Jonathan Watts – författare

With foul air, filthy water, rising temperatures and encroaching deserts, China is already suffering an environmental disaster. Now it faces a stark choice: either accept catastrophe, or make radical changes. Traveling the vast country to witness this environmental challenge, Jonathan Watts moves from mountain paradises to industrial wastelands, examining the responses of those at the top of society to the problems and hopes of those below. At heart his book is not a call for panic, but a demonstration that - even with the crisis so severe, and the political scope so limited - the actions of individuals can make a difference.Consistently attentive to human detail, Watts vividly portrays individual lives in a country all too often viewed from outside as a faceless state. No reader of his book - no consumer in the world - can be unaffected by what he presents.

LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN AWARDA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'Splendid' GUARDIAN'Utterly fascinating' ROBERT MACFARLANE'A scientific life as dissonant as it was remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMESBased on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem.Lovelock's life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory - a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life. Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKLONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN AWARD'Splendid' GUARDIAN'Utterly fascinating' ROBERT MACFARLANE'A scientific life as dissonant as it was remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMESDrawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most important scientists of the modern age and the father of Gaia Theory. Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of the fascinating, sometimes contradictory man who changed the way we see the world.