morals

Book review – Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe

10-minute read
keywords: ornithology, philosophy

Ecologist Carl Safina needs little in the way of introduction, having written the lauded Beyond Words and Becoming Wild, and a score of earlier books. For me, he ranks right up there with modern science popularisers such as Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, and the late Frans de Waal for his thought-provoking and intensely beautiful writing. His latest book sees him captivated by a bird as he nurses back to health an orphaned screech owl. But Alfie & Me is far more than a memoir about one man’s friendship with a wild animal, as it sends him on a personal quest to better understand humanity’s relationship with nature throughout history. Come for the owls, stay for Safina’s philosophical reflections and piercing analysis of how the West came to see the natural world as a commodity to exploit and exhaust.

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Book review – Aesop’s Fables

7-minute read
keywords: fiction, mythology

This is the first of a two-part review delving deeper into the world-famous collection of animal tales known as Aesop’s Fables. In preparation for reviewing Aesop’s Animals from Bloomsbury Sigma, which looks at the facts behind the fiction, I decided to first read the fables themselves. I could not have picked a better time. The Bodleian Library has just published a collection of Aesop’s Fables with some scrumptious woodcut illustrations to boot.

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Book review – Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment

9-minute read

The best way to introduce this book is to quote the first sentence of the blurb: “Techno-Fix challenges the pervasive belief that technological innovation will save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fuelled binge known as modern industrial civilization“. Stinging, provocative, and radical, Techno-Fix puts its fingers on many a sore spot with its searing critique.

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Book review – Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things

If so many people are concerned about the environment, why do we still behave in ways that harm it? Many environmentalists will quickly argue that people just do not care or need more information. Professor of Environmental Studies Elizabeth R. DeSombre here argues that these answers are often wrong or incomplete. By considering research from a range of disciplines she is looking for a fuller explanation of why we behave the way we do. Only then can we hope to change how people achieve their goals in less destructive ways. And that, she daringly concludes, does not even require people to care about the environment.

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