Environment and Climate
Keegan O’Connor reviews 'A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A year of keeping bees' by Helen Jukes
The eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist François Huber (1750–1831), who is still credited with much of what we know about bees, was almost completely blind when he made his acute ‘observations’ and significant discoveries. Huber studiously recorded the queen bee’s ‘nuptial flight’ ...
... (read more)Andrea Gaynor reviews 'The Allure of Fungi' by Alison Pouliot
Of all the forms of life historically divided into kingdoms, only two – plants and animals – have attracted large bands of human followers. Entire organisations and university departments are devoted to understanding, controlling, and conserving plants and animals, and our cultural domains ...
... (read more)Lauren Rickards reviews 'Sunburnt Country: The history and future of climate change in Australia' by Joëlle Gergis
Sunburnt Country is a fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy. The first two of these dominate the ...
... (read more)Kathrin Bartha reviews 'Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime' by Bruno Latour, translated by Catherine Porter
Have you heard of the Anthropocene, the so-called Age of Humans? Our geological epoch has been renamed because human influences on Earth are so profound that not only is our climate changing, but so are our soils, water, and social order. Bruno Latour, prolific French philosopher and historian of science, dedicates his book ...
... (read more)First, I need to visit Dean Nicolle’s eucalypt arboretum. Four hundred rows of trees, four specimens of each species of Eucalyptus, Corymbia, and Angophora (the eucalypts) nestled together, sharing pollen and landscape, dropping limbs in the grass. Each group of trees is a result of the previous year’s fieldwork. The year ...
... (read more)Matthew Chrulew reviews 'Zoo Ethics: The challenges of compassionate conservation' by Jenny Gray
Zoological gardens are conflicted institutions. They provide a miraculous opportunity for close-ups with exotic and native animals one might never otherwise encounter. Yet they do so by keeping those very animals captive. The creaturely contact that zoos hope and claim can help transform citizens into advocates for animals and the environment is discomfited, if not ...
Peter Christoff reviews 'Burn Out: The endgame for fossil fuels' by Dieter Helm
While Australian governments line up to help Adani dig the world’s biggest coal mine, energy experts are burying fossil fuels forever. Dieter Helm is an economist and professor of energy policy at Oxford. Burn Out: The endgame for fossil fuels is his ambitious, provocative, and sometimes perverse take on global energy prospects ...
... (read more)Lauren Rickards reviews 'Defiant Earth: The fate of the humans in the Anthropocene' by Clive Hamilton
‘Forget everything you know.’ Clive Hamilton’s book pulls no punches from the first words on the cover. Building on a raft of other pieces he has written on the subject, Hamilton’s book is unsurprisingly provocative, blunt, and confident, its style matching the epic physical, intellectual, and ethical drama that is the ...
... (read more)Kate Griffiths reviews 'Sunlight and Seaweed: An argument for how to feed, power, and clean up the world' by Tim Flannery
The world is embarking on a journey to a clean energy future. Some places are well on their way; most have barely begun. We will all need to get there eventually. How long it takes comes down to political choices, economic realities, and technological breakthroughs. The consequences of delay are already well known ...
... (read more)Roger McDonald reviews 'The Songs of Trees: Stories from nature’s great connectors' by David George Haskell
The Songs of Trees takes its title from something that might not actually happen. Do trees sing? The notion runs through the American biologist David George Haskell’s second book in twisty directions, like a half-caught melody. (His first book was The Forest Unseen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013.)
Don’t trees just make sounds, crack ...