Colin Tudge - Böcker

Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees: How they Live and Why they Matter explores the hidden role of trees in our everyday lives - and how our future survival depends on them.What is a tree? As this celebration of the trees shows, they are our countryside; our ancestors descended from them; they gave us air to breathe. Yet while the stories of trees are as plentiful as leaves in a forest, they are rarely told. Here, Colin Tudge travels from his own back garden round the world to explore the beauty, variety and ingenuity of trees everywhere: from how they live so long to how they talk to each other and why they came to exist in the first place. Lyrical and evocative, this book will make everyone fall in love with the trees around them.'A love-letter to trees'Financial Times'One of those books you want everyone to have already read'Sunday Telegraph'Wonderful, invaluable and timely. Tudge is as illuminating a guide as one could wish for'Daily Mail'Everyone interested in the natural world will enjoy The Secret Life of Trees. I found myself reading out whole chunks to friends'The Times Books of the YearColin Tudge started his first tree nursery in his garden aged 11, marking his life-long interest in trees. Always interested in plants and animals, he studied zoology at Cambridge and then began writing about science, first as features editor at the New Scientist and then as a documentary maker for the BBC. Now a full-time writer, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. His books include The Variety of Life and So Shall We Reap.

In The Secret Life of Birds, lifelong bird enthusiast Colin Tudge explores the extraordinary variety, secret history and hidden importance of birds around the world. Birds are beautiful, intriguing and life-enhancing. They can do everything mammals can, and even more besides. Collected here are birds who navigate using the stars, tool-making crows, territorial robins, cooperative penguins and swans who mate for life - among hundreds of others.Revealing everything from why birds sing to how they fly, think, bond and survive, from how they evolved (and whether it really is from dinosaurs) to why, in so many ways, they are very much like us, this rich, evocative book will make you love and admire the birds that are all around you. 'Enjoyable ... entertaining ... masterful'Stephen Moss, Guardian'Simply fizzing with ideas ... his heart is with the birds' Literary Review'Inspired ... Tudge's writing is always clear and frequently embellished with wry humour' Richard Fortey, Sunday Telegraph'Only when we read this scintillating study do we see how little we've known about the creatures we see around us' Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman Books of the Year'An author whose own deep relish for the extraordinary lives of birds seems only marginally less pleasurable to him than sharing that wonder with others' BBC Wildlife MagazineWhen Colin Tudge was a small boy, he could recognize only five kinds of birds. After studying zoology at Cambridge, Colin wrote for the New Scientist and was a documentary maker for BBC radio. His other books, also published by Penguin, include The Secret Life of Trees and So Shall We Reap: What's Gone Wrong with the World's Food - and How to Fix It.

The Variety of Life can be read at many levels. Not least it is an extraordinary inventory - an illustrated summary of all the Earthly creatures that have ever lived. Whatever living thing you come across, from E coli to an oak tree or an elephant, The Variety of Life will show you what kind of creature it is, and how it relates to all others. Yet there are far too many creatures to present merely as a catalogue. The list of species already described is vast enough - nearly two million - but there could in reality be as many as 30 million different animals, plants, fungi and protists - and perhaps another 400 million different bacteria and archaea. In the 4,000 million years or so since life first began on Earth, there could have been several thousand billion different species. The only way to keep track of so many is to classify - placing similar creatures into categories, which nest within larger categories, and so on. As the centuries have passed, so it has become clear that the different groups are far more diverse than had ever been appreciated. Thus Linneus in the 18th century placed all living things in just two kingdoms, Animals and Plants. By the 1950s this had become five kingdoms - with fungi, protists, and bacteria hived off into their own separate groups. But leading biologists today acknowledge three vastly different domains, each divided into many kingdoms - so that animals and plants, spectacular though they are, are just a fragment of the whole. The Variety of Life explains the means by which systematists have attempted such a mammoth classification of so many various creatures - which in turn leads us into some of the most intriguing and knottiest areas of modern biology: evolutionary theory, molecular genetics, and the history of biological thought. Finally, however, The Variety of Life can simply be seen as a celebration. We should all share Miranda's pleasure in Shakespeare's Tempest - 'How many goodly creatures are there here!' - and feel, as she did, what a privilege it is to share this planet with such wonders. Their fate is in our hands; and first, we must begin to appreciate them.

The modern world is dominated by ideas that are threatening to kill us: that life is one long battle from conception to grave; that all creatures, including human beings, are driven by their selfish DNA; that the universe is just stuff, for us to use at will.These ideas are seen as emerging from science and hard-nosed philosophy, and become self-fulfilling. They have led us to create a world in perpetual strife,that is unjust and in many ways precarious.This remarkable book by an experienced author and thinker argues there's another way of looking at the world that is just as rooted in modern science, and yet says precisely the opposite: that life is in fact cooperative; all creatures, including human beings, are basically nice; that there's more to the 'stuff' of the world than meets the eye.This book is both a powerful call to rethink our assumptions, and a message of hope for those who believe we're doomed to self-destruction.

An exploration into how we can have truly sustainable, resilient and productive farms.In the 1930s, nutritionists claimed that the increase in population size would soon make it challenging to eat enough protein, which they thought was only obtainable from meat. Mercifully, this is not true. Although meat does offer a nutritional bonus, we do not need vast amounts of it and could get all our protein from plants. The world has lots of food problems still – from issues surrounding fertile soill to agroforestry and livestock – but there are solutions.Colin Tudge coined the expression 'Enlightened Agriculture' to describe agriculture that is expressly designed to provide everyone, everywhere, with food of the highest standard, nutritionally and gastronomically, without wrecking the rest of the world. In his enlightening book, Six Steps Back to the Land, he explains how we can achieve truly sustainable, resilient and productive farms, looking at why we need to rethink our approach to farming, how we can move to low-input mixed farms, and how tightly-integrated farms employ many skilled people, as well as the practicalities in today's world and how to deal with those.Informative, uplifting and deeply inspiring, Six Steps Back to the Land is perfect for anyone with an interest in our food chain, and includes lots of ideas on how to get involved and make a difference.

Everyone who is ever likely to be born on to this planet could be fed to the highest standards of nutrition and gastronomy-and this could be done without cruelty, or destroying our fellow creatures. By 2050 we will need to feed 9.5 billion people-which is as big as the world population is ever likely to get. To achieve this we need only to design farming expressly for the purpose-what in this book is called Enlightened AgricultureA". Good Food for Everyone Forever describes what's needed, and why. Picking up from his earlier book, Feeding People is Easy, the author introduces his radically new Campaign for Real FarmingA", intended to bring about nothing less than a people's takeover of the world's food supplyA".