Rachel Carson

‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil Amrith at the start of his melancholic new book, ‘I struggled to connect the scene before me.’ While the river that flows through Bangkok looked idyllic, ‘crowded with noisy pleasure boats festooned with lights’, Amrith was struck by the realisation that half of the city ‘could be underwater by the end of this century’. This thought was the latest stage in a process that he says has taken him time to work out: ‘I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers? The extreme heat of the Sun at its core makes it the place least hospitable to life – yet it is equally the source of the whole process. Perhaps the greatest of all associated questions is whether humans are subsumed within, or inexorably separated from,