Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? by Mark Cocker

We British think of ourselves as nature-lovers, but we actually “live in one of the most denatured and wildlife-impoverished countries on Earth”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. Mark Cocker’s “magnificent” book explores this disconnection. Using “rigorous” science, he paints a picture of wildlife “in free fall” – of 44 million pairs of breeding birds lost in the past 50 years, of “an eerie absence of moths on a summer night on your windscreen”. Meanwhile, we enthusiastically visit national parks, where we experience “landscape beauty almost devoid of biodiversity”. Cocker contends that in fact the British aren’t nature-lovers: we’re a nation of “fatally tidy-minded” gardeners.

This book contains some exquisite writing about nature, but it is always powerfully and insistently grounded in “its cause”, said Alex Preston in The Observer. Cocker is especially good on environmental politics, writing of the “diminution of the National Trust” from a “visionary organisation” to a “stuffy pillar of the heritage industry”. A radical polemic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Cobbett, Our Place is a “seriously great book, important and urgent”.