Tag Archive for: biodiversity

The Future of Life | E.O. Wilson

“We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless,” writes the naturalist, biologist and ecologist E.O. Wilson. By the time of his death in 2019 Wilson’s pioneering work in the fields of biodiversity and socio-biology had made him one of the world’s most influential scientists.

Over the decades Wilson became increasingly alarmed by humankind’s destruction of the world’s fragile ecosystems. In The Future of Life he argues that we have a moral obligation to restore and conserve them if we are to survive: “Destroying a rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”

 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

 

The Sixth Extinction | Elizabeth Kolbert

In her ground-breaking and scientifically rigorous exploration of ecological breakdown, Elizabeth Kolbert reveals how human activity has led to humankind the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, which is “likely to be more prolonged and severe than the previous five.” Highlighting the loss of charismatic species such as the golden frogs of Panama and the great auks, she emphasises the irreparable loss of biodiversity, the interconnectedness of living systems, and how the disappearance of one species can have cascading effects on the entire web of life. “There is no way to know, and no way to stop, what’s now underway,” she writes. “The only question is whether and how to intervene.”  The book is a poignant but essential read for anyone concerned about the future of the non-human world – and our increasingly precarious existence on Earth.

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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The Most Important Comic Book on Earth | Rewriting Extinction

 

 


“Storytelling is our most ancient and powerful technology. Stories have shaped our world, have changed the course of history and transformed lives. It’s the life blood of our species, pumping through our collective cultural veins, informing our actions motivating us, spinning our webs of beliefs, ideologies and realities. No part of our lives remains untouched by the stories we are told or those we tell ourselves.

In many ways the ‘story’ of Extinction Rebellion has always been its most powerful asset, that by coming together in creative, collective civil disobedience we can harness our power and change a world hurtling towards a global catastrophe created by our insane systems and reckless appetites.

Paul Goodenough’s Rewriting Extinction project is a herculean attempt to reimagine our collective fate through story, to literally rewrite the mass extinction event currently under way. A dazzlingly ambitious collaboration of creative talent from across planet Earth, it contains wisdom from luminaries in the comic industry like John Wagner, Tula Lotay, Alan Moore and Amy Chu to the talent of people like Moses Brings Plenty, Lucy Lawless and Andy Serkis to name but a scant few.

It’s a love song, a war drum, a desperate plea and an inspirational call to arms to take action now on behalf of all life, to fight for every species, every inch of ground, every child growing up in these uncertain times. The project not only tells stories but weaves them into projects that are directly making a difference. The proceeds raised go towards a variety of projects and organizations that are contributing to our struggle for survival. These stories are dedicated to preserving life itself and this in itself is a testament to the power of change.

So read it, let it seep into your bones, then ponder what you can do to change the story of a planet heading for extinction, every action we take here on in is absolutely vital to every life living now. Rewriting Extinction is the only story worth telling our children, is the only story worth living and breathing. Because if we can craft a vision of change, can become that change, future generations may just look back on this era as the greatest story ever told.” ~ Simon Bramwell

 

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Your Nearness | Forrest Gander

‘There’s a deep personal feeling found in Forrest Gander’s desperately beautiful ‘Librettos for Eros’ [in which] feeling masters the poems, and it is feeling about self, desperate, squandered, willful, all but out of control – and ultimately uncivilised…’ ~ Thom Gunn

‘Forrest Gander knows that the poet’s first duty is “to see what’s there and not already patterned by familiarity” – and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the finest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today.’ ~ John Burnside

Source: Arc Publications

Cephalopography 2.0 | Rasiqra Revulva

Cephalopography 2.0 is as much a passionate celebration of cephalopods in all their plurality and finery as it is a collection of poems exploring human identity and experience through the lens of these marine animals. These experiments with traditional poetic forms such as ghazals, tankas and cinquains, as well as more contemporary forms, make poems that are uniquely and beautifully composed. Cephalopography 2.0 plunges into the depths of human experience to daringly remark on the wild and transformative links between cephalopods and humanity beyond the land and the sea.

Plastiglomerate | Tim Cresswell

Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell writes with the forensic eye of a professional, bending the hard vocabulary of science into a jagged but compelling lyric that telescopes from the vast to the cellular in the space of a line. Plastiglomerate completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind’s impact on the earth; its central poem recycles the British folk ballad The Twa Magicians to make an ecological protest song fit for the Anthropocene age.

But among powerful depictions of the natural world under threat – from beached whales to lost birds – it is the humanity of Cresswell’s imagery that wins through: leaf-blowers in surgical masks, blue nail polish, the biro “leaking in the heat of my pocket”.

“Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There is redemption here too, in the warmth of human relationships – while this is indeed a world of “ruin and plunder”, it is also a
place “full of love and sap”. A powerful and memorable collection.’ ~ Jean Sprackland

Animal Experiments | Anja Konig

In an era of tribalism, it’s rare to encounter one so committed to identifying the root of things as they really are, and then laying those findings bare with benign frankness. While the world ends around us daily, these pages offer a macro and micro view, in which we find ourselves both culpable and insignificant, and it is in this paradox that, perhaps, we might be redeemed.

Anja Konig’s is a voice we need now more than ever.

How to Live With Mammals | Ash Davida Jane

All around us, life is both teeming and vanishing. How do we live in this place of so many others and so many last things? How to Live With Mammals is not a book of instruction but a book of reimagining and a book of longing. In these funny and often poignant poems, Ash Davida Jane asks how we might reorient ourselves, and our ways of loving one another, as the futures that we once imagined grow ever more precarious.

“Urgent, funny and tender: these poems shine.” ~ Louise Wallace

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The World According to Anna | Jostein Gaarder

When fifteen-year-old Anna begins receiving messages from another time, her parents take her to the doctor. But he can find nothing wrong; in fact he believes there may be some truth to what she is seeing. Anna is haunted by visions of the desolate world of 2082. She sees her great-granddaughter, Nova, roaming through wasteland with a band of survivors, after animals and plants have died out. The more Anna sees, the more she realises she must act to prevent the future in her visions becoming real.

But can she act quickly enough?

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

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A Friend of the Earth | TC Boyle

It’s 2025, and 75-year-old environmentalist and retired eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living managing a pop star’s private zoo. It is the last one in southern California, and vital for the cloning of its captive species.

Once, Ty was so serious about environmental causes that as a radical activist committed to Earth Forever! he endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he’s just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, Andrea re-enters his life. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping, T.C. Boyle’s story is both a modern morality tale, and a provocative vision of the future.

“Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favours the darkly comic.”–Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section