FiveBooks

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.’

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.

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.

Jeremy Mynott is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the former chief executive of Cambridge University Press. Throughout his career, he spent his hard-won leisure time pursuing his interest in birds in many parts of the world. He now lives in Suffolk, though he still makes regular excursions to watch birds in favourite places including the Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly, the Volga Delta and New York’s Central Park. He has devoted much thought to the place of birds in our lives and the reasons we react to them as we do, culminating in his book, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2009. He is currently translating Thucydides for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, and his next project will be an anthology of writings about birds in the ancient world.