Charlotte Smith's Reading List

"Yes, exactly. It’s really powerful, partly because he starts as a child. The first bit is about when he was 11 and, when he finishes the book, he’s 94. My own father is 90 so I’m aware, in a really visceral sense, of just how much they’ve seen in their lives. When I talk to my dad, it’s like a history lesson sometimes and you can’t quite believe he was there for it. You get the same feeling with this book with Sir David Attenborough. He just writes so well, and so clearly, about what it was and what it is. Then the second part of the book is ‘That’s the problem. Those are my memories. This is the mess we’ve got ourselves into—and here’s what we can do about it.’ So it is a hopeful book, in the end. I should say that the book is written with somebody else, Jonnie Hughes. I feel sorry for Jonnie Hughes because it’s by Sir David Attenborough. We should mention Johnnie because Sir David does say, ‘Look, I didn’t do this on my own.’ Yes, this book is really accessible. It’s very readable. I think it’s because both Sir David and Johnnie write TV scripts. A TV script is quite sparse in comparison with writing a novel or a book, you have a lot fewer words. It really benefits from that because it’s readable and clear. I really liked it."

"This is an amazing book. It opened up a whole new world that I knew nothing about. Well, I knew a bit because some farmers do talk about the fungal roots beneath the soil, but I didn’t know enough. It’s really interesting. It’s a complex subject and he does navigate through it deftly. The book is fairly accessible, I’d say, and utterly absorbing. There’s a whole thing called the ‘wood wide web.’ The illustrations in the book are lovely and there’s a fantastic diagram of a tree and it’s got all these roots that go down and have a symbiotic relationship with these fungal things. I’m really simplifying this—if Merlin reads this, he’ll have a fit—but basically, the fungi and the roots of the tree have a symbiotic relationship and they then ‘communicate’ with other trees. So yes, there is more to mushrooms than you ever thought possible."

"This is beautifully written, really elegant. It’s a disquieting book, I would say. It made me think about whales a lot in a way that I hadn’t before. It’s compelling. There is a lot of information and it’s quite dense in part, but it’s clearly expressed. “We’ve done a lot of talking and not a lot of doing” Some of the things you read are shocking, some are absolutely fascinating. There’s a world in a whale’s stomach—they found plant pots and all sorts of things. Again, a little bit like Entangled Life , it’s about the interconnectedness of things. The book talks about a whale fall, which is when a whale dies and it falls to the bottom of the sea, and the process of that, but also about all the other things that happen that rely on that whale being there and dying. It’s about the interconnections in nature that you just don’t really think about. If they’re mucked up, we then have to think about them because we’ve broken something. Yes, from hunting them, to where they are now, to eating them to not eating them. It’s amazing."

"This is so beautifully written, it’s poetic. She takes us to a variety of places that we have, frankly, mucked up and then abandoned, or just abandoned. So, Chernobyl where we mucked it up and then ran away; Detroit where the economy collapsed, and there are just all these empty properties; Scottish slag heaps, ‘bings’ they call them, and they’re made from ‘blaes’ which are small bits of shale gravel; a Scottish island where the last people left in 1974, leaving their cattle behind. She then charts what happened next, how nature recovers and copes and, in some cases, invents something else, something that will put up with radiation, say. She doesn’t let us off. There’s no suggestion that ‘it’s okay, whatever we do, nature will survive it.’ You do realize it’s very bad, but it’s a beautiful book."

"The book is kind of ‘here’s the problem, here is how we got ourselves into this mess and here is Professor Dieter Helm’s idea of how we get ourselves out of it.’ We’re coming up to COP26 and he gives fairly short shrift to all the international efforts that we’ve made so far and says, ‘Here is what the UK could just get on and do.’ At the moment, we’re not counting the true cost of pollution . The person or the company that created it doesn’t pay for it. We’re also not counting properly the amount of emissions that we create offshore, which is pertinent at a time of free trade deals. We say, ‘It’s okay. We’re not growing chickens (or whatever it might be), we’re importing them. We can discount all those emissions because they happen in Australia. His point is, ‘yes, but they only happen because of us, so we should count them.’ I’m no economist, but it’s very readable and very clear, and quite angry. He is not happy. There’s a real sense of ‘Argh!’ throughout it. It’s more at the level of policy and the bigger picture. There’s a whole set of conclusions and he talks about having to go electric and the electric future, for example. There’s certainly stuff you can do. He’s not going to take any shilly-shallying; I don’t think he’d have much time for ‘Hang on I just need to…’ He’d say, ‘No! You don’t. You just need to get on with it.’"

"Under a White Sky is all about our attempt to control nature and then repair the impact of what we’ve done. It’s a book about solving the problems created by the people trying to solve the problems, as somebody rather neatly put it. It is really fascinating. It’s the law of unintended consequences: ‘We’ve got a problem with this. So we’ll dam it and we’ll reroute the river this way.’ And then, ‘Oh, hang on, all these rare fish are dying because we’ve stolen their water.’ And then we create a completely false place for them to live to survive. There’s a really nice bit, when she’s in Death Valley in the United States. She is staying in Las Vegas that night, at the hotel with the Eiffel Tower outside, Paris Las Vegas. And she says, ‘I’m in my fake French room, and I’m looking at the fake Eiffel Tower. I could go down to the fake French bar. Maybe this is how those fish feel. They’re in this completely fake environment, to try and keep them alive because we were doing something else and mucked up their actual habitat.’ There is, with a British academic who was working in the States, in Hawaii. I noticed in the acknowledgements that she died. She discovered that for some reason—they don’t really know why—some types of coral are surviving. In a rather pragmatic way, they’re trying to breed that type of coral because they’re not convinced that we’ll get our act together. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a really interesting look—as all these books are—at what we’ve done when we weren’t trying to do it. Like Fathoms : nobody set out to rid the world of whales, and all the things that depend on whales being there. Nobody set out to upset a very complicated fungal system that we didn’t know was there. But our efforts have an impact and that’s what these books are about. It’s probably more downbeat, I would say. All of the books do have hope, but with a lot of them you feel the author’s frustration. All of them are, in their different ways, experts on what they’re talking about. You feel the complexity of the solution because the problem is so complex now that the solutions are complex. As Dieter Helm would point out, we’ve done a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. I’m not an environmental journalist, but I do do countryside journalism and the depth of my ignorance shocks me. I didn’t know anything about fungi or whales, I didn’t know about Islands of Abandonment . I knew a bit more about Net Zero because I’ve interviewed Dieter Helm. But there is that moment when you just think, ‘Wow, everyone should know this.’ I was reading the whales book, Fathoms , on holiday. And I kept saying, ‘Oh, did you know?’ and reading it out loud. All these books are a little bit like that, there are bits when you will find yourself quoting them in a slightly irritating way to your friends and family because all the stuff in them is so interesting. We’ve got the meeting tomorrow when we’ve got to pick the winner and I have no idea which one will win. I’d really like everyone to read the shortlist and not just the winner. Whichever book wins, there will be others which could have/should have. They are all weirdly hopeful and well worth reading. The winner of The Wainwright Prize, sponsored by James Cropper , was announced on Tuesday September 7th. Part of our best books of 2021 series."

"The concept of this book is, I suppose, relatively simple, in that he goes to places that we may or may not be about to lose, and talks about the whys and wherefores. Which makes it sound quite boring, doesn’t it? Which it really and absolutely isn’t! “You could sit quite happily on a beach and read some of these, because they’re really well-written, clever, and in some cases lyrical books” I thought this was a wonderful book. It’s beautifully written. And it’s quite sobering as well, in that he goes to beautiful and exotic-sounding places around the world – but also places that are sort of… just slightly above bog-standard countryside, if you see what I mean, and explains, through the people who live and work in them, why these places matter so much. There’s a really strong sense in this book of the importance of place to humans, which perhaps we don’t talk about enough. It’s sobering. But I think it’s a hopeful book – defiant, and full of life and love. It’s a lovely book. Well, you could ask ten people that very same question and get ten different opinions. I think what Julian Hoffman would say – having never met the man – is that there are some places that we really need to fight to save. And there are other places, although he doesn’t talk about them, you could stand to lose. I think, you know, all of the books have a strong message about being quite realistic about where we are and what we have to do – inconvenient, expensive and hard work as it might be. Rather than just thinking, ‘we’ll shove it over there, because there’s nothing else there.’ Because, actually, there’s an awful lot of stuff there."

"Yes, our impact on this world, the way we have changed the world. This is really interesting. She talks about her genetically-modified wolf, her domesticated wolf – which is her dog. And you think: ‘oh yeah!’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She goes right back to the invention of farming, and how that changed everything. I learned almost an embarrassing amount from this book, given what I do for a living. Pilcher has a really light touch as well. It could be boring, this kind of book, but it’s actually really funny. It has really wry comments that just make you laugh, while discussing the huge impact of what she describes as “a bolshy bi-pedal primate.” Exactly. The law of unintended consequences runs through this book, in that I’m sure when people started doing whatever they started doing, they didn’t think about the knock-on effects. That’s a theme running through it. But, again, it doesn’t say, ‘abandon hope.’ We’ve been clever enough to do all of this; we should be clever enough to sort out some of the problems we’ve created. She’s optimistic that this bolshy primate will be able to find a way out."

"There’s a quote on the back of this book from Bill Oddie: “Having read a number of the recent books about rewilding, I was tempted to think, oh blimey, not another one!” I completely agree with Bill Oddie; when I picked this up, I thought, ‘I can’t be bothered to read this.’ But I’m really glad I did. Not only is it beautifully written and a joy to read, it’s really interesting, just a really good book. He writes absolutely beautifully, and although there’s loads of detail in it, it doesn’t feel like you’re being lectured. “We should be clever enough to sort out the problems we’ve created” Again, he goes back to really quite a long time ago to talk about how we got here, but then has very particular and practical ways that he thinks should improve things, particularly for birds, which is his thing. So it’s problems and solutions not only for birds, but also for rural communities. Not everyone will agree with the conclusions that he reaches for, but his arguments are persuasively written, so at least there’s something to discuss. We can all say, ‘Oh dear, isn’t it awful? How dreadful.’ But at least if somebody says, ‘well, why don’t we do this?’ then you can have a discussion about it. He’s got some wonderful, detailed thoughts about how you can go about improving things. No. It doesn’t read like a polemic, because it’s very inviting. You don’t feel like you’re being shouted at. Or, well, maybe. It’s good. Yes, it’s clever. You don’t have to agree with him to find the book interesting."

"Okay. So, again, another seemingly simple idea: let’s look at things through food. Now, I’m obsessed with food. I like cooking. I love eating. And this is really, really interesting, very wide-ranging. It looks at the world through the prism of food, covering everything from land use to philosophy, culture, and many contemporary issues like, for example, obesity. A lot of information, from a writer whose sense of humour comes through. Thank god. Because, again, in this book there are times when you think, ‘hang on a minute,’ and you have to go back and have another think about what she’s just told you. But it’s got a smile on, as well as a slightly annoyed tone. Well, food governs everything, doesn’t it? I’m going to put this quite crudely, with apologies to Carolyn Steel who does this much better, but what you buy dictates how land is used – how intensively it’s used, what it’s used for and where that land is. Do you buy something that was grown here? Do you buy something that was grown far away? Your decisions about food influence so many things. So it really impacts on conservation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Food is a problem in many ways for us at the moment – it makes us fat and unhealthy. But the way some of it is grown, particularly in Western societies, can fuel climate change. As everything! Even as someone who works in farming and food, this book makes you realise how food cuts across everything. It has really interesting things about the philosophy of food, and how other civilisations looked at food. I found it such an interesting book."

"So this is quite a different book to all the others, because it pretty much says, ‘right, these are the problems, here are my solutions.’ It’s very clear, and gives you ten areas for action. It’s a manifesto for change and how to do it. Again, it’s readable, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. Not everyone is going to agree with all the solutions that Chris thinks we should all do, but he does break it down in a way that makes all the challenges doable, rather that making us feel that it’s all so dreadful that there’s nothing we can do. This book is like, ‘no, we can do this, this, this.’ Even if you disagree, it shows there is a way through. “if you say to people, ‘you’ve got to read this book because it’s good for you,’…I’d be the first one leading the charge out the door ” I think it’s interesting that one of his priorities in the book is insulating houses, which was part of the British government’s green recovery plan, announced just a few weeks ago. It gave me massive boasting rights because I knew everything, having just read this chapter. It’s really interesting and it’s nice to have something that says, ‘this is how we should make it work.’ Again, even if there’s disagreement, you’ll have a conversation. Well, Chris Goodall would say that we definitely do know, and we just need to get on with it. That’s what Chris Goodall would like. For many of the rest of us, it’s just: ‘show me what I need to do, and I’ll do it.’ But as someone who wants to learn… You know, one of the reasons I wanted to judge this prize was that I thought the books would teach me things I didn’t know. And they really have. I think reading them has made me change some of my views. It has certainly changed me and inspired me, reading these books."

"This is a game changer. I mean, this book has been a lifetime in the making, because Jeremy has had such an amazing life. It’s global in outlook, because his career has been all over the world. He says, ‘I was in so-and-so, and this is how it works there.’ I had no idea that place even existed, let alone that that’s how it works! Also, he’s worked alongside engineers, so it’s all about solutions. Here’s a problem: let’s work it out. What’s really lovely about it is that it’s his professional lifetime – in fact, it starts from when he was a small child. It has that feel of time – the way your experience shapes you and your attitudes. That’s right. Yes. He would try to work with the local community to find a solution that got whatever result you wanted, engineering-wise, but preserved what you could and was also respectful of the way people traditionally used that area. So, as an environmentalist and ecologist, he’s worked on massive projects. And because he’s done it over a long time, it’s interesting to see what you can achieve when you actually talk to people, and with patience. Exactly. And, even in the Chris Goodall book, which is very much ‘here’s the problem, here’s the solution,’ the solution is not: ‘so let’s all go live in a mud hut,’ you know? It’s: ‘let’s do something different.’ ‘Let’s have a carbon tax’, or, ‘let’s use more electric cars.’ Let’s do it like this , you know? Sometimes not very glamorous things. It’s not a rallying cry, is it? ‘Insulate your house!’ But actually it’s really important, because of the scale. A little bit like how Irreplaceable is not talking about the most beautiful national park in the history of the world, it’s about saving that little patch of green that’s really important to the thousand people who live within five minutes’ walk. No, no, no! I think if you say to people, ‘you’ve got to read this book because it’s good for you,’ then, I mean, I’d be the first one leading the charge out the door! These are all a good read . You could sit quite happily on a beach and read some of these. Because they’re really well-written, clever, and in some cases lyrical books. And what they’re doing is challenging us to think differently and to get off our backsides and do something. The winner will be announced on September 8th, 2020. wainwrightprize.com"