Search results for ""author colin tudge""

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.

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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 Year Colin 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.

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All too plausibly, it seems, popes and scientists are warning us of impending collapse—yet humanity and our fellow creatures could still be looking forward to a long and glorious future: at least a million years of peace and personal fulfilment, with abundant and diverse wildlife. But to achieve this we need to re-think everything that we do and take for granted, from the day-to-day mundanities of growing and cooking, to the economy and methods of governance, to the most arcane reaches of science and metaphysics. It all amounts to nothing less than a Renaissance—a re-birth—and the Renaissance to come must be driven and led by us, ordinary Joes and Jos, because the oligarchy of governments, corporates, financiers, and their attendant intellectuals who now dominate the world have largely lost touch with the moral and ecological realities of life. The transformation won’t be easy but—the good news!—millions of grassroots initiatives of all kinds the world over are already moving in the right directions.

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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".

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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 Magazine When 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.

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