This is the former rock producer’s account of how he built the biggest greenhouse in the world in a vast clay pit, filled it with a rainforest, and in the Eden Project created Cornwall’s biggest tourist attraction. A lively read, the book does not match seeing the real thing; and if you’ve seen it, the book is rather superfluous.These lavish tomes are all meant to be money-spinners, but you may not find yourself engaging with them For engagement, look elsewhere. Look at Brian Clarke’s The Stream (Swan Hill Press, £14.95), the minutely-detailed account of the death of a small English chalk river through intensive farming, pollution and industrial development. This modern parable, by some distance the most moving environmental book of the year, won two prizes, The BP Natural World Book Award and the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award (it pipped Zadie Smith), yet you won’t have seen it displayed in any major book chain No TV series, you see They will order it, if you insist. Insist.The year’s most unusual and fascinating environmental book has been similarly invisible. Michael Salmon’s The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (Harley Books, Colchester, £30) opens the door into a lost world, that of the clergymen and solicitors and gentlemen of leisure, Victorian and earlier, who found lepidoptery a passion all-consuming and never travelled without a net.
Read about the great Henry Tibbats Stainton, Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe and his gamekeeper-companion Agathos Pegg, not to mention Laetitia Jermyn, contemporary of Jane Austen and author of The Butterfly Collector’s Vade Mecum of 1824.Laetitia married a clergyman and one Sunday, engrossed in her collecting, was late for his morning service. When she arrived he paused in his sermon and hissed: “I wonder where you will be, Madam, when the last trumpet sounds.” A wonderful work, an absolute labour of love, this book too will need ordering. A good year for butterfly books also saw The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, £30), the handsomest of atlases, which every present-day butterfly admirer will want on their shelves.The year’s most important environmental book will, yet again, be hard to find almost everywhere. Climate Change 2001: the scientific basis (Cambridge University Press, £34.99) gives chapter and verse on the present state of knowledge and prediction of global warming from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel Buy it to settle any arguments.
The year’s most controversial green book was The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge, £17.95), the attempt by Danish statistics professor Bj?Lomborg to demolish the notion that the state of the world is ever deteriorating He partially succeeds. Buy it to annoy your chums in Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.A few to look out for: The Forgiveness of Nature by Graham Harvey (Cape, £17.99), the surprisingly interesting biography of grass in all its forms; The Last Horsemen by Charles Bowden (Granada, £16.99), an account of Britain’s one remaining horse-powered farm in Northumberland; and The End of British Farming by Andrew O’Hagan (Profile Books, £5.99), which contains a gripping account of what it was like to be a slaughterman at the height of this year’s foot-and-mouth epidemic.These you may find in your High Street bookshop. It remains the case that the ones you won’t find, The Stream and The Aurelian Legacy especially, are the environmental books of 2001 which are most like those prized wild mushrooms Go that extra mile and garner them Enjoyable? C?s and chanterelles ain’t in it.. Though the great bebop trumpeter was overshadowed by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Gillespie’s dress, particularly his goatee and beret, has influenced a tranche of Bohemian youth since the Forties. In this prodigiously researched biography, Shipton insists that Gillespie’s impact was much more profound: “he was a far more wide-ranging, innovative and original musician than Parker.” Like Armstrong, his reputation suffered from jokiness and longevity.
