Standing up for Nature
This is a compilation of quarterly articles which appeared in The Organic Grower between 2009 and 2021. The author is, or was, an organic farmer in south Devon. We often hear that farmers are stewards of the countryside and all that lives there – well a better case for that can be made for organic…
This is a heavily revised and expanded English translation of a book published in Icelandic in 2020. The translator, Anna Yates, is to be thanked, along with the author and publisher, for making such an interesting book accessible to English readers. I’m interested in extinction and the Great Auk is a famous extinction. Of course,…
After studying zoology at university Jonathan was involved in ornithological research and conservation for a number of years in France, Scotland and West Africa. Subsequently he has spent most of his career as an environmental consultant, assisting industry in managing its environmental impacts. Wildlife, particularly insects, remain his first love however and he is a…
This is Guy Shrubsole’s best book yet, despite the success of his excellent Who Owns England (reviewed here) and his book about soggy, slippery woods, The Lost Rainforests of Britain (reviewed here) because this book is about everything! It covers a lot of ground, all of it, because it is about land use and who…
This is the story of the relationships between the author and a team of conservation volunteers. It is a tender account of those relationships and has some very, very well-written and moving passages. I liked it a lot. However, although these are conservation volunteers, nature is the backdrop to this book rather than a leading…
I wrote the foreword for this book (the author must have caught me on a good day) but it was published last year so I have been rather dilatory in giving it the little breath of publicity here that it most certainly deserves. The title is self-explanatory but few vaguely similar regional books use the…
John Page was born in the West Riding, a proud Yorkshireman and was taught to play cricket left-handed “’cos it flummoxes t’ bowler, and buggers up t’ field.” He went to university in London and Leeds, and enjoyed (most of the time) attempting to teach young people that there’s a big wide world beyond the…
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
This is a very interesting book about a very few species and a very good New Naturalist. The New Naturalist series put out some rather unattractive books a while ago with terribly reproduced and somewhat irrelevant images. Those days have certainly passed. This is a well-produced volume with good photographs, graphs and figures. The author…
Another novel about the murky upland world of somewhere near you? Badgers, grouse moors, lords, rich businessmen, snares, machetes, rifles, Hen Harriers, modern slavery and so much more. It’s a good follow-up to Bob’s previous novel Snared (see review here). If you enjoyed Snared then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this too. And, just like Snared,…