Interview with Rebecca Nesbit, author of Tickets for the Ark: What we should conserve and why in this age of extinctions
Rebecca Nesbit, author of Tickets for the Ark: What we should conserve and why in this age of extinctions recommends a fantastic group of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Rebecca's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Our planet hasn't seen the current rate of extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and global conservation efforts are failing to halt this. As a society, we face choices which will determine the fate of Earth's estimated 8.7 million species, including humans. As wildlife declines, conservation needs to make trade-offs. But what should we conserve and why?
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Tickets for the Ark: What we should conserve and why in this age of extinctions
Are we wrong to love bees and hate wasps? Are native species more valuable than newcomers (aka invasives)? Should some animals be culled to protect others, and what do we want the 'natural world' to look like? There are many surprising answers in Rebecca Nesbit's lively, stimulating book, which sows the seeds of a debate we urgently need to have.
Buy On:
Easons €20.99
Book Depository €14.62
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $15.61
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Behave by Robert Sapolsky. It has clarified my thinking about free will (or lack of it), and helped me understand the way people act. This knowledge doesn't make all behaviours acceptable - some are very damaging. But it makes forgiveness easier, and I think it should prompt us to reimagine criminal justice.
Review From Book Depository
Why do human beings behave as they do?
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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other?
Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species.
In the epic sweep of history, how does our biology affect the arc of war and peace, justice and persecution? How have our brains evolved alongside our cultures?
This is the exhilarating story of human morality and the science underpinning the biggest question of all: what makes us human?
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Book Depository €13.52
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $14.33
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I'm currently reading Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn. I'm enjoying the stories it tells - from spoil heaps in Scotland to a no-mans land in Cyprus. I also think it has an important message about nature in landscapes shaped and abandoned by humans. Brownfield sites can be very diverse, and have a beauty we should learn to appreciate.
Review from Book Depository:
This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man's lands and fortress islands - and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.
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Islands of Abandonment : Life in the Post-Human Landscape
In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America's fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods.
This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live - or survive in tiny, precarious numbers - to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind's impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world - and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.
By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we're gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?
Buy On:
Book Depository €12.70
Waterstones £8.49
Wordery $12.05
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
This is slightly hard because I barely read any books while I was at secondary school - I was put off by the reading journal my school expected me to keep. However, the book that springs to mind is Swallows and Amazons. I've been a keen sailor since I was a child, and I loved the sense of adventure. When I was older I enjoyed David Attenborough's Life of Birds.
Review From Book Depository
The Walker children - also known as Captain John, Mate Susan, Able-Seaman Titty, and Ship's Boy Roger - set sail on the Swallow and head for Wild Cat Island. There they camp under open skies, swim in clear water and go fishing for their dinner. But their days are disturbed by the Blackett sisters, the fierce Amazon pirates. The Swallows and Amazons decide to battle it out, and so begins a summer of unforgettable discoveries and incredible adventures.
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Review From Book Depository
Based on the spectacular ten-part program on PBS, The Life of Birds is David Attenborough at his characteristic best: presenting the drama, beauty, and eccentricities of the natural world with unusual flair and intelligence. The renowned writer and filmmaker treks through rain forests and deserts, through city streets and isolated wilderness, to bring us an illuminating panorama of every aspect of birds' lives--from their songs to their search for food, from their eggs and nests to their mastery of the air. Beautifully illustrated with more than a hundred color photographs, the book will delight and inform both bird lovers and any general reader with an interest in nature. Attenborough begins at the beginning: reviewing ideas about how and when creatures first took to the air--and why ostriches, kiwis, and other flightless birds later returned to the ground. He introduces us to the marvels of flight. We encounter the albatross, which can soar for hours without flapping its wings; hummingbirds that beat their wings two hundred times a minute; and the swift, which eats, sleeps, and mates in mid-air.
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Swallows and Amazons
Buy On:
Easons €11.19
Book Depository €11.21
Waterstones £7.99
Wordery $10.65
The Life of Birds
We read about birds' extraordinary methods of hunting and gathering--about crows that use twigs and leaves to hook and harpoon insects, and eagles that can stamp venomous snakes to death. Attenborough explains why and how birds sing and why many have such dazzling plumage. He reviews courtship and mating strategies, including the extravagant dances of cranes and the bizarre and ornate pavilions that male bowerbirds build to attract females. We learn how birds defend their young against predators. Attenborough explains how birds have colonized the globe more effectively than any other vertebrates, adapting to Antarctic winters and African summers, to vast oceans and the densest, most polluted cities. He also outlines the threat that humans pose to many species, showing how we have already driven many to extinction. The book presents birds in all their complexity and glory, revealing in clear and elegant prose Attenborough's infectious sense of wonder about the rich variety of life on Earth.
Buy On:
Book Depository €30.06
Wordery $36.45
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Books are beautiful, and a lasting reminder of what I've read. They're also easier to lend to people. However, nothing beats my Kindle for convenience, and from an environmental perspective I suspect my ancient Kindle beats printing and transporting new books.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Alison's in Tewkesbury, where I grew up. It is such a friendly and welcoming environment.
Many thanks to Rebecca for recommending a fantastic group of books! Please don't forget to check out Rebecca's book Tickets for the Ark: What we should conserve and why in this age of extinctions .
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Profile Books Ltd (Tickets For The Ark), Vintage Publishing (Behave, Swallows and Amazons), HarperCollins Publishers (Islands of Abandonment), Princeton University Press (The Life of Birds).
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