Carlo Rovelli is an internationally acclaimed writer whose books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland and White Holes, have been number one bestsellers around the world and translated into over forty languages. As a theoretical physicist, he has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time and he is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France.

Carlo Rovelli

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Alex Evans

Why, with absolutely no idea what Brexit actually meant, did the UK vote for Brexit? 
Why, rather than vote for the best-qualified candidate ever to stand as US President, did voters opt for a reality TV star with no political experience? 
In both cases, the winning side promised change and offered hope. They told a story voters longed to hear. And in the absence of greater, more unifying narratives, then true or not, voters plumped for the best story available. 
Once upon a time our society was rich in stories. They brought us together and helped us to understand the world and ourselves. We called them myths. Today, we have a myth gap – a vacuum that Alex Evans argues powerfully and persuasively is both dangerous and an opportunity. 
In this time of global crisis and transition– mass migration, inequality, resource scarcity, and climate change - It is stories, rather than facts and pie-charts,that will animate us and bring us together. It is by finding new myths, those that speak to us of renewal and restoration, that we will navigate our way to a better future. 
 
 
Drawing on his first-hand experience as a political adviser within British government and at the United Nations, and examining the history of climate change campaigning and recent contests such as Brexit and the US presidential election, Alex Evans explores: 
*how tomorrow’s activists are using narratives for change, 
* how modern stories have been used and abused, 
* where we might find the right myths that will take us forward

The Myth Gap

What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough

James Martin

James Martin, one of the world's most widely respected authorities on the impact of technology on society, argues that we are living at a turning point in human history. 'We are travelling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes - extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes in globalization. If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.' Although we face huge challenges and conflicts, Martin argues that it is in the scientific breakthroughs of the new century that we will find new hope. In a clear, penetrating and insightful style he addresses the key questions of our age and proposes an interconnected set of solutions to its problems.

The Meaning Of The 21st Century

A Vital Blueprint For Ensuring Our Future

Leo Hickman

How often in life does convenience triumph over 'doing the right thing? And what is 'ethical living' anyway? When it comes down to it, most people fight shy of giving up their cars, or their toxic household products, their cheap washing machines, or dodgy, unethical bank accounts in order to make the world a better place. So Leo Hickman, resident consumer expert of the Guardian, decided to give it a try. Over the course of a year, he and his family set out to discover whether it was possible to live a 'normal life' - job, mortgage, kids, holidays - while at the same time making each daily choice or decision an 'ethical' one - for the family, their neighbours and the environment. This the story of that year, is a record of an extraordinary transformation. Amid the pitfalls and confusion, Leo's account is funny, inspirational and a mine of information for the curious.

A Life Stripped Bare

My Year Trying To Live Ethically

Fred Pearce

What do City speculators, Gulf oil sheikhs, Chinese entrepreneurs, big-name financiers like George Soros and industry titans like Richard Branson buy when they go shopping? Land. Parcels the size of Wales are being snapped up across the plains of Africa, the paddy fields of Southeast Asia, the jungles of the Amazon and the prairies of Eastern Europe. Why? The money men will tell you that their investments will bring an end to world famine. But is this more about fat profits and food security for the few? 
 
The race is on to grab the world’s most precious and irreplaceable resource. In this brilliant piece of investigative journalism Fred Pearce moves from boardroom and trading floor to goat-herder’s hut and flooded forest. The result is an eye-opening, extraordinarily important examination of the most profound ethical and economic issue in the world today.

The Landgrabbers

The New Fight Over Who Owns The Earth

Richard Girling

We can no longer cope with our waste. Every hour in the UK we throw away enough rubbish to fill the Albert hall - a statistic quoted so often that perhaps we've stopped imagining what it means. And every year the flow accelerates. 
This is the story of our rubbish - from the first human bowel movement to the littering of outer space. With a hankerchief to his nose, Girling picks through our fridge mountain, our crumbling sewers, trading waste, packaging waste, hazardous industrial waste... it is a mucky saga of carelessness, greed and opportunism, wasted opportunity and official bungling. But Rubbish! is also a plea for us to consider other kinds of waste: the trashing of our landscape, the unstoppable floods of junk that clog our mailboxes, litter the skies and foul the airwaves... 
Rubbish! may not be a conventional battle cry but this is unmistakably a call to arms - not just for the three 'R's - reduce, re-use, recycle - but for us to fight for new ideas, brave initiative rather than reliance on old systems that are crumbling before our eyes.

Rubbish!

Dirt On Our Hands And Crisis Ahead

Maggie Campbell-Culver

A fascinating history of Britain's plant biodiversity and a unique account of how our garden landscape has been transformed over 1000 years, from 200 species of plant in the year 1000 to the astonishing variety of plants we can all see today. Thousands of plants have been introduced into Britain since 1066 by travellers, warriors, explorers and plant hunters - plants that we now take for granted such as rhododendron from the Far East, gladiolus from Africa and exotic plants like the monkey puzzle tree from Chile. 
 
Both a plant history and a useful reference book, Maggie Campbell-Culver has researched the provenance and often strange histories of many of the thousands of plants, exploring the quirky and sometimes rude nature of the plants, giving them a personality all of their own and setting them in their social context. 
 
The text is supported by beautiful contemporary paintings and modern photographs in 2 x 8 pp colour sections.

The Origin Of Plants

Alanna Mitchell

After winning the Global Reuters IUCN media award for excellence in environmental reporting, Alanna Mitchell launches herself on an odyssey that takes her around the world, zeroing in on it's environmental hotspots. Travelling from Madagascar to the Middle East, from the Arctic to the Galapagos Islands, her goal is to explore how humanity can flourish without destroying the planet. She begins with a term of study at Oxford University where she studies Darwin's theories. Darwin challenged the idea that the earth and its species were created for man's benefit and succeeded in overturning the accepted view. Today, we are at a similar crossroads, one where we need to come to terms with the fact that all creation is not here for us, that we are but one species dependent on other species and planetary life-support systems for our own existence. As his theories of evolution changed the whole way of Victorian thinking, so Alanna sets out to persuade us that we can accept a similar seismic change and learn to treat our environment in a way that will prolong, rather than shorten its shelf life.

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