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FiveBooks Interviews
For the author and journalist the celebration of the non-rational is one of the things he loves about Spain. Luis Buñuel is almost like a prophet of non-rationality in this very rational world, he says. Webster chooses five books on the wonder of Spain.
Editor of the website China Dialogue, Isabel Hilton says the environmental disaster in China is dramatic. Many years ago she walked across a wooden bridge at Lo Wu to leave China, and all around were paddy fields. Now there are large cities and smog – the rivers really do run black. She chooses five books on the ecological catastrophe of China’s industrialisation, its Communist history and its fragile efforts to repair the damage.
Research Fellow at Exeter University and former chair of the British Agricultural History Society, Paul Brassley asks if rural Britain can still be distinguished from urban. If not, then perhaps this is no bad thing, he says. The countryside is dynamic and is now a place for having fun as well as for producing crops and rearing livestock: ‘Commuters can have a positive impact on village society; different is not necessarily worse’.
David Shukman is Environment and Science correspondent for BBC News. He has reported from the Arctic, the Amazon, Antarctica, and the Galapagos Islands, and more than 90 countries. His latest book, Reporting Live from the End of the World, was published this week. Shukman points to the constant battle between the political imperative of helping fishing communities and meeting market demand, and what the science is saying about what’s happening to the oceans. Fishing with modern techniques – with radar, and these huge nets – is the most destructive activity on earth, he says. ‘Over-fishing is changing the world. We don’t see it, because it’s underwater, but if the same went on, on land – imagine if you had a mile of net dragged over the plains of Africa, catching everything – it just wouldn’t be tolerated. But that’s what’s going on underwater.’
Adam Maloof is assistant professor of geology at Princeton University. He spent his childhood summers in Newfoundland and Maine and his interests centre on the relationship between ancient life, climate and geography. He says the most valuable piece of information missing in studies of the modern climate system is a deep understanding of Earth’s past. No one would ever study modern political science without a basic understanding of human history and civilisation, and no one would ever study a modern animal without a basic understanding of evolution. It is the same with the climate and Earth history, the only problem is that you have to study nature and not books to understand Earth history.
Dan Morrison is the author of The Black Nile. He began his journalism career covering the Rudolph Giuliani mayoral era for Newsday. He has worked from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Cairo, where he wrote for US News & World Report, the San Francisco Chronicle and National Geographic News. He spent six months travelling the Nile for his upcoming book, which will be published in August.
John Shepherd is a professorial research fellow in Earth system science at the National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, UK. His current research interests include the natural variability of the climate system on long timescales. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, participated in the Royal Society study on Ocean Acidification, published in 2005, and chaired the study on Geoengineering the Climate, published in 2009. We could and should remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, he says, having put it there without realising what the consequences would be. It is possible to remove it and that we need to find ways of doing that in order to restore the climate to something closer to a natural state.
Born into a family of renowned plantsmen, Kenneth Cox, himself a nurseryman and author of numerous garden books, is grandson of plant hunter, writer and nurseryman Euan Cox and son of Peter Cox. The three generations are considered the world’s leading experts on rhododendrons. Kenneth has carved out his particular niche in the world of plant hunting, leading nine expeditions to Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, India. His lectures on horticulture take him around the world and he is managing director of the family firm, Glendoick Gardens Ltd, near Perth, a nursery specialising in rhododendrons, azaleas and ericaceous plants collected by his family. His latest book, Scotland for Gardeners, is a guide to Scottish gardens and nurseries.
Penelope Hobhouse is one of the world’s leading experts in gardening history and design. Having restored the garden while she lived at Hadspen House in Somerset, she started writing and designing gardens for others while living at Tintinhull, which has one of the most harmonious small gardens in Britain. Her books cover not only design, planting and the practicalities of gardening but also the role of plants in history and the history of horticulture itself.
Richard Reynolds, a strategic planner for an advertising agency, learnt how to garden from his mother and grandmother. Frustrated by the lack of a garden on his council estate in Elephant and Castle, one of South London’s toughest areas, in 2004 he decided to brighten up its many roundabouts. Here he talks to The Browser about why guerrilla gardening has always been part of our history and is now becoming a global phenomenon.