Robert Mayhew
Energising Evolution
Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction
By Chris D Thomas
Allen Lane 320pp £20 order from our bookshop
Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction
By Britt Wray
Greystone Books 304pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
Popular ecology has always tended towards the jeremiad. ‘I think we’re fucked,’ wrote Stephen Emmott by way of conclusion to his recent 10 Billion, while numerous BBC natural history documentaries presented by the likes of David Attenborough have more politely implied the same thing. This tone of lamentation has a venerable pedigree, being deployed by Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s in his bestselling The Population Bomb and by Fairfield Osborn in the aftermath of the Second World War in Our Plundered Planet.
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