Book reviews
Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson (2021) 352 pp., Vintage Books, London, UK. ISBN 978-1-5291-1442-3 (pbk), GBP 9.99.
My whole life has revolved around insects. As a small child, I would catch, hold and admire insects in the garden, mostly because they were easier to catch than the birds. Today, I am lucky enough to travel around Europe, researching the endlessly fascinating world of insect migration, and insects still provide a great source of happiness for me: the thrill of thehunt for a rarebee, the joy of discovering an insect I have never seen before or the relax- ing hours of just looking and observing. Dave Goulson’s books make it clear that he is cut from a similar cloth. Silent Earth is simultaneously a love letter
to insects and a battle paean for the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. It is a factual and scientific book, yet there is so much extraordinary within the invertebrate world that reading it feels like watching a par- allel universe, one that is intimately entwined with our own, and at the same time strange and unknown. The approachability of Silent Earth is a great boon to those of us who are studying this alternate universe: the book clearly and uncompromisingly describes key issues we want the wider public to understand and appreciate. Yet it is also terrifying. The book is full of moments that reach
deep into your chest, and twist, leaving you breathless and heartbroken. The ‘poisoned land’ chapter, for example, and the fact that nobody alive can remember just how many cowslips there once were; the recipes that once called for the collection of gallons of the flowers that are now painfully obsolete. A friend described my feelings well when they said: ‘I threw the book across the room regularly in my fury at our species’ arrogance.’ Echoing Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with her ‘fable for tomorrow’, Dave Goulson gives a stark warning towards the end of the book with ‘A view from the future’, writing from his son’s point of view 60 years from now. The world has continued upon its catastrophic trajectory and has left life nearly unrecognis- able. As I am writing this in Somerset, in the 40 ˚C heatwave of July 2022, every Buddleja bush I walk past is devoid of butterflies. The warning cannot be heeded soon enough. When reading Silent Earth, I was thankful
that between consecutive chapters, as a break from the terror, Goulson intersperses small monographs about the remarkable world of in- sects. My personal favourite was learning that earwigs are right-‘handed’: they have two pen- ises and prefer to use the right-hand one! And
despite the gloom, Goulson infuses his book with hope. The final chapters are dedicated to whatwe can all do and the benefitswe will gain. Simple plans bullet pointed across the pages lay out actions anyone can take, fromnational gov- ernments through every profession and every way of life: farmers and gardeners, office and factory workers, people shopping and travel- ling. Each one of us can play a key role and it will repay us all with greater food security, cleaner landscapes and better mental health. This year of all years, people are noticing
the lack of insects in their gardens and parks. I hope this book scuttles and flutters its way out to the widest possible public, taking its message to everyone: Westminster Village to city scape and rural lanes, chief of industry to chef, bus driver to scientist. Everyone needs to be talking about and noticing insects and what they do for us, giving us a chance to re- build the natural support networks that we, quite simply, will not survive without.
WILL HAWKES (
orcid.org/0000-0003-0661- 7864,
w.l.s.hawkes@exeter.ac.uk) University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn, UK
Why Conserve Nature? Perspectives on Meanings and Motivations by Stephen Trudgill (2022) 400 pp., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 978-1-108-95857-8 (pbk), GBP 39.99.
A book’s preface is often illuminating. The ac- knowledgement of intellectual debts, shared endeavours and support, alongside the occa- sional airing of grievances, reveals the context in which the book emerged, and its overall purpose. The preface for the late Stephen Trudgill’s Why Conserve Nature? Perspectives on Meanings and Motivations chronicles his serendipitous journey from researching geo- morphology, soils and ecology through to a greater focus on philosophy, art and literature, particularly poetry, from being trained in clas- sically positivist thinking about nature and science, to re-engagement with why he was first interested in nature. This journey was shaped by encounters with colleagues and stu- dents from many disciplines, and through his work for the Field Studies Council, observing and making decisions about how students should engage with nature. Trudgill aims to accompany the reader on that same journey, and he makes an interesting and erudite travel companion. He would gently persuade many Oryx readers to follow him, to partially reject their scientific training, and re-engage with why they first cared about nature. He does not provide simplistic answers, but nudges
readers with thought-provoking questions, the ‘hippy contrarian’ described in his obituary (Elliot, 2022, The Guardian, 7 February 2022). Trudgill argues that reasons to conserve
nature cannot come directly from human- created concepts that purport to be easy, uncontroversial and objective; he peels away veneers of simplicity from concepts such as nature, species and native, using both his sci- entific training and his deft engagement with social sciences and humanities. Nor does he see them coming from oversimplified catas- trophism about impending doom, or from simplistic ecosystem service arguments; he critiques these from multiple angles, but with- out rejecting their potentially useful aspects. Rather, people should conserve nature
primarily because of the relationships we have with it. These relationships are slippery, amorphous, heterogeneous and personal, but so are the multiple interactions we have with nature, and how they define us and how we want to live, as humans, communities and in- dividuals. There is substantial focus on art, lit- erature and poetry, as Trudgill’s passions and as things that simultaneously reflect and create human relationships with nature. An amusing swipe in the preface, lamenting the turn in universities towards metrics and away from the things that matter, could easily be applied to a conservation movement that focuses on measuring, the easily quantifiable, at the ex- pense of the reasons why people get involved in conservation in the first place. The bibliog- raphy contains plenty of ecology papers, but these are outnumbered by the references to social science and humanities sources. For Trudgill, nature here is fundamentally
social, but not irreducible to the social alone. Megafauna and mycorrhizae both exist in and of themselves, but our understanding of and relationships with them are mediated by our social values. This is not a new idea, but it is one eruditely developed here, and it forms the basis for the book’s fundamental ar- gument. As Trudgill declares, ‘Let us not deny the importance of science and let us not deny the importance of an emotional attachment to sense of place’ (p. 322). The book begins with an exploration of
how we experience nature, drawing heavily on psychogeography, before delving into a slightly incongruous chapter on climate change uncertainty and narrative. It then picks up the pace from this slightly bloated start, and tells a compelling story about how humans have represented nature, and what this tells us about both humanity and nature. This is followed by a detailed section on per- sonal meanings of nature, and about how humans understand and relate to the places
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 958–959 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605322001132
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164
