Bibliography

For Today’s Caretakers of Tomorrow’s World

edited by Norman Myers

(Pan Books, 1985; other editions 2000, 2005)

This book is a guide to a planet in critical transition. The facts of our situation and our options for tomorrow are presented with a wealth of maps, data, vivid graphics, and authoritative texts by leading thinkers on these crucial environmental, political and social issues.

Excerpt: “I find it difficult to conceive of the speed at which we are overloading Earth’s ecosystem. Our numbers have almost doubled in 35 years and are still growing fast (...). Still more worrying, the degradative process underway have built up so much momentum that they cannot be stopped overnight. Our situation is like that of the captain of a supertanker. If he decides to turn around, he will need several miles to slow his ship, let alone to head in a basically different direction. Time is not on our side.”

The Adventures of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science

by Andrea Wulf

(John Murray, 2015)

In her biography of Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–1859), Andrea Wulf follows the footsteps of the worldwide-known German explorer, geographer, naturalist and writer. She relates his travels from the legendary climbing of the volcano Chimborazo in Peru to the crossing of the Mongolian border, his scientific researches in Berlin, London, Paris and his meetings with the brightest minds of his time from Goethe to Darwin. This relentless worker has revolutionised the way we see the natural world: “In this great chain of causes and effects, Humboldt said, no single fact can be considered in isolation.”

Excerpt: “Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem and the climate: the trees ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil and their cooling effect. He also talked about the impact of the trees on the climate through their release of oxygen. The effects of human species’ intervention were ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb so ‘brutally’.”

edited by Phaidon

(Phaidon, 2016)

This visually stunning book features more than 300 outstanding works of art from all cultures and periods – from ancient stone carvings, medieval manuscripts and watercolours to photographs, sculpture and cutting-edge micrograph scans. These works have been carefully chosen by an international panel of experts and are supported by key reference information. But above all, they are arranged in pairs which create thoughtprovoking juxtapositions and offer a highly stimulating aesthetic pleasure. Like the Lavender painted by Davis Kandel in 1546 which is confronting the image of a Cannabis plant which Ted Kinsman created with a micrograph scan in 2014. It is a refreshing way of redefining our ideas of what constitutes ‘botanical art’.

Excerpt: “Botanical art remains at heart, however, concerned with the process of identification and preservation that has long been its central purpose. In May 2016, scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew published the first study of the status of world flora. They estimated that 369,400 flowering plants were known to science, of which a fifth were in danger of extinction from habitat loss, climate change and other factors.”

The 30-Year Update

by Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows and Jorgen Randers

(Earthscan, London. Sterling, VA 2004)

Limits to Growth (also known as the Meadows Report) was first published in 1972. It was written by three researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dennis and Donella Meadows and Jorgen Randers, at the request of the Club of Rome. This report demonstrates that an exponential growth in a limited world is doomed to failure. And that unless efficient steps are taken it will be the end of our planet “sometime within the next 100 years.”

Excerpt: “The set of possible futures includes a great variety of paths. There may be abrupt collapse: it is also possible there may be a smooth transition to sustainability. But the possible futures do not include indefinite growth in physical throughput. That is not an option on a finite planet. The only choices are to bring the throughputs that support human activities down to sustainable levels through human choice, human technology and human organization or to let nature force the decision through a lack of food, energy, or materials, or through an increasingly unhealthy environment.”

A Personal Journey Through the Science

by Philippe Squarzoni

(Abraham Comics Art, 2014)

This black and white graphic novel, written and illustrated by Philippe Squarzoni, was first published in French in 2012 under the title Saison Brune. It weaves together scientific research and interviews with experts to decipher the complexity of what is called ‘climate change’. It also “describes the author’s own struggles and personal choices while confronting the issue”. Whether he draws the streets of a busy city or the branches of a tree covered with snow, Philippe Squarzoni has the eyes of a true cineaste: the flow of his pictures, page after page, always brings a surprise.

Excerpt: “In the societies we live in, environmental concerns look like a road paved by eco-related gestures and intentions-insufficient, trivial... and all the isolated initiatives seem like useless sacrifices. And no matter how we look at the problem, we always come to a dead end. Sure, it’s true, we make our small gestures to ‘save the planet’. Turn off the water when we brush our teeth, buy energy-efficient light bulbs. But are we ready to forego purchasing the next big-screen TV? A more powerful car? Are we ready to give up red meat? Give up a trip overseas?“

How We Became a World of Consumers, From the 15th Century to the 21st

by Franck Trentmann

(Penguin Random House, 2016)

In Empire of Things, the historian Franck Trentmann gives a highly documented account of consumerism throughout the ages, from Renaissance Italy and late Ming China to today’s shoppers. He shows that it is “a truly global phenomenon with a much longer history that we realise”. He also demonstrates that consumption is more than ever rampant in our throwaway society: “How much and what to consume is one of the most urgent but also thorniest questions of our day.”

Excerpt: ”Our lifestyles, and their social and environmental consequences, should be the subject of serious public debate and policy, not left as a matter simply of individual taste and purchasing power (…). Such a debate has to be bold and envisage different lifestyles and the concomitant changes to housing, transport and culture. It will need more people to remember that, as consumers, they are citizens and not just consumers. And it will need historical imagination”.

by Alexander Cordell

(Blorenge Books, 1959)

Set in the times of the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Wales, this gripping novel gives an unflinching look at the plight of the iron making communities of Blaenavon and Nantyglo where children aged 5 had to get up at “first light while the brats of ironmasters eat at eight before riding” and go to work “crawling through the galleries where the masters would not rear their pigs”. It also describes accurately the birth of the Chartist movement and of Trade Unionism in Wales. The book, which became a bestseller translated into 17 languages, shows that, undisputedly, the way we treat people and the way we treat nature go hand in hand. At all times.

Excerpt: “I thought of my river, the Afon – Lwydd, that my father had fished in youth, with rod and line for the leaping salmon under the drooping alders (...) But no salmon leap in the river now, for it is black with furnace washings and slag (...). No alders stand now for they have been chopped as fuel for the cold blast. Even the mountains are shells, groaning in their hollows of emptiness, trembling to the arrows of the pit-props in their sides, bellowing down the old workings that collapse in unseen dust five hundred feet below. Plundered is my country, violated, raped.”

25 Years of Nature Photography

by Stephen Dalton

(Century, 1988)

Secret Lives is a personal selection of one of the world’s greatest wildlife photographers. Whether it is the exquisite blue of a birds-eye speedwell, the cloud of spores leaving the cap of a puffball or the enigmatic smile of an intriguing horned frog, it is each time the beauty and the complexity of any form of life which is captured.

Excerpt: “We seem completely to miss an essential point when we talk about saving this animal or conserving that habitat because it may provide us with some commercial or medical advantage – as though everything on earth was placed here for our exclusive benefit.(...) What is far more important is that wild places and the animals which depend on them are beautiful and irreplaceable, and their existence is essential to our spiritual well-being and happiness. It seems that man has lost its way. He is blinded by commercial interests and fails to understand what really matters for the longterm future of the planet. He continues at an accelerating rate to destroy natural creation, replacing beauty with ugliness.”

The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson

edited by Linda Lear

(Beacon Press, Boston, 1998)

In Lost Woods, Linda Lear has collected and edited the writings, speeches, quotes and letters written by the great American scientist and writer Rachel Carson (1907–1964). Rachel Carson is famously known for her book Silent Spring (1962) which had a powerful impact on the environmental movement. She spent her life working relentlessly to describe and defend nature and its beauty. In her anthology, Linda Lear explains that ”Carson’s public and private voice speaks to our human condition and to the condition of our earth at the end of the millenium”.

Excerpt: “Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend, there is no single remedy – no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Under the Sea-Wind (1941)
The Sea Around Us (1951)
The Edge of the Sea (1955)

by Rachel Carson (1907–1964)

This trilogy about the sea installed Rachel Carson not only as an expert in marine biology, but as a great conservationist and as a great writer.

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breathe of a mist over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

The Sea Around Us was a great success, and was reissued in 1962 with a new foreword in which Carson underlined the threat of the nuclear waste disposal areas at the bottom of the oceans.

“Although man’s record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man’s ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.”

by Rachel Carson

(1962)

Rachel Carson wrote this book to expose the deadly danger of pesticides, above all DDT, for the health of nature and of humans. She was fiercely attacked by the chemical firms which produced the pesticides, but the publishing of the book resulted in a national ban of DDT for agricultural uses.

Excerpt: “We stand now where two roads diverge. But.... they are not equally fair. The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway which we progress with great speed, but at its ends lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one ‘less travelled by’ – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth.

The choice, after all, is ours. If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know’; and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.”

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway

(Bloomsbury, 2011)

Merchants of Doubt tells the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers with connections in politics and industry ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim that the science of global warming is ‘not settled’ have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rains, and CFCs to the ozone hole.

Established in California, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway are specialists of the history of science and technology.

Excerpt: “Science has grown more than exponentially since the 1600s, but the basic idea has remained the same; scientific ideas must be supported by evidence and subject to acceptance or rejected. The evidence can be experimental or observational; it could be a logical argument or a theoretical proof. But whatever the body of evidence is, both the idea and the evidence used to support it must be judged by a jury of one's scientific peers. Until a claim passes that judgement – that peer review – it is only a claim. What counts as knowledge are the ideas that are accepted by the fellowship of experts...”

The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial

by Peter Stott

(Atlantic Books, 2021)

Peter Stott is a Science Fellow in Climate Attribution at the Met Office Hadley Centre. As such he is one of the scientist members of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which determine the state of the climate change on the planet. In Hot Air, he describes the negotiations – and the fights – led behind the scenes to reach an agreement before the publication of the reports of the IPCC.

Excerpt: “There is no time to lose. The global toll from floods, droughts and heat waves continue to rise at a startling rate, their increasing intensity attributable, our research shows, to human-induced climate change. The people affected don't find our science surprising. They know that most of these disasters are not natural. Instead they see them rocket-fuelled by the human folly of unchecked emissions of greenhouses gases.”

Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

by Andrea Wulf

(William Heinemann, 2008)

“Without the achievements of Miller, Collinson, Bertram, Linnaeus, Solander and Banks, England would not have become such a nation of gardeners.” Through the story of these men, of their friendly or rival relations, Andrea Wulf explains how, in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries England became the centre of a great trade of plants coming from the worldwide, circulating on the seas at the rhythm of explorations (James Cook’s travels) and colonisation.

Excerpt: “Miller taught his fellow countrymen practical horticulture with his matter-of-fact advice in the Dictionary... Collinson and Bertram enabled plant-lovers to translate to translate their ideas about the natural Arcadian landscape into reality – incidentally nurturing the commercial seed trade and nurseries in England. Linnaeus and Solander transformed botany from the scholarly pursuit of a few educated men to a common practice, for without the standardisation of plant names they would have chaos and confusion making it impossible for people to share botanical knowledge and research.

Banks built on theses achievements when he consolidated practical horticulture, systematic botany and imperial expansion into a coherent enterprise.”

The Famine in Ireland (1846–1851)

by Cecil Woodham-Smith

(Hamish Hamilton, 1962)

In this book, the historian and biographer Cecil Woodham-Smith (1896–1977) examines the disaster caused by the potato blight in Ireland in 1846. Potatoes were the main, if not the only, food for the peasants, particularly in the west of the country. 2.5 million Irish people died from starvation and from typhus or migrated, mainly to North America (a lot of these migrants died during the journey or on arrival in Canada or the United States).

Excerpt: “It has been frequently declared that the parsimony of the British Government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance probably contributed more... Much of this obtuseness sprang from the fanatical faith of mid-nineteenth century British politicians in the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, no interference by government, no meddling with the operation of natural causes. Adherence to laissez-faire was carried to such a length that in the midst of one of the major famines of history, the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and of corrupting the Irish people by kindness, and so stifling the virtues of self reliance and industry. In addition hearts were hardened by the antagonism rooted far back in religious and political history, and at the period of the famine irritation had been added as well...”

by Linda Lear

(Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997)

In this book, Linda Lear, an historian of science, explores the life of the famous environmentalist (1907–1964). She describes her early attraction to the study of nature. Her studies in Connecticut were shared between her love of writing and her passion for biology and science. As a sea biologist, Rachel Carson explored all the coasts of the United States, mainly the eastern ones. As a writer, she described the beauty of nature and the reasons to protect it.

Linda Lear also shows Carson’s personality: passionate and straightforward, very firm in her convictions, hard-working, always connecting with her colleagues in the scientific community, conscious of her value but no egotist, truthful in her professional and personal friendships. She was also very brave, whether taking charge of her family, confronting the lobbyists who raged against her or standing up to the cancer which eventually killed her at 57 years old.

For this very complete and rich biography, published 33 years after Carson's death, Linda Lear has dived into the archives and studied the interviews of thepeople who knew and, for the most part, loved Rachel Carson. As Marjorie Spock, a long-time environmentalist correspondent, relates about their first meeting: “Upon landing we went to meet her at the inn's parking lot. As we approached it, a slightly built woman came around the bend walking unhurriedly. Seeing us she smiled, but did not change her pace. When we knew Rachel better, we realised how typical it was of her to keep her own way in everything. Neither at this nor further meetings did she strike us as an exuberant, outgoing nature. But there was no heaviness in her somewhat grave demeanour, no lack of warmth in her reserve, or unease in her incapacity for chit-chat. Rather did she seem so disciplined, so concentrated, so given to listening and looking and weighing impressions as to be unable to externalise.”

by Rachel Carson

(1965; Harper Perennial, 1998)

In her foreword Linda Lear, Rachel Carson's biographer, writes: “The Sense of Wonder is Rachel Carson’s gift to the remembered child in all of us.”

In this short essay first published in a newspaper in 1956 and edited posthumously as a book in 1965, Rachel Carson relates how children and adults can discover together the wonders of nature; but she also warns grown-ups against interfering in children’s fresh and spontaneous curiosity.

She describes mainly her walks around her cottage in coastal Maine with her grand-nephew and adopted son Roger: on the beach along the water’s edge, in the woods during a rainy day, through the dawn to enjoy the chorus of birds in spring or at night to hear the voices of migrant birds.

The edition published in 1998, with photographs by Nick Kelsh, includes the following advance notice: “Rachel Carson intended to expand The Sense of Wonder but time ran out before she could. She also intended a dedication and so: This book is for Roger.”

Excerpt: “We have let Roger share our enjoyment of things people ordinarily deny children because they are inconvenient, interfering with bedtime, or involving wet clothing which has to be changed or mud that has to be cleaned off the rug. We have let him join us in the dark living room before the big picture window to watch the full moon riding lower and lower toward the far shore of the bay, setting all the water ablaze with silver flames and finding a thousand diamonds in the rocks on the shore as the light strikes the flakes of mica embedded in them.

I think we have felt that the memory of such a scene, photographed year after year by his child’s mind, would mean more than the sleep he was losing. He told me it would, in his own way, when we had a full moon the night after his arrival last summer. He sat quietly on my lap for some time, watching the moon and the water and all the night sky, and then he whispered: ‘I’m glad we came.’”

(See also The Cabbage Leaf n°9, page 6)

The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution – and How We Can Fight Back

by Gary Fuller

(Melville House UK, 2018)

An air pollution scientist at King's College London, Gary Fuller led the development of the London Air Quality Network. And clearly he knows his subject.

He remembers the first pioneers who studied the composition of air and tested its effects on human health. But as he writes, “This book allows us to look backwards in order to look forward.” Therefore, after having reviewed the impact of air pollution on human health and on the economy and the battles to improve the quality of air, he underlines the actual challenges and questions all the protagonists: the politicians who should make more regulations, the businessmen and their polluting factories, the farmers and their pesticides. But he questions also the common people and their way of life: the use of the car even for very short hauls, the purchase of toxic products, etc. He shows how the problem is complex and how it is necessary to keep an overall picture and an holistic point of view to try and resolve this problem which is threatening the life of the planet and its inhabitants.

Excerpt: “The title of this book frames air pollution as an invisible killer. No one has air pollution on their death certificate, but there is overwhelming evidence that air pollution is shortening our lives. It increases deaths and illness from everyday causes including respiratory problems, heart disease, stroke and many more. We can see air pollution if we look for it. We can taste and smell the smoke from a fire and the exhaust from a passing car. The thick winter smogs that affected London and the haze in cities around the world today are visible signs of air pollution, but we no longer perceive them; they are part of everyday life.

During the 1922 coal strike, people in the UK saw that the world around them was miraculously transformed; distant hills were visible in a way that people had never seen before. During the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) in 2014, and the 2015 parade to mark seventy years since the ending of the Second World War, industry around Beijing was curtailed and traffic cut in half. The air pollution decreased and the skies cleared. The people of Beijing could see the true colour of the sky without looking through the customary haze. It was nicknamed APEC blue, and later parade blue. It is not the invisibility of air pollution that is the problem but its normalisation and acceptance.”