Category Archives: Book reviews

Book reviews, Conservation, Insects

Shieldbugs by Jones, 2023

Shieldbugs by Richard Jones. No. 147 in the New Naturalist Series.ISBN 978-0-00-833489-5   9-780008334895.  452pp. RRP £65.

 The author has written a previous New Naturalist Series (NNS) book on Beetles (No.136, 2018), and Shieldbugs is presented with the same vigour and analysis that this expert entomologist gives his books. Covid gave him the opportunity to delve deeply into this group of small and sometimes colourful insects – producing a lockdown special – a very discursive one at that. The author admits to ‘verbose fact boxes and obsessive footnotes’ which I like, the more annotations the better.

The NNS books are mostly British-centric, but authors are always tempted to reference species from overseas particularly when the group they are talking about is biodiverse. Such is the case with this title. The author says that the book is ‘mainly about shieldbugs of the British Isles’, but that he occasionally makes references to exotic species including, for instance, edible species in Africa. He allowed himself this diversion in his other NNS book https://wildlifematters.com/?m=201803.

Jones introduces us to the 79 species of British shieldbugs, the 11 species in the Channel Islands and 16 other species which are potential colonists to these islands. He admits to shieldbug distribution ‘skewed to the southeast’ which makes it a little unfair on entomologists north of the Thames. Climate change has affected the range of shieldbugs just like most insects, in this case incursions such as the Southern Green Shieldbug (arrived 2003). He presents data on even the latest shieldbug to the British list, the Trapezium Shieldbug discovered in East Sussex in 2019.

Slightly less than half the book is text, the remainder a key and descriptions of species illustrated with lots of colour photographs. Most of the shieldbugs are small, brown or black, some with white spots, resulting in identification difficulties – many cleared-up here. There are a number with striking red and black colour and this stands out in the book as if the author likes these shieldbugs particularly (I don’t blame him) and the greatest exemplar is The Firebug is expertly illustrated on the cover. His daughter drew the line drawings in the identification key.

Shieldbugs This is a book that is essential to be on the bookshelf of all those who collect NNS and entomologists in general. It is far too heavy for use in the field, only for reference and verification after fieldwork, for which it is now a definitive key work.  This book thus fills the yawning gap since Southwood and Leston’s 1959 book on Land and Water Bugs. Today there is also a 35pp ‘Provisional atlas of shieldbugs and allies’ (2018) by Tristan Bantock (for the Terrestrial Heteroptera Recording Scheme) which can be downloaded to a mobile phone for use in the field.

The book is written with a sense of humour and a great deal of passion which shines through – giving this generally drab group colour.  Without all this being ‘flippant nonsense’ he writes (and says don’t write in), he has actually designated collective nouns for 16 species that have the tendency to live together in groups – perhaps an attempt to dissuade predators. Two that come to mind, the glamorous firebug is an ‘Inferno of Firebugs’ and the Common dock bug, is a ‘Coven of Dock Bugs’. This is hardly flippant stuff, it is useful that someone has given some time to describe what is going in the hitherto world of unreported bugs.  So it all adds up to the increased knowledge on this group that this NNS addresses.

The colour photography has been sourced principally from Shutterstock and Wikimedia and the author’s colleagues – small shieldbugs are not too easy to shoot, at least to get some reasonable shots showing identification features, but this has been overcome. The production of the book is up to the usual high standards of the NNS with indexes and references.

Book reviews, Conservation

State of Nature 2023

 

The State of Nature report is a massive document (108pp) profusely illustrated in colour (mostly RSPB images) with numerous graphs (mostly showing downwards trends), and covering what is happening in the UK as well as the Overseas Territories (OT) and Crown Dependencies (CD).  Sixty-six government bodies and NGOs supplied information.

There are plenty of references to key works that present the accumulated evidence.  The trajectory of the state of nature is definitely downwards, and the 280 references to ‘decline’ is testament to that. In contrast it was surprising that the concepts of ‘natural capital’ and net loss and net gains are hardly mentioned.  It is perhaps early days to expect any of the mitigation that supports the net gain initiatives that will go live in January 2024 to buck the downward trend, are mentioned.

The review assesses the ‘major pressures on the UK’s nature over the past 50 years.’  What has driven the declines is down to ‘ , significant and ongoing changes in the way we manage our land for agriculture, and the effects of climate change, are having the biggest impacts on our wildlife.’

Knowing that a dozen SSSIs have been impacted to make way for the HS2 railway, I looked for reference to this, and accompanying mitigation to see how the net loss and net gain had been calculated, but there is no mention, and no mention of impacts from infrastructure, railways and roads per se. The nearest reference is under ‘pressures and responses’, but the SSSIs comments are wrapped up in a graph showing that about 40% of SSSIs are favourable across the four countries, leaving ‘unfavourable’ or ‘unknown’ statements for most. Not a good record.

This is what the authors said about various groups.

Flora & Bryophytes:  ‘Since 1970, the distributions of 54% of flowering plant species and 59% of bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) have decreased across Great Britain’

Lichens: ‘Strong decreases in plant and lichen distributions. Since 1970, the distributions of 47% of flowering plants, 62% of bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) and 57% of lichens have decreased, compared to 27, 25 and 34% of flowering plants, bryophytes and lichens respectively, that have increased in distribution.

Invertebrates:

  • Across 4,979 invertebrate species, there was an average decrease in species’ distributions of 13% between 1970 and 2020
  • Distributions of 2,149 invertebrates increased by 15% on average since 1970. This was driven by climate change and large average increases in the distributions of aquatic insects
  • Pollinating insects (bees, hoverflies and moths), which play a critical role in food production, show an average decrease in distribution of 18%
  • Average 15% decline in species’ abundance, for 407 terrestrial and freshwater species, abundance across Scotland has fallen by 15%, on average, since 1994
  • Of the 62 species assessed in the 2010 and 2021 butterfly Red Lists, 11 species became more threatened and five became less threatened.
  • Average 15% increase in the distributions of invertebrate species.

11% of species are threatened, of 7,508 species in Scotland that have been assessed using IUCN Red List criteria, 11% have been classified as threatened with extinction from Great Britain

 It is worth noting, separately, that Buglife-The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, state in a flier received Nov 2023 that ‘today ..for every four insects around 20 years ago there is just one.

 Birds:  The abundance of 11 seabird species in Scotland has fallen by 49% on average since 1986. These results pre-date the current outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza’  There is nothing on swifts, house martins and swallow which are all know to be in decline.

Mammals: Between 1970 and 2016 the distribution of small mammals (mice, voles and shrews) decreased on average by -29%, those of mid-sized mammals (eg mustelids and hares) showed a similar but not significant change of -15%’

Amphibians and reptiles: there was not a lot on these herps, more information on them in the Overseas Territories and Dependencies.

So, overall  the state of UK’s nature is not so good!

Book reviews, Conservation, Insects

Vicar of Amazon – by Howse

Vicar of the Amazon, The Reverend Arthur Miles Moss, in the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace. By Philip Howse.  Published by Butterflies and Amazonia. www.butterfliesandamazonia.com  Hardback ISBN 978-1-7398856-0-1  eBook ISBN 978-1-7398855-1-8.  243pp.

                       

It was only in the last twenty years that a series of coincidences occurred to the author that the life and works of The Reverend Arthur Miles Moss is told in this book. Moss was born in 1872 in Liverpool, raised in his formative years in the Lake District, went to Cambridge after Darwin and was ordained Deacon of Chester the year after graduation. He was already a keen lepidopterist when he went up to University, a keen painter, played on the huge organ in Kendal Parish Church and published an appreciation of poetry. This was a typical multi-talented Reverend of the time who was a keen lepidopterist. In 1901 he was a Norwich Cathedral, still collecting in his spare time, publishing items in The Entomologist, and in 1902 he went on a Grand Tour including a butterfly collecting expedition to Switzerland.  The Lake District and the Cambridge hinterland set the scene for his love of the great outdoors, and it is no surprise that much of his collection of pinned butterflies and moths, and ‘blown’ caterpillars are in the Kendall Museum; his note books of that period were lost.

The Rev. Moss was posted to the Amazon in 1907, yes, the whole of the Amazon was his ministry, a vast area from the mouth of the Amazon in Belém (known then as Pará) to the Andes, most of the Amazon being Brazil. He was granted free passage on ships up and down the coast and across the Amazon to Peru, some 60,000 miles of navigable waterway was his parish.   Moss was there for almost 40 years and he even had an organ with him.  He had followed in some of the footsteps of Darwin in the Beagle down the west coast of South America 70 years earlier, whilst issues of yellow fever and plague still persisted in the various ports of call.

Moss was an industrious chap. Prof. Prance, Former Director of Kew states in the Foreword, that he has been to most of the places that Moss had been too, had noted the many plants that bear Moss’s name and noted the various herbarium specimens in various locations, and lamented that the once almost pristine rainforest that Moss went have now been logged-out, Belém now has over two million people. Moss’s church is still there.  So Moss was not only a capable field botanist but a lepidopterist which is the main subject of this book.

A rediscovered cache of over 100 watercolours of insects from the Amazon were found by the author in the Natural History Museum, many of them now used in this book. The author is Emeritus Professor Phillip Howse from the University of Southampton and is the author of many award-winning books colourful on butterflies. Mimicry is brought finely into focus throughout with colour photographs showing caterpillars and butterflies next to animals of the rainforest that they have intimately mimicked, for instance the Dynastor butterfly that looks like the head and shoulders of a piranha (he had an obsession with the butterfly) whose caterpillar has projections that mimic eggs, and the pupa looks like the head of a snake, or the Great Silkmoth whose distal parts of its forewings are snakelike, or even the small hesperid pupa that also looks like a snake ‘a terrifying’ pupa of Bangalotis erythrus.   Moss was also smitten by the stunning vermillion and blue Agrias claudia and went on many expeditions to find it. Moths as wasp mimics with warning colours, hawk-moth caterpillars that also mimic snakes, or bizarre lantern bugs, or owl moths with ‘eyes’ a common disguise across the living world were the subject that caught his attention. Or, the dramatic ‘monkey slug caterpillar’ looking just like a tarantula. The Amazon is like this: biodiverse, bewildering and inextricable.

There is some discussion in the book on the veracity of natural selection then and now, but deep in the hot-spots of the Amazon rainforest species diversity is so prolific that natural interactions are highly likely to evolve when species are living, and trying to stay alive when living cheek by jowl. We are talking millions of years ago, so evolution has had plenty of time to make subtle changes that are beneficial.  Moss’s notebooks are filled with illustrations of camouflage in caterpillars and pupa, a subject explored later by the celebrated expert on colour in animals Hugh Cott.

Moss travelled high in Peru, collected a small moth (which was eventually found to be new to science, 80 years later – thanks to Claude Lemaire working in the Natural History Museum). This was a land full of adventure. His train was boarded by ‘brigands’, one person shot dead, but he survived. He was known in Peru as a pioneering naturalist. Today naturalists ‘do’ the Manu trail in Peru because it is still a hot-spot for biodiversity.

The famous rainforest explorers Wallace and Bates had been in the Amazon in 1845 and employed slaves as cooks, but slavery was abolished when Moss was there in 1912.  Moss was always fascinated by the process of metamorphosis and bred quite a lot of species out. He also caught and sold materials for collectors and sponsors in Europe, especially Lord Walter Rothschild, Miriam Rothschilds uncle.

Working at the edge of the un-exploited rainforest Moss was amazed at the sheer quantity of moths that came to light, in some case they were so thick on the ground that bins of them had to be taken away when the streets were cleaned.  He recalls the travel observations of Theodore Roosevelt and his son in the Amazon, and the paintings by Margaret Fontaine, and of course the travels and discoveries of Richard Spruce. There is also a nod to Nabokov. The Amazon is a large area, and still is a large area over which many have travelled and few have written natural history travel books.

The author has brought us a delight to the eyes on part of the extensive work of this English vicar in the Amazon even if he was always catching butterflies rather than tending his flock. The book demonstrates that it has been intensely researched in both the UK and South America much to the benefit of the reader. There is much history of entomology woven through this important work.  It is certainly a good read that should be in all rainforest themed libraries.    There are appendices, further reading and an index.

Book reviews, Conservation

Summer Nat Hist Books

Summer reading

The long hot summer provided time to catch-up on a pile of old favourites and new publications. Amongst the older ones were the Hon Miriam Rothschild’s ‘Butterfly Cooing Like A Dove’ (1991, Doubleday) which is a prolifically-illustrated exploration of the role and symbolism of butterflies in art; major works shown in full colour and black and white. Only Miriam could have done this extraordinary book with 30 chapters on such examinations on the soul, the spirit, the psyche, dreams and disasters, whilst quoting Nabokov, Prost, Jung and Picasso amongst many others.

As a fan of RLS I re-read Kidnapped – the cover reminding me that Stevenson is today the 25th most translated writer in the world. It is always enjoyable to read RLS’s glorious descriptions of people and places in Scotland in the 18th century. It is a pity that he was taken by TB at the age of 44. What other works did he have in prep.?

Botanical researcher, Richard Mabey’s ‘The Cabaret of Plants, Botany and the Imagination’ (Profile Books, 2016) is another firm favourite to dip into during the summer for his depth of knowledge of the English flora and its introduced species. His ‘Weeds’ (Profile, 2010) is an alternative good read.

Of newer titles, Guy Shrubsole’s ‘The Lost Rainforests of Britain’ (William Collins, 2022) – a Sunday Times Bestseller – follows on from his revelatory ‘Who Owns England’ (William Collins, 2018) gives us an insight into the temperate rainforests that we have in the West Country, west Wales and west of North England and west Scotland; these precious woodlands that need to be conserved. The amazing Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, dripping with lichens is for ever etched in one’s memory following a visit, but there are many more to explore and conserve.  One hopes they must all be like that!

One of the more recent New Naturalist’s titles is ‘Solitary Bees’ (William Collins, 2023, No. 146 ) by Ted Benton and Nick Owens who know a thing or two about bees. Benton has already produced two other volumes in the NN series, Bumblebees (2006) and Grasshoppers and Crickets (2012).  Owens has published books on bumblebees, bees and wasps. Together they have brought together a lot of theory and science behind the diversity of solitary bees which has not been previously set out.   The large book (598pp) is lavishly illustrated throughout to show particular morphological features, nest construction and habitats.  Solitary bees are not an easy group for any naturalist or general entomologist to get their head around the diversity and variation but this book presents all that is known of the group and will be a key work.  Overall a good bunch of books perused over summer.

 

Book reviews, Insects

Butterflies…by Philip Howse

Butterflies, Messages from Psyche, by Philip Howse, 2010, Published by Papadakis (An imprint of New Architecture Ltd, Winterbourne, Berkshire). 192p. ISBN 9 781 901 092806.  ISBN. 978 1901092806. Large 24x30cm.

I would of course be biased in the review of this book as it has the Cabbage White on its cover, and I did my PhD thesis on this very successful species that has colonised much of the northern hemisphere and is doing its best in the south.  I am also biased because I love butterflies, have written several books on butterflies, have worked and published with Dame Miriam Rothschild on butterflies, as she loved butterflies too. In fact my 157 letters from her are precious.  She is mentioned by the author of this book alongside Darwin, Wallace, Bates, Fabre, Hinton and, as Howse says she ‘stands apart amongst entomologists , and the basis of many of my ideas have come from reading her publications.’  I would agree, and this Psyche book reminds me of one particular book by Miriam ‘Butterfly cooing like a Dove’ (Doubleday, 1991).  For Psyche think Keats ‘Ode to Psyche’.

Philip Howse is also a butterfly lover, and the book is butterfly-centric throughout, not forgetting moths, especially day-flying ones which have to express themselves rather better than nocturnal ones.  Miriam was always fascinated by the reasons for everything, particularly colour, and she told me many times that there must be a reason for every particular colour on an insect, even if you have not worked out what it is. Of course, we have worked out what makes colour chemically, about pigmental colours, and structural colours, and how  caterpillars sequester particular pigments for ornament, or poisons for defence, but the world is more evolutionary-sophisticated than that; there is the world of eyes and shapes and ‘clever’ visual deception that has evolved too, in a world replete with merciless hungry predators.

What Howse, and Miriam before him, have tried to do, is interpret the complicated and superbly biodiverse world of insects and other invertebrates, an almost impossible task as there are 40K invertebrates in Britain as an example.  The book reminds me a wander through the rooms of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with a plethora of fine detail of marginal insects popping up as if they were always part of the countryside scene, which is what they were then. Not add-ons in today diminishing biodiverse world.    

In the world of art through time much has been inspired by nature. This book brings together some of the earliest examples from cave paintings, the apparent symbolic patterns on insects, such as the death’s head hawk moth – with  discourses on ‘skulls and symbols’, snakes, eyes, bird icons and goddesses as chapter headings.

What one has to consider is that here we are trying to interpret the myriad of colours and designs that have taken millions of years to evolve, possibly at least a million years before man was even evolved. Natural Selection is a powerful thing, and Howse sets about providing explanations of how living things have evolved together, mammals and insects, birds and insects, plants and insects, and how insects have taken advantage of the great biodiversity of life to successfully integrate themselves into the environment without being eaten. Continued good luck to them. A good deal of subjects in the book are aposematic i.e. ‘want to be seen’ with their bright symbolic colours and designs, other than cryptic or camouflaged, or both when in different situations (‘clever’).  We are just outsiders looking in. Invertebrates are the most successful animals on earth.

Who would put a caiman and a lantern fly together on a page, but Howse has? I have been in the Amazon and marvelled at the bizarre shape of lantern flies, and handled baby caiman and not considered the connection.   But yes, why not.  We have in this book a glimpse into the diverse world of colour deception.  Bates and Muller were both engaged in trying to explain mimicry, so too Miriam and Howse.  

This book is a tribute to mimicry in butterflies and mimicry examples pervade the book, butterflies with eyes, butterflies with spines, butterflies like leaves etc.  To survive in the living world butterflies must evolve, fast, to deceive and become invisible.  I particularly liked the juxtaposition of the fox’s face and eyed-hawk moth, or the robin and the Meadow Brown butterfly, or even kestrels and fritillaries.

Philip Howse OBE was a lecturer at Southampton University and this is one of his many books. The book is large format,  professionally produced as a superb photographic book, picture-perfect colour reproduction with full pages of butterflies and more butterflies.  There is an index and chapter notes for further information.  Overall a delight; especially as it has such a striking aposematic butterfly on its cover. 

 

Book reviews, Conservation

Prance’s Amazon Book 2022

Ghillean T. Prance, 2022. The Amazon Forest and Its People in Black and White. Published by ‘Butterflies and Amazonia’. ISBN: 978-1-7398856-2-5. £20.  Marketed by Redfern Natural History Productions Limited, at https://www.redfernnaturalhistory.com/product/amazon-forest/

                    

Before Prof. Prance became Director of The Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (1988-1999) he spent years in the Amazonian Basin tirelessly cataloguing the botany and describing new species to science, but that was when he was working for the New York Botanic Garden (1964-1988) and nipped off to the rainforest on 39 expeditions as one does. Few have ever had the extensive tropical field work that Prance has had, resulting in the discovery of 350 new species of plants especially with his exploration of the Serra Aracá plateau.

This book is all about then, but is a salutary lesson about now.  In this book you feel the warmth of the Amazonian people living sustainably off this watery world, whilst we in the West look in wonder and try to interpret how their way of life revolves around their natural habitats, flora and fauna.  In my experience the further you get away from civilisation the nicer and more helpful people are. This is reflected in the pages.

So this book looks at the nature of the living world that shapes the way of life of the Amazonian people, from their buildings made of wood and palm leaves, their ceramic clay pans, calabash cups, their baskets, red dye plants, natural fruits of the forest, ‘water vines’, plants to stun fish and plants used as contraceptives. No wonder the intrepid botanist Prance edited the more recent Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (2018) – this is just one of the 29 books that he has written; Sir Ghillean’s knowledge is wide and wise and he has a genus Pranceacanthus named after him.  

Prance has trekked and waded through the Amazon rainforests where only a few famous people before him have ventured, including President Roosevelt and his son, as well as Victorian naturalists Henry Bates, Richard Spruce and Alfred Russel Wallace – probably more time in the forest than the Victorians.   Prance confirms to me that he has certainly spent more time in the Amazon rainforest than Wallace and Bates, and at least the same time as Spruce. The longest continuous period he was there was two and a half years in 1973-1976. 

Prof. Prance experienced the Amazonian rainforest as he says: ‘When I first went to the Amazon…..I saw many of the same things as the Victorian naturalists’. ‘There was comparatively little destruction of the forest’ then. The photographs in the book are backed up with quotations from many of these early explorers indicating how untroubled the habitats were from man.  Darwin had a short spell near Rio but never penetrated the Amazon.

Prance’s botanical skill and knowledge shines through with his descriptions of trees and vines and his identification of all the plants that the Amazonian people use for their life in the forest, and the ‘fruits of the forest’ that they depend on. This includes the ‘Siokoniamo’ fungus (Lentinus velutinus) which translates as the ‘hairy arse fungus’.

The chapter on the giant Victorian Water lily is delightful, as a species that can block a waterway with its magnificence (other lesser plants do too),  its structurally-sound leaves that man has copied in architecture,  and the way it captures beetles overnight for pollination purposes.  He introduces us to various Amazonian tribes, the Yanomami, Mayongong, Tikuna, Huitoro, the Jarawara, the Deni and the river people (the caboclo) who all visitors to the Amazon will meet.  This book records much of their social history with plants.

At school in England they never tell you that the water level of the Amazon rises and falls dramatically each year by several metres, which alters the nature of habitats; or that there are many of these caboclo people of African and European ancestry who live along these fertile waters who are not the tribes.  Of the native Indians there used to be over 2-6 million present (of over 350-400 tribes) before the Europeans arrived in the late 15th century, and, as the cataloguer Greta Thunberg says, 90% of the Indigenous people were either massacred or died of infectious diseases, or 10% of the world population (see previous review of Thunberg’s latest book).   This is their assimilation with the forest.

Although the botany of the Amazon has not changed since it was photographed in black and white in the 1970-80s, there has been much destruction. Prance’s photo of rubber balls waiting for trading is almost a thing of the past, and the rubber industry that he describes had such a traumatic effect on the people, at the hands of the rubber barons who created the incongruous Opera House in Manaus.

Throughout the book and alongside photographs there are paragraphs from the Victorian explorers Bates, Spruce, Wallace and others and it is very telling that the population of Manaus in 1850 was just 3000 people.  Now it is a major hub for exploration of the Amazon with a population of over two million people. The book has a botanical slant for obvious reasons, but animals photographed in black and white are included. Feathers and furs are still used for adornment. Sadly society still collects wildlife and this reviewer’s first encounter with a wild jaguar was in a cage display in a hotel’s foyer, not in its natural habitat. 

Of the way that things have moved on, I liked the understatement that oil palm ‘as much planted by locals and also as an industrial crop that is destroying some rainforest areas especially in Amazonian Peru and tropical Asia’. Too true. You can fly for an hour or so along the Pacific Central American rainforest and see plantations of oil seed palm to the horizon that has replaced rainforest and all its biodiversity.

I am very glad that Sir Ghillean Prance still refers to ‘rainforest’ (it is all in the name), as opposed to David Attenborough who refers to it as ‘jungle’ (dry, spiny tropical forest). All books on the Amazon are a lesson to us all. The tropical habitat continues to be systematically destroyed. Prance is ever hopeful for a suitable outcome, for he says ‘It is not too late to help’ and he calls on Davi Kopenawa  from the Yanomami tribe who asks whether the white people know that when they kill ‘the spirits of the big earthworms (who) own the forest earth’, that the soil will instantly become arid.   

Overall, this is beautiful book that demonstrates the way that indigenous people are at peace with their environment.  There is a glossary, index and further information on charities that readers can help with rainforest conservation, and a list of publications of the early explorers cited. 

 

Book reviews, Conservation

Greta’s Climate Book, 2022

The Climate Book. 2022. Published by Allen Lane, and imprint of Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-242-54747-2; 9 780241547472 £25 pp 446.

Any gardener will know that Thunberg brings to mind a bright orange flower of a climbing plant with a dark centre called a Black-eyed Susan, so my impression of this book is already coloured by Greta’s book, which is mostly blue not green for an ecologist.  Television viewers will have been prepped by Attenborough in ‘The Blue Planet’ where his ecological outlook is also blue, not green. 

The cover is clever is as it shows the average temperature of the earth from 1634 to 2020 going from blue (cold) to red (warming). You can download your own country cover from www.showyourstripes.com.

It is a heavyweight book, almost encyclopaedic, multi-authored and ‘created by’ Greta Thunberg. It is arranged in five sections: How the Climate Works, How our Planet is Changing, How it Affects us, What We’ve Done about it and What We Must Do Now.  Each section has an introductory section by Greta who sets the scene and crystallises the subject in her own inimical way, quite succinctly, stating the obvious cumulative facts (that people tend to gloss over) and in some cases, showing how ‘This is exactly how you create a catastrophe’ .

The publishers have gathered together about 90 scientists, professors, activists, students to write 500-1000 word pieces on familiar topics, and there are 13 topics on which Greta has had her introductory say.  These authors are all at universities, think tanks, action labs, climate labs, sustainability labs, carbon labs (sorry, being like Greta here, listing issues), all of whom are ‘on side’ with the travails of climate change. I don’t think their collective works will sort the world out, but their knowledge will help our understanding of what needs to be done. There is NOTHING by Attenborough, NOTHING by Lomberg to put statistics in perspective and NOTHING by Prince Charles as was.

As far as I can detect there are no articles in the book from any government agency around the world about how things are being sorted; none of the bodies that have been accused of ‘blah, blah, blah’ have had their say. So we know what is wrong, but we need another book on how to fix it.

Several of the authors are well known such a Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the ‘Sixth Extinction’, who writes a perfect resume of the effect of man on the environment through time. There are also vignettes of the parlous state of insects by Dave Goulson and Jason Hickell on his ‘Degrowth’ theory.

George Monbiot (who uniquely has a two slots in the book – seems Greta is a fan of Monbiot as she quotes him) has a chapter on the media as being the ‘most responsible for the destruction of life on earth’ (mindful that he writes for The Guardian!) rather than big industry. He also has a pop at BBC Channel 4 and Attenborough for not mentioning the fuel industry in his presenting of ‘The Truth about Climate Change’ programme. Monbiot’s other contribution (with Rebecca Wrigley) is on Rewilding, and he is on a popular (hopeful) winner when he says ‘We can replace our silent spring with a raucous summer’. 

Lord Stern (of The Stern Report (2006) has his precautionary, reserved  and caveated say by letting us know that ‘biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change’ has been excluded from the economic considerations up until now. Thanks for telling us that, we kind of knew.  And that we are now on ’catch-up’ because ‘the economic analysis of climate change has failed on three levels’ first, not realising the true scale of the losses (hello – wildlife disappearing – the Anthopocene!!), second, not understanding the power of alternative energy, and third, ‘discriminating against future generations based on their date of birth’.  I think we all knew what he has to say.  

Such a collective book of words on the Climate Change has not been done before, and is probably all you need to know about the subject. To be sure it will be essential reading for all ecologists.  It can be dipped into to research a subject (but sometimes the 500 word résumés are too brief) and the book is let down by a poor index, that does not bring up major issues that are in the book (e.g. Acidification or Drax or Degrowth). It is better to pan through the contributors for interesting topics to investigate. Perhaps when the living world has collapsed it will be an excellent book explaining how it all went wrong.

JF’s Notes on Greta’s introductions to each subject

There is a recurring truth running through each section that Greta writes about, and that is about the Global North, where all the wealth is, and which prevails and seeks to direct the poorer Global South, she writes ‘the suffering of the many that have paid for the benefits of the few’.

Having read all the chapter sections written by Greta here is a rundown of her pronouncements- for, in her own words, everything is black and white. She is fond of compartmentalising and listing facts and figures, and I like that, so here goes. She is also well informed of her brief, and often quotes from book content.

  • The richest 1% of the world’s pop are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of the humanity.
  • There are 7.9 billion of us on Earth and we are in a sustainability crisis. As she reminds us in Sweden (her home country) ‘koka soppa pa en spik’ meaning ‘we have to make do with what we have’.
  • On heat related deaths : 37% are caused by Climate Change, and roughly 10 million die from air pollution each year (Note to Greta’s Editor: this pops up at least twice).
  • On rising sea levels -‘the snowball is in motion’  Scary information: At last Ice Age the sea levels rose by 120m as a result of a 5°C warming. There is enough ice on earth to raise sea levels by 65m….that keeping to 1.5°C will still release one third of the ice mass. 
  • Every second an area the size of a football field of forest is cut down.
  • We use around 100 million barrels of oil every day
  • 8m tonnes of plastics are dumped in out oceans each year.
  • On renewables she is horrified that burning timber is regarded as (eco-friendly) ‘renewables’ which she says has been adopted by governments as a loophole which allows emission calculations to exclude CO2 from timber-burning factors.
  • On creative accounting: Drax Power station is the largest producer of CO2 in the UK, yet its burning of timber is not part of the emissions calculations. She visited Drax and was told that it receives four ship’s worth of pellet a week and seven trains a day of wood, not coal.
  • She highlights this blind spot on renewables in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which is the loophole used by governments.
  • To exemplify her cause, she quotes the International Monetary Fund who says that governments subsidise the burning of coal, oil and fossil gas by the tune of $11m a minute.
  • She has the latest 2021 formula for creating a catastrophe: loss of Amazon rainforest + the CAP now out of reach of the Paris Agreement + the US auctioning off 90m acre area of the Gulf of Mexico for oil exploration + China opening more coal power stations, and + the EU not updating climate targets = a catastrophe.
  • After all of this she says ‘There is still time for us to avoid the worst outcomes.’

And her take on lifestyles:

  • Veganism is a privilege mainly available to the affluent of the Global North

 The book is printed on certified FSC paper as you might expect. There are a few colour DPS spreads, some of which have been shown on BBC television recently, bubbling methane in the sea, collapsing permafrost, large thunderstorms…flooding, deserts, industrialisation.  References are hived off somewhere else at www.theclimatebook.org/. At the end of the book there are comprehensive lists of What needs to be done and What society can do and What an Individual can do.  As you might imagine, plant trees (not plantations), rewild nature, restore nature, make ecocide a crime, write new laws, rethink transportation, invest in wind and solar, face the emergency, educate ourselves.

We have been told that the beginning of the climate change started in the Bronze Age when China started using coal, so we have come a long way in the worlds destruction in a very short time. Time will tell if climate change will slow or stop. The world according to Greta is that it will do neither. This is a great book, a last milestone on the way to destruction.  Every school should have a copy. 

Book reviews, Conservation

Lomborg, False Alarm, 2021

Lomborg, Bjorn. 2021. False Alarm: How Climate Change panic costs us trillions, hurts the Poor, and fails to fix the planet. Basic Books, Hachette Book Group. Originally  published in July 2020, also as ebook, and as a First Trade Paperback Edition in October 2021. 321pp.  ISBN 978-1-5416-4747-3 & 9 781541 647473.  $22.99.

This later edition has a long epilogue which, within the year of publication had to bring it up to date with the fast moving events following COVID-19. Lomborg’s earlier, controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, Measuring the Real State of the World (CUP, 2001) went into ten reprints in one year.   Not that everyone likes to reminded of the facts and figures of climate change, but a different interpretation is always welcome. The stats speak for themselves but not everyone really puts them all together like Lomborg.  The author is not a climate change denier, far from it. He is a visiting Prof at Copenhagen Business School, a visiting fellow at Stanford and has been named as one of the 100 ‘Most Influential People of the World’. He knows his stuff and is authoritative with it because he is a statistician at heart; he was an Ass Prof of Statistics at The University of Aarhus in Denmark when he wrote the Skeptical Environmentalist. He deals in published data and incorporates the salient facts and conclusions into his work, so this book is full of supporting graphs and diagrams to illustrate his points – all of which are backed with references to published data.  You have to be committed to read all through his book as it is hugely scientific and not necessarily for the general public who would find it complicated.  The book was being finished off during the Covid epidemic but Lomborg quotes various papers that showed that the decline in the use of cars during lockdown did not have a significant effect on climate change. He states ‘Everything learned over the course of the COVID-19 epidemic has reconfirmed the basic message of this book. Just forcing us to do with less is not the solution, not in the rich world and certainly not for the world’s less well off.’, He is adamant that we need to solve five issues ‘to get our focus back’ which are i) increased carbon tax, ii) green innovation (the most important), iii) adaptation, iv) geoengineering, and v) prosperity.  He holds great store in President Biden’s promise of $75 billion a year for green R&D which could be ‘a real game changer.’  He analyses the truth about the EU’s stated bold commitment to reduce emissions by 55% (from 40%) in 2015. This shows he says ‘good intentions’ but the cost of $1.5-$5 trillion to achieve the actual tiny benefit of ‘postponing global warming by just two weeks’ by the end of the century shows it ‘is a blatantly bad idea.’ There are plenty of topics to investigate by delving into this book for instance on extreme weather events, where Lomborg compares the various extreme events in the US with the GDP, and finds that these events  are ‘causing less suffering in terms of deaths and in terms of GCP’.  With flooding and hurricane events Lomborg discusses the ‘Expanding Bull’s Eye Effect’ where, say an area’s housing expands by 58% over 20 years (actual example) a repeat of a similar flooding example will seem to be significantly greater, when the degree of flooding has perhaps stayed the same. The book is in five sections, The climate of fear, The truth about climate change, How not to fix climate change, How to fix climate change and Tackling Climate Change and All the World’s other challenges.  It is a good but necessarily scientific book with plenty of straight forward arguments informed by published data. Lomborg is a regular Tweeter so you can follow his day to day tweets on how he interprets the living world during the current energy crisis.  

Book reviews, Conservation, Insects

Silent Earth by Goulson 2021

  

Silent Earth, Averting the Insect Apocalypse, by Dave Goulson, Published by Jonathan Cape, London in 2021. (imprint of Vintage which is part of Penguin Random House, London.) 328pp. Hardback £20. ISBN 978-1-787-33334-5  &  9 781787 333345  A review:

Hot on the heels of other books on the impending disaster to affect the wildlife world we live in, this is another that adds to the debate. It seems that lockdown has had a positive effect on the productivity of all authors. But this assessment of the decline of insects is from an academic for consumption by the general public. And he is good at it, converting scientific facts, arguments and counter-argument into some interesting discussion. The author is Prof.  Dave Goulson, lecturer at the University of Sussex, who, when he is not writing books, looks after freshers giving them a tour of the campus to assess their readiness to understand the living world, identifying the common birds and the bees (which they do very poorly). His lecturing circuit of about 40 lectures a year allow him to assess audiences, and he agrees that talking to primary school schoolchildren is more fulfilling as they pay attention and are enthralled, compared to secondary pupils. He sees a drift of grey hairs in some of the older audiences and they also are more keyed into what is happening. He says that about 90% of the population could not care less about the environment, and he is right, possibly higher. This is however a flaw in his halting the apocalypse. Will they all respond?

There are five sections of the book, Why Insects Matter, Insect Declines, Causes, Where are we headed? and What we can do? in all 21 chapters. Each chapter is quite short and succinct and reads without giving specific references (making the text a better read), but the references are at the back of the book under chapter headings if anyone wants to fact-check Goulson’s comments and threads.  The author draws on his own academic published work, and his travels around the world making observations.  Having just reviewed McGavin’s audio book on insects (All Creatures Small and Great), both authors have used the same published work, whether it is the German experience of declining insects or the Knepp experience of wilding, and drawing on the quoted works of Carson, EO Wilson, Fabre, Monbiot or Attenborough.  It is surprising how there is a relatively small body of work on declining species out there, that everyone quotes. The difference with this book and the others is that Goulson supports all his commentaries with graphs and scientific evidence – almost, but not quite, at the level of a textbook. Most pages are enlightening, and the book can be dipped into to get a different flavour. There are at least ten books I have around me here on the impending Armageddon and the story is the same, the relatively few references the same, Carson being the first key witness.

So where does Goulson really stand. He is an optimist. He says on the flyleaf ‘it is not too late for insect populations to recover’. Attenborough also says that on television. That does not fit comfortably with the 90% who do not care less. Even the sub-title is optimistic ‘averting the insect apocalypse’. Topically he has one chapter on life in the future after the apocalypse several decades on, and another chapter on how to get things right before the apocalypse, education, involvement at local level and getting involved in politics. Goulson also muses on Rumsfeld’s ‘knowns and unknowns’ and ‘unknown knowns’ in the biodiverse insect world. He also has a chapter on ‘Bauble Earth’ about light pollution and effects on wildlife, also very topical at the moment.

Goulson is a bee expert and he often refers to his other books (three out of five on bees and bumblebees) and one has the feeling that one should have read his The Garden Jungle before writing this review as he often refers to it.  His appraisal of the effects of neonics on bees is excellent. Curiously, various vignettes on the peculiarities of a handful of insects are placed at the end of the chapters, not related to the subject matter, but the tiniest peek into the world’s biodiversity that we might loose, such as the earwig with two penises if you have ever seen it in the first place.   With the insect world in Britain of 27K species these are not key to the message of the book, and therefore a distraction, perhaps an entrée into the bizarre world of biodiverse insects for a new book?

Book reviews, Conservation, Insects

Insects by McGavin 2022

All Creatures Small and Great. How insects make the World.  An audiobook written and narrated by Dr George McGavin. MP3 (14 hours). Published by WFH Original (W.F. Howes), £16.99   ISBN: #9781004073344    Link on Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/All-Creatures-Small-and-Great-Audiobook/B09RC5CCYP   A review:

 

For those who have not come across George McGavin on the radio or on the TV he is a passionate, if not unique spirit of ecology who now works in the media but was once a lecturer at Oxford. We learn a lot about the life of McGavin, an early interest in bugs in Edinburgh from the age of 12 through to his latest tribute to the parlous state of insects worldwide. In some ways I thought this was a promo for The Royal Entomological Society (RES) as it so insect-centric (which I applaud) and one of its nine guest contributors is the president of the RES, Prof. Helen Roy – a ladybird authority. But insects rule the world with their complete mastery of numbers and diversity and put other classes to shame in biodiversity. McGavin says confidently that they will be around on Earth well after our own demise. Therein is the issue that grips McGavin throughout this audiobook. The relentless decline in species, that McGavin reminds us several times that he has experienced in his lifetime. We all have.  You can feel that he feels wounded as an entomologist that his subjects are disappearing, even species that could be useful that will become extinct before they are discovered (a very familiar and true refrain) with steady on-going rainforest loss that no one seems to be able to stop. He does not refrain from speaking the truth, whether it is rainforest loss just to grow new crops (oil palms, soya), burning peat for shooting, cutting verges or ‘unnecessary street lights’.  One of his most animated interviews is with the inimitable fly-centric Dr Eric McAlister particularly on the fruit-fly – 60% of whose 15.000 decoded genes are found in humans (a common ancestry) which cause cancer, offering hope for remedies for various diseases. He calls the fruit-fly ‘arguably the most important insect in the world’ – vying with the house fly as the most dangerous.  Like many TV reporters he asks many questions such as why and how we got into this mess, where have all the insects gone, and so what if they go extinct? But he does give answers. He talks to Sir David Attenborough to see if he has any answers to which he is told that he receives 50-70 letters a day, mostly, now from concerned youngsters. Attenborough’s solution is to i) individually do not waste food, space, fuel, paper etc, ii) that those who have an elected voice should appreciate the international point of view of the worldwide dilemma and do something, and iii) that that there is a need to get politicians to set out remedial measures.  Maybe we have all got it wrong, McGavin invokes Genesis 9.7 ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Yes, says McGavin we have done that, and spoilt the world. We have become complacent and here McGavin says that we have all fallen into the ‘Shifting Benchmark Syndrome’ where the gradual decline of species (example Passenger Pigeon) is easily missed and extinction occurs. He laments his windscreens not being encrusted with a pâté of insects, something we have all noted, and now wonder where they all went.  40% of all insects are now threatened with extinction towards an Eco-Armageddon. There have been mass extinctions before, 250yrs ago at the end of the Permian ‘The Great Dying’ but that was because of acidification of the oceans and gross volcanic activity. Insects at that time did not become widely extinct. Now we are told we are ‘in the middle of a mass extinction event’ the Anthropocene, during this The Age of the Human.  With difficulty we must triage what to save, which insect species we need to save.  We are told by Prof. Philip Stevenson (Kew Gardens) that two out of five plants are now currently at risk of extinction. There is discussion on over-production of food, that an area the size of China produces food that is wasted each year, and that the energy and greenhouse gases to produce it could be saved.  There are moments in the audiobook that McGavin reverts to describing in detail the autecology of various species, such as the honeybee (excellent account), the cochineal beetle, the stag beetle, the galls of oak trees or the Colorado Beetle – all a background for a younger audience, and harking back to this lecturing days.  He gets very annoyed at the phrase Save the Planet when the planet is actually fine, it has looked after itself OK for the last 4.5 billion years and insects in general are always OK. As a good storyteller, McGavin tells us of his adventures mothing in Papua New Guinea where he is ‘ecstatic’ by the diversity of moths to his moth trap, or under the clear skies of Africa. McGavin gets us up to date with neonicinoids in the environment and their potential effects on honeybees. A lot of what he says is backed up with reference to recent research. He quotes E.O. Wilson (we all do) and John Muir; he talks about ‘bee vomit’ (honey) from honeybees and the ‘insect spittle’ (silk) from the silkmoth now extinct in the wild. These descriptions are very appealing to youngsters, and to this end the book is pitched for a very general audience from children right up to all adults interested in the natural environment and what is happening to it, even ecologists, entomologists and naturalists.  There is a very good section on ‘A Natural Pharmacy’ (the audiobook is full of named sections) where the plant world is shown to be a natural pharmacy of useful ‘secondary plant substances’ or scientifically as Prof Philip Stevenson says are ‘Secondary Metabolites’. This is an area much to my own interest especially with the suite of carotenoids and their overlooked importance in inverts and humans.  Much discussion is had on caffeine which in concentration is antagonistic or a deterrent to honeybees (for instance) but in dilution appears to be a stimulant to improve the bee’s carrying out its pollination duties.

There is measured frustration in McGavin’ s voice that the message of the insect decline is not being heard or heeded, as we have all been banging on about this for decades. There have been other voices before about the loss of habitat, such as Marion Shoard, Norman Moore, Graham Harvey, and more recently Elizabeth Kolbert on the 6th extinction and Dave Goulson (with his Silent Earth), but McGavin’s is more a more direct and approachable, well-rounded interpretation, as always backed up with scientific evidence, even though the truth is not heeded.  This topic needed to be aired as an audiotape (14 hours), even if it’s dark message that can be listened-to during a long car journey through a clean windscreen. It has great educational value and should be required ‘reading’ for all schools.

 

Dr John Feltwell (Naturalist Dr John Feltwell has visited New and Old World rainforests and has written over 40 books including his own on Rainforests, conservation, global warming etc).