spine, the smell of the paper – I'm so grateful to my publisher Orion and my illustrator Andrew Davis for turning my book into such a beautiful object – it was an incredible feeling when I received the first box of copies.
Having said that, I do also own a Kindle and it's very handy for holidays, reading big, heavy books on the move and making those books fully searchable. I've yet to listen to many audiobooks, but I'm definitely into podcasts, and since I've recently had a baby (which makes conventional reading a bit harder) now might be a good time to start.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Can I have two? Please? Firstly, The Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town. It's been there since my mother (to whom Wild City is dedicated) visited as a student at North London Poly in the 1970s. Every time I visit I always manage to come out with at least one book, usually more.
Secondly, the Camden Garden Centre cafe – Pritchard & Ure – which may sound like an unusual choice, but it's such a lovely setting and has a wonderful selection of titles – mostly natural history, which is always a winner with me!
Many thanks to Florence for recommending some important books! Please don't forget to check out Florence's book A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Orion Publishing Co (Wild City), Penguin Books Ltd (This Changes Everything), Penguin Books Ltd (The Spirit Level), Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (The Sixth Extinction), Pan Macmillan (Wilding), Martino Fine Books (The Magic Pudding).
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