Search results for ""Author Stephen Humphrey""

A tiny organism called pollen pulls off one of nature’s key tasks: plant reproduction. Pollination involves a complex network of different species interacting with one another and mutually adapting to their ecosystems, which are constantly changing.Some pollen grains require just a puff of wind to set them in motion, but most plants depend on creatures gifted with mobility. These might be birds, bats, reptiles, or insects including butterflies, beetles, flies, wasps, and over twenty thousand species of bee. In Paths of Pollen Stephen Humphrey asks readers to imagine a tipping point where plants and pollinators can no longer adapt to stressors such as urbanization, modern agriculture, and global climate change. Illuminating the science of pollination ecology through evocative encounters with biologists, conservationists, and beekeepers, Humphrey illustrates the significance of pollination to such diverse concerns as food supply, biodiversity, rising global temperatures, and the resilience of landscapes.As human actions erase habitats and raise the planet’s temperature, plant diversity is dropping and a growing list of pollinators faces decline or even extinction. Paths of Pollen chronicles pollen’s vital mission to spread plant genes, from the prehistoric past to the present, while looking towards an ecologically uncertain future.

Read more less

There are few areas of London that have changed in recent decades as much as the dockside areas of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. As the importance of London as a shipping port declined in the post-war years many of the city's docklands began to see changes. In Bermondsey and Rotherhithe almost the whole of the riverside was once devoted to the unloading and loading of goods of all kinds from ships that arrived from all over the world.The goods were stored in the gigantic warehouses that lined the rover and factories, with famous names, grew up to process them close to where they were unshipped and stored. To service and maintain the port industries a multitude of workers and their families lived and worked in the often cramped and narrow streets that ran around and between the port buildings.This book recalls the days when these communities were at the heart of British commerce and industry, and covers particularly the years from between the wars to a decade of two after the Second World War. Drawing on the excellent collection of photographs and memorabilia held in Southwark Local Studies Library, Stephen Humphrey reveals the sights and sounds of an industrial heritage that is now all but gone and an area that is now the scene of major redevelopment.

Read more less