The best books for building peace with nature

This book hurled me into a compassionate and respectful understanding of puffins, gannets, fulmars, cormorants, and other seabirds, and their varied and extraordinary relationships with the world ocean and its winds and sea cliffs. It left me aware of huge gaps in my perception of these different worlds, of the otherness and perfection of seabirds, and of my own species' abuse of such wonders. It re-set my standard for beautiful writing, and for appreciating the feeling of standing against a gale above the sea while surrounded by creatures who are truly at home there.

This tells the story of a near future when mass extinction has driven the international community to negotiate a deal to save life on Earth. But this deal was corrupted at birth by the interests and opportunism of corporate capitalism. Woven around efforts to 'save' a fish species by people with madly different motivations, the book feels true while also being darkly funny, easy to read, and transforming in its power. It is all horribly familiar from my own experience of the deals that people and institutions have made to save the world from climate change. All of them are warped by the power of the profits made from destroying life, and by no one being willing to pay for precaution or clean-up.

While studying wildlife, I often slept on a polythene sheet on the floor of a tropical rainforest. In the velvet blackness, I would look down on the tracery of glowing fungal threads everywhere in the leaf litter of the forest floor. In my memory they blend with night flights over human cities: bright trunk roads and byways among the packed ranks of houses, all in a wide and sparkling network. And so it is with the fungal kingdom described here. A vast aspect of life on Earth is revealed that is almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, yet makes life work in all its parts, including us. It's the rich but easy-read kind of book that makes you say, 'well I never!' on every page, from sheer wonder at seeing how fungi join things up in a living world of near-infinite complexity.

We live in a golden age of discovering complex systems. The path was opened by the science of ecology, which Alexander von Humboldt founded in the early 1800s after years of exploring South America. Taking meticulous observations and recognising and communicating patterns that connect great swathes of the biosphere, Humboldt was inspired by the indigenous peoples with whom he lived and worked. The eternal need for reciprocity and peace with nature are the common insights of ecology and indigenous cultures from the Andes to Australia. They offer a great theme opposed to the other, darker inventions of recent centuries: imperialism, racism, and future-eating capitalism. Andrea Wulf wonderfully explains Humboldt's contribution to the insights that might make humanity's survival possible, and which could help us go on to build a society with peace with nature at its heart.

I was in Parliament Square at Samhain, 31 Oct 2018, when the Extinction Rebellion began. Greta Thunberg spoke there, but the mic broke so she paused at every sentence for the front rank to call out her words to those behind. The potent archetype of a virgin girl-child speaking truth to power worked its traditional magic, by exalting a thousand people, including me. Fast-forward a few years, and millions on the streets, and this little book condenses the motivation and message of climate activism: “Everyone and everything needs to change. Make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy. We must start today. We have no more excuses.” Greta offers everything important that we have been trying to say for decades. She encourages us to unify our divided minds and purposes. To me this is worthy of the most passionate engagement.