pollutants

Book review – A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

8-minute read

The legendary British broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough needs almost no introduction. Since his first appearance on our television screens in 1954, he has gone on to a long and distinguished career presenting and narrating groundbreaking nature documentaries. And he shows no sign of slowing down. His voice and style have become so iconic that he has been dubbed the voice of nature. Over the years, he has increasingly expressed concern over the state of the natural world, and in A Life on Our Planet Attenborough fully engages with this topic. However, when you turn to the title page you will notice the name of a co-author, Jonnie Hughes, who directed the Netflix documentary tied in with this book. As Attenborough explains in his acknowledgements, Hughes has been particularly instrumental in the writing of the third part of the book, together with substantial assistance from the Science Team at WWF. This is Attenborough’s witness statement, yes, but whose vision of the future is it?

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Book review – Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

6-minute read

One objection sometimes raised against the search for extraterrestrial life is that our planet is rich with bizarre life forms that we still poorly understand. As a biologist, you are usually so close to the subject that you sometimes forget just how otherwordly our home planet can be. With his beautifully written book Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake shook me out of that daze by offering a truly mind-opening book on fungi. Excitingly, he does so without floating off into speculative or esoteric territory.

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Book review – Science in Black and White: How Biology and Environment Shape Our Racial Divide

6-minute read

Some time after I reviewed Angela Saini’s book Superior, I was contacted by medical anthropologist and science writer Alondra Oubré, offering me the opportunity to review her new book. The overall aim of Science in Black and White might be the same—the debunking of the biological arguments used to justify racist thinking—but Oubré shows there is more than one approach to get there.

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Book review – The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate

7-minute read

Since it was coined in the year 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the term “Anthropocene” has taken the world by storm – pretty much in the same way as the phenomenon it describes. Humanity’s impact on the planet has become so all-encompassing that it warrants giving this period a new name. As a colloquial term that is all snazzy, but are we actually leaving a tangible trace in the rock record to signal a transition to a new period?

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