The Cyborg Conservationist
Haze from the 2015 forest fires in Southeast Asia may have killed about 100,000 people. It was also really bad for wildlife. Benjamin Lee and colleagues recently showed these effects by measuring...
View ArticleEarth Algebra
It is the time of year when newly arrived students gather around the university in uneasy groups, shuffling like swallows waiting to migrate. All have passed, quite recently, through the trial of...
View ArticleListening and loss
Recently, on a run in the fields around the village where I live, I realised that I could not hear a skylark. At one level, this is not surprising, because the agricultural landscapes of Cambridgeshire...
View ArticleBrexit Political Ecology
Now that the UK’s exit from the European Union is but days away, it seems an opportune time to reflect on what the new regime might mean for nature and the countryside. The future of nature did not...
View ArticleCOVID-19 and Conservation
These are strange, scary and fascinating times. Watching the COVID-19 pandemic grow throws us into the fantastical world of films or games. It brings disaster close to home, and to the people we know...
View ArticleSilent Spring
The freedom to take an hour’s walk or bike ride each day has been one of the unexpected pleasures of the Covid shutdown. April was scarily dry, with day after day of blue skies. Blackthorn bloomed in...
View ArticleGreen Development?
Recently I held in my hands a printed copy of the new Fourth Edition of my book Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World. It had been a long while coming. The contract...
View ArticleThinking post-Covid
We started writing Thinking Like a Human back in 2012. That now seems a long time ago, in our own lives, and in the world around us. At the time we had adjacent offices in the Department of...
View ArticleStill Wasting the Rain?
It is exactly 30 years since I started to write the book that became Wasting the Rain (eventually published in 1992). I have been thinking about this book a lot in the last couple of years, as Chris...
View ArticleStrange Natures
In July, the book I have long been writing with my friend and colleague Kent Redford was finally published: Strange Natures: conservation in the era of synthetic biology (Yale University Press). It...
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