Philippa Kaur

The Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies among members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) aims to eliminate those subsidies that lead to overfished stocks (see Nature 641, 821; 2025). It has been accepted by 108 member states and will hopefully enter into force this year, pending acceptance by three more members. But it risks failure without investment in the science that underlies it.
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The authors declare no competing interests. More

Modern foods, medicines and textiles depend on millennia of selective breeding by Indigenous peoples, generating species with useful genetic properties — but these efforts have been mostly uncompensated (C. Lawson et al. J. Intellect. Prop. Law Pract. 19, 337–357; 2024). In late 2024, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity established the Cali Fund to accept voluntary corporate payments for use of genetic information. This fund would support biodiversity and pay Indigenous peoples for their contributions. It remains empty.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

At first glance, Ruben Jorge’s farm near the village of Penha Garcia in eastern Portugal doesn’t seem all that unusual. But look closer, and signs emerge that Jorge is shedding tradition in the hope of future-proofing his farm.Between the rows of chestnut and pistachio saplings, a mix of grasses covers the ground where a stretch of bare dirt would typically be — a deliberate attempt to prevent erosion. To retain water, Jorge has wrapped a blanket of wood chips around the base of each sapling. And among the young trees grow yellow lupin flowers, known as tremocilha in Portuguese, that have a special power: they capture nitrogen and store it underground.“It’s a natural fertilizer,” Jorge says, looking out over the field of chest-high saplings under an intense springtime Sun. The flowers, mowing and mulch are part of Jorge’s transition to regenerative agriculture, a method of farming that prioritizes soil health, boosts biodiversity, minimizes tilling and uses pesticides sparingly. “Anything that we can do that adds resilience to the land, that preserves this land for the future, is always a better option,” Jorge says, “as long as it’s economically viable, of course.”What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planetThe future is coming hard at Europe — the fastest-warming continent on the planet since the 1980s1. In just the past few years, farmers on the Iberian Peninsula have struggled with shrivelled crops, shrinking water supplies and more-frequent wildfires. Going forwards, the economic hit to the European Union and the United Kingdom from drought alone could reach more than €65 billion (US$76 billion) each year by 2100, in part because of crop damage and lost water supplies2.With an estimated 4 °C of warming expected over the next 75 years if no action is taken to curb or adapt to climate change, southern and western Europe could lose 10% of its agricultural economic output2. Meanwhile, widespread erosion continues to sweep away soil, taking with it crucial nutrients and increasing the risk of flooding and landslides. Between 60% and 70% of soils in the EU are degraded, according to the European Commission.These mounting risks are leading farmers such as Jorge to bet on regenerative agriculture. Together with climate advocates and scientists, they increasingly see these practices as key to withstanding changing climatic conditions — and to helping farmers stay in business. And Europe is showing how it can be done, they say.“We believe right now we’re at a point where the grassroots are spreading,” says Simon Krämer, executive director at the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA), a farmer-led advocacy group in Berlin that was founded in 2023. According to Krämer, about 2% of farms in Europe are fully regenerative, and another 5–10% are on the regenerative path.This budding regenerative revolution now faces some headwinds, however. After farmer protests across Europe in 2023 and 2024, the EU has backed away from some environmental requirements for the agricultural sector, and farmers say that incentives fall short of what’s needed to help them make the transition.But many advocates expect that the momentum behind regenerative agriculture will continue to build, particularly given Europe’s need to meet its commitments to restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And farmers and researchers around the world are carefully watching Europe’s attempts to pull off one of the biggest transitions in agriculture in generations. Regenerative agriculture, Krämer says, “is the most important farmer and science movement in the world”.Saving the soilIn Portugal and many other parts of the globe, farmers are coming to realize that what worked for their parents and grandparents is no longer viable. To survive increasingly harsh conditions, they need to rethink how they farm – from the soil up.About 180 kilometres south of Jorge’s farm, just outside the tiny cobblestoned hamlet of Assumar, Herberto Brunk is undertaking his own regenerative experiment. As he manoeuvres his black Peugeot truck up his long dirt driveway, he stops between two of his fields. On the left, Brunk has planted mixed grasses as ground cover. On the right is a thriving field dominated by buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) with some millet, pumpkin and sunflowers mixed in. A few months later, after a dry summer, he decided not to harvest the buckwheat and to leave it as a cover crop instead. Kept intact, it has helped to prevent nitrogen from leaching out of the soil.Much of the work Brunk is doing is aimed at improving the soil — the foundation for a healthy bottom line. “Our main goal is to actually recover the soil, get our organic matter up, get our nutrients recycled and reduce as much as possible the erosion,” Brunk says. He’s already beginning to see some positive results: “At the moment, we don’t have any erosion at all due to water.”Brunk is working to increase the amount of carbon stored in his farm’s soil.Credit: Barbora MrazkovaAnd Brunk says his farm is likely to be more resilient during wildfires. In August, as fires burnt across Portugal, he helped his neighbour, a cattle grower, to put out a fire. If it had reached Brunk’s property, he says, it probably wouldn’t have done much damage because the fields are green and well hydrated.This is year three of Brunk’s five-year plan, and he doesn’t expect to see a profit for a while. But both Jorge and Brunk are hopeful that the eventual pay-off will be worth the wait. For them, the regenerative approach is not only a way to restore the soil — it’s also good for business in the long run.Improving the soil will help to retain water, protecting it from drought, says Brunk. He has also seen the amount of carbon in his soils increase from 1.9% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2024 — more than halfway to his goal of 6%. Under a new partnership with Terra Madre, a company based in Porto, Portugal, that helps farmers transition to regenerative agriculture, he will receive payments for increasing the amount of carbon stored in plants and the soil; companies buy carbon credits based on this sequestered carbon to offset their pollution.The practices that Brunk and Jorge are deploying — planting cover crops, rotating crops, reducing tilling, integrating trees — can help to protect their farms against the vagaries of a changing climate, says Thomas Elmqvist, a sustainability scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He co-wrote a 2022 report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council on the state of regenerative agriculture in Europe. “There is fairly strong scientific evidence for the practices having an impact,” he says.For example, growing different crops on the same field in rotation can boost the number and types of microorganisms in the soil3. And a 2021 meta-analysis4 spanning 85 countries showed that diversifying crops in this way increased the biodiversity of other plants and animals by 24%. Growing a variety of crops brings a host of other benefits: the study also found the practice led to a 51% increase in water quality, a 63% boost in pest and disease control and an 11% spike in soil quality.How farming could become the ultimate climate-change toolA 2022 study5 using soil samples from 1,267 farm sites across Germany found that tripling the area used to grow cover crops could boost the amount of organic carbon added to the soil by 12% within 50 years.When it comes to crop yields, the results are less clear. A 2019 review6, for example, found that using cover crops decreased grain production by 4%, but including legumes such as clover in the cover crop could increase yields by 13%.Other studies show positive trends in terms of profitability for farmers. In June, Krämer’s group released a multi-year analysis7 that looked at 78 farms across 14 European countries. The results, which have not been published in a scientific journal but were reviewed by agricultural experts across Europe, found that farms that had adopted regenerative practices used 61% less synthetic nitrogen and 75% less pesticides than did their conventional counterparts. Per hectare, regenerative farms also achieved a 20% higher margin (the difference between income and costs).And a 2023 analysis of regenerative farms in Germany by Krämer and his co-authors — written for the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consultancy firm — reported that these operations should be at least 60% more profitable after six to ten years compared with conventional farms using other approaches.But what works in one location might not work in another, Elmqvist says. “More long-term studies are needed to fully understand the sustainability and profitability of regenerative practices over multiple growing seasons, in different regions and under different climatic conditions,” he says.A push for reformOn paper, at least, the EU has some of the world’s most ambitious commitments to sustainable agriculture, several of which encourage a regenerative approach. But in practice, observers say, the bloc has struggled to deliver on those promises.In 2020, after a brutal European heatwave in 2019, the EU committed to building a food system that “works for consumers, producers, climate and the environment”. It had also launched its signature environmental law in 2019, the European Green Deal, which aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. And, last year, the bloc adopted a landmark nature-restoration law, which includes a requirement for member states to boost biodiversity on farmlands.Reducing the amount of soil disturbance has helped Brunk to avoid erosion in his fields.Credit: Barbora MrazkovaThe bloc now funds an initiative to help farmers to scale up regenerative practices and, in February, it unveiled a road map that calls for farmers to be compensated for increasing carbon storage, boosting biodiversity and providing other environmental benefits. If implemented, this should encourage more farmers to make the switch to regenerative agriculture, says Teresa Pinto Correia, a landscape ecologist at the University of Évora in Portugal, who served on a recent EU-funded task force for regenerative agriculture.“I think it will help,” says Correia. “There’s a strong economic argument.”

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“I study the marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus), a species indigenous to the Galápagos Islands, a province of Ecuador in the eastern Pacific.Iguanas are stoic, placid and funny creatures. My PhD project focused on understanding the differences between the various species present in the Galápagos. Initially, I thought I would just sit in the laboratory extracting DNA from samples sent by collaborators in Ecuador. One of my early frustrations was a lack of realistic population-size estimates for the Galápagos species, which are scattered across inaccessible parts of the archipelago.At the end of my PhD in 2015, a colleague suggested I look into drone technologies to survey remote locations. And that small idea grew into a project called Iguanas from Above. After securing funding in 2020 from Leipzig University in Germany and the Galapagos Conservation Trust, a UK charity, I returned to the archipelago to test the feasibility of the approach. Now, just a few years later, my team and I have surveyed the whole archipelago, helped by more than 17,000 online volunteers.

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Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Future Edited by Peter Vanham, Ross Chainey and Gemma Parkes Routledge (2025)As biodiversity loss accelerates alongside the climate crisis, businesses are increasingly recognizing their role in both causing and potentially solving this planetary emergency. The scale of the problem is stark: humans and our livestock now make up around 96% of all land-based mammal biomass, leaving just 4% for the world’s remaining wild species. But progress in combating such losses remains too slow.Becoming Nature Positive offers an ambitious, timely and comprehensive guide for organizations seeking not only to reduce harms but also to regenerate nature in an active way. With more than two dozen contributors, this volume provides both theoretical grounding and practical strategies. It comes at a crucial time, as the world is working out how to meet the goal of the 2022 Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030.Environmental politics is doomed to fail — unless we tell better storiesIn the opening sections, Marco Lambertini, convenor of the Nature Positive Initiative and former director-general of WWF, the conservation group headquartered in Gland, Switzerland, traces the story of the ‘nature positive’ movement. This growing global community is committed to doing more than halting and reversing biodiversity loss: its aim is that, by 2030, the world has more nature than it did in 2020 and, by 2050, all ecosystems will have recovered.Lambertini charts the movement’s emergence through early United Nations initiatives, such as the Decade on Biodiversity in the 2010s, through to the pivotal 2019 meetings in Davos, Switzerland, leading to biodiversity loss appearing as a top-ten issue for the first time in the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report. The adoption of the 30% goal under the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2022 was a step as groundbreaking for nature as the 2015 Paris climate agreement was for climate.But much remains to be done, as global assessments continue to show. The UN Environment Programme’s 2024 Protected Planet Report (see go.nature.com/3hc330h) reveals that 17.6% of land and 8.4% of ocean areas are now protected — an increase since 2020 that is equivalent to twice Colombia’s size. But to meet the target, this still leaves areas the size of Brazil and Australia combined on land, and an area larger than the Indian Ocean at sea, requiring protected designation by 2030.Pragmatic solutionsWhat distinguishes this compilation from many others is its refusal to promise simple solutions, instead acknowledging the complexity and scale of change required across business, finance, policy and society at large.The book’s honest assessment of implementation barriers is particularly valuable. The authors acknowledge that, despite increasing corporate commitments, large gaps remain between rhetoric and action. By 2021, only 10% of firms in the Fortune 100 list of top US companies by revenue had specific, measurable, time-bound biodiversity targets. That’s twice as many as in 2016, but progress is much too slow (S. O. S. E. zu Ermgassen et al. J. Clean. Prod. 379, 134798 (2022); see also go.nature.com/47vfnw3).Examples of what can work are offered in Eva Zabey’s excellent chapter on business engagement. As chief executive of Business for Nature, a business coalition driving nature-positive action on the global stage, Zabey provides an insider’s perspective on the corporate awakening to biodiversity issues. She goes beyond categorizing businesses as either part of the problem or part of the solution, to explore the nuanced reality of different business types.The peaks of Cuernos del Paine in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile.Credit: Marco Bottigelli/GettyLarge companies, for instance, have the resources, scale and reach through their supply chains to drive significant environmental gains quickly, if they integrate nature-positive practices into their core strategies. Smaller firms can be more agile, piloting innovative approaches and influencing local economies and communities.Purpose-led businesses often set ambitious standards and lead by example, whereas profit-driven firms can shift entire markets when regulations and incentives align. Some companies will transform their value chains and set global benchmarks. Others will pioneer innovative business models or foster grassroots change. Zabey makes clear that actions from all types of company are needed to move the nature needle in the right direction.Why the green-technology race might not save the planetZabey also demonstrates how language enables, as well as shapes, action. Her discussion of how concepts such as natural capital (the value of everything that comes from the natural world) and ecosystem services (the direct benefits people receive from nature, including fresh air to breathe) have enabled business participation is insightful.Such terms translate matters of ecological concern into economic and managerial language that resonates with corporate decision makers. Similarly, framing a wetland as ‘flood protection infrastructure’ recasts the natural world as an asset class or service provider, and thus makes it easier to integrate biodiversity into business models, investment decisions and policy frameworks.Clear thinkingIndeed, competing definitions of nature positive have been a challenge, creating a blind spot in which businesses and policymakers can talk past each other or measure progress differently. Some businesses focus on reducing harms, others on restoration, and yet others consider a more general sustainability agenda. Such confusion elevates the risk of ‘greenwashing’, in which companies portray themselves as acting on sustainability when they are, in fact, doing little. It paints an unclear picture for those setting policy agendas and misses opportunities for collaboration.

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“Since 2012, I’ve worked with the Tonkawa Foundation, in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Mexico, on the recovery of the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), a grey-wolf subspecies that had been hunted to near-extinction by the 1980s.Reintroducing wolves to the Chihuahua region will restore ecological balance and help to regulate other wildlife populations. The Mexican wolf’s return not only helps to conserve biodiversity but also represents an act of reconciliation with a species that humans persecuted for decades.One of the main challenges has been obtaining accurate data in areas with complex terrain to understand how the wolves are adapting. Using camera traps, radio collars, direct observations and track and scat analyses, I collect information about their movements and behaviours.We estimate that 25–30 Mexican wolves now live in the region. It’s early days but their presence is already affecting the distribution of other predators such as pumas, hinting at an ecological rebalance.Public perception remains another challenge. Wolves are not always welcome, especially in areas with livestock farms, so we work closely with landowners to monitor the wolves without generating conflict.

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Mary Hagedorn, who studies cryopreservation of corals, wants to put a biobank on the Moon.Credit: Marco GarciaWorking scientist profilesThis article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests.Mary Hagedorn has spent decades studying coral reproduction as part of an effort to save reefs from being destroyed by rapidly warming oceans. To collect precious fragments of new coral life, she must carefully synchronize her activities to the Moon’s phases.Corals breed at or near a full moon, releasing a blizzard of sperm and eggs into shimmering waters, but the unpredictability of which full moon corals choose makes fieldwork a gamble. On one trip “we dove for 60 nights straight” before capturing the magic moment, Hagedorn says.The patience and persistence required to collect coral sperm, cryopreserve it, transport it to the laboratory for rearing coral larvae and then releasing them into the ocean could serve her well for another planned mission: a literal moonshot to preserve threatened organisms.Working Scientist career profilesHagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Kāne‘ohe, Hawaii, is part of an interdisciplinary team proposing to build a frozen repository in a permanently shadowed polar area on the far side of the Moon. Initially, the effort would focus on cryopreserving a veritable Noah’s ark of Earth’s animal life. It would start by banking tissue samples from endangered and threatened animals, as well as from priority species. These would include pollinators and ecosystem engineers such as beavers, that, through dam-building, create whole systems of aquatic environments for other organisms. Hagedorn and ten collaborators published the lunar biorepository idea in 2024 in the journal BioScience as a backup plan for biodiversity — a way to introduce life back to Earth, or to other planets, in the event of catastrophic loss (M. Hagedorn et al. BioScience 74, 561–566; 2024).She likens the planned repository to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway, which stores seeds of genetic importance for food, agriculture and biodiversity in a rocky cavern deep under an icy mountain held at −18 °C. It’s an ambitious idea that faces many challenges, including a political climate in which science in the United States and beyond is being undermined and underfunded, especially when related to the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, the lunar biorepository idea is gaining traction and being given serious consideration.“We wanted something that could act like Svalbard,” but there’s no place on Earth that is naturally cold enough, says Hagedorn. Even Svalbard needs refrigeration to keep its samples frozen. In 2016, extraordinarily warm winter temperatures sent a flood of melt water into the vault’s entrance. It was a wake-up call for a facility thought to be a fail-safe because it is surrounded by permafrost.Thinking big, and extraterrestrially, Hagedorn reasoned that the lunar south pole is spared the vagaries of climate and temperature (see ‘Quick-fire Q&A’). Being stored under the Moon’s surface, also protects the samples from another damaging factor: radiation. Another advantage is the Moon’s lack (so far) of war, violence, natural disasters, overpopulation and resource depletion. Samples could be stored and retrieved using robots similar to the Mars rovers.Addressing criticism that retrieving samples could be challenging, Hagedorn responds that, barring an apocalypse, “we will be travelling into space regularly in the future”.Quick-fire Q&AIf you could do a site visit for a biorepository on the Moon, would you go?In a heartbeat. I would love to go into space. I actually applied to be an astronaut with NASA, but my eyesight was not good enough.Every author on our 2024 BioScience paper proposing the biorepository is like me — they’re frustrated astronauts, sci-fi buffs or both.How did your biorepository team come together?Around 2015, I was giving a talk in London about biorepositories in general. I said, “you know, one of the best places we could probably have a biorepository is on the Moon”.Then, I brought this concept up at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and the response of my colleagues there was, “this is really stupid — don’t do this”. So I didn’t pursue it, for about four years. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, I had some time, and I decided to get a group together, meeting on Zoom. It just grew from there.What is the biggest challenge to getting this project off the ground?Money. This project is going to cover so many different areas, from space engineering to ethics, and there are going to be a lot of scientific changes and breakthroughs.It’s all new territory; I think that is going to be very exciting. We just have to be patient and try to get some small grants to keep us going. There will be a way.Composite image of the lunar south pole.Credit: Stocktrek Images/GettyLocation, location, locationOne favoured site for a lunar bio-repository lies in a crater some 6 kilometres deep, “way deeper than the Grand Canyon” in Arizona, Hagedorn says. In this permanently shadowed space, the temperature is stable — at or below −196 °C.Protecting Earth’s life must be a top priority in the rush to stake out lunar sites for industry and research, argue Hagedorn and her co-authors, whose expertise encompasses cryobiology, medicine, engineering, atmospheric research, coral and fish biology, and law and policy. They issued an open call for others to collaborate on this ambitious, decades-long programme.The process would start by banking skin samples that contain fibroblast cells. Those fibroblasts are isolated from a cell-culture process, and then cryopreserved. They can later be thawed and transformed into sperm and egg cells from the specific species. Eventually, whole organisms could be reintroduced into their natural habitat.A sit in the sauna can save endangered frogsAs proof of concept, the team will test one species on the International Space Station. The researchers plan to cryopreserve pelvic fins from a coral-reef dwelling fish aptly named the starry goby (Asterropteryx semipunctata), and test them in space for sensitivity to radiation and microgravity. They will also refine the optimal storage materials for cryopreserved cells and study how frozen storage in space affects DNA and the ability to derive and culture cells from thawed fin samples.Once the team works out the kinks for starry gobies, it wants to expand to other species. There are plans to collaborate with continental-scale sampling already being undertaken by entities such as the National Ecological Observatory Network, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and collects 100,000 biological samples annually from freshwater and terrestrial habitats.Cryobiology, corals and lunar missions were not always Hagedorn’s focus. After earning a PhD in marine biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, in 1983, Hagedorn next studied the physiology of electric fishes and a cichlid fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) as a postdoctoral fellow. That research abruptly ended after a boating accident in the Peruvian Amazon claimed the lives of two colleagues. Hagedorn could not bring herself to go back, but realized she wanted to work on the impacts of warming oceans, which led her to bleached and dying coral — the ocean’s canary in the coal mine.An article by Canadian molecular physiologist Ken Storey, on the ability of tree frogs to freeze solid in winter and thaw again in spring (K. B. Storey and J. M. Storey Sci. Am. 263, 92–97; 1990), sparked the idea of using cryobiology for ocean conservation work. “Nothing had been done at the time with cryo-preservation of corals,” says Hagedorn. She received a mid-career fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC in 1996 to start work on fish-embryo cryopreservation. In 2004, she transferred her lab group to Hawaii, expanding the scope of her work to include developing techniques for coral cryopreservation.The lunar biobank could start with tissue samples from corals and other endangered species.Credit: Andrew Heyward, AIMSMehmet Toner, a biomedical engineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has known Hagedorn for more than 30 years, says: “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world who knows coral biology and cryobiology like her.”Toner, Hagedorn and their colleagues are funded by the NSF as part of the ATP-Bio programme, which brings together partners from industry, academia, the non-profit sector and government to investigate how to cryo-preserve and store samples ranging from cells to whole organisms.Toner’s cryobiology research includes work to understand how to freeze and thaw cells without damaging them. “When I learned about the southern lunar pole being in cryogenic temperatures, it sparked my interest,” says Toner, a co-author of the lunar biorepository proposal.Moonstruck collaboratorsThe cryobiology involved in preserving life across a spectrum of biodiversity is extremely complex, he explains. “You’re taking a living thing to −196 °C and bringing it back” to the temperature of its habitat, alive. “I call that a miracle.” At the same time, he notes that cryobiology techniques have advanced significantly in the past 20–30 years. “It’s much more predictable and doable now,” he says.Toner notes that their team is not the only one vying for lunar real estate. “That part of the Moon is becoming very popular,” with scientists also proposing polar craters as sites for mines, telescopes and temporary human habitation. Indeed, NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to land humans on the Moon again, is encouraging the exploration of lunar resources.John Bischof, a bioengineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the director of ATP-Bio, notes Hagedorn’s talent for identifying scientists to join their team. “She’ll bring you into the collaboration, show you exactly where you can make the contribution, and explain why it’s so important. So, even before you do anything, you’re just so pumped up,” he says, describing her as enthusiastic and empathetic. “It’s fun to be around somebody like Mary,” says Bischof, describing her as “untethered in a good way”.This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting startedClaire Lager, Hagedorn’s lab manager since 2016, and once her graduate student, notes that “somebody who wants to put things on the Moon has to be optimistic, enthusiastic and very, very charismatic”, and that Hagedorn ticks all the boxes.

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A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer Jenny Uglow Faber & Faber (2025)The first person to identify harvest mice (Micromys minutus), Gilbert White was an eighteenth-century English curate and naturalist who has been called the ‘father of ecology’. Yet records from his student days show that he was not so much a quiet country gentleman as a lad about town, losing money at cards and buying fancy waistcoats. In her grandly illustrated book A Year with Gilbert White, historian Jenny Uglow looks between these extremes to investigate who White really was.She depicts a self-taught biologist who not only enjoyed wining and dining, but also took natural history out of stuffy dissecting rooms and into the wild. Spurning the dry descriptions of wildlife commonly used at the time, White’s only book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), brought colourful character to its scientific records of plants and animals. In doing so, it transformed the art of nature writing.Swarming bees and greedy sheepBorn in 1720, White was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, before settling at The Wakes — his family home in Selborne, UK — in around 1757. Then, from 1768, he worked for 25 years on his Naturalist’s Journal, a columnar diary in which each page covered a week of observations on fruit and vegetable experiments, local creatures and weather conditions.White’s daily entries in Selborne were often haiku-like in their simplicity. He described “vast rocklike, distant clouds” or simply stated “Bees swarm much. Sheep are shorn.”Gilbert White added entries to his Naturalist’s Journal every day for 25 years. Credit: Culture Club/Getty Uglow’s book examines one year of journal entries, from 1781. She chose this year for two reasons: it was the mid-point in White’s writing of his book, and a year after Timothy the tortoise arrived, a pet inherited by White that was later found to be female. Timothy often featured in the journal entries, being suspected of amorous longings whenever it wandered off.Uglow compares White’s year in nature with personal sightings at her own home in the Lake District, UK. In January, centuries and miles apart, White logs the chatter of nuthatches (Sitta spp.) while Uglow searches for eelworms (nematodes). Originally, Uglow thought of toadflax (Linaria spp.) as a weed, but White’s delight in its loveliness makes her reconsider. They share a gardener’s irritation with field mice. They each find beauty in autumnal beeches (Fagus spp.). Tulips in both of their gardens are destroyed — White’s by rain, Uglow’s by greedy sheep about whom she jibes, “They have left the daffodils, in disdain”.Should we treat rivers as living things?Selborne was not a safe haven for animals, it was a working community. For low-paid labourers, it was a case of human rights over nature’s rites. Birds were routinely shot if they were harmful to crops or livestock. “The air crackles with fear and rage,” writes Uglow, as she relays White’s account of a farmer and his hens tormenting a captured hawk to death.Uglow also traces the publication of White’s book from its germination to its blossoming. It has remained in print since 1789 and came about when White realized the literary potential of the letters he’d written to fellow naturalists Daines Barrington and Thomas Pennant. For publication, he revised these old letters and added entries from his journals to give an intricate view of Selborne’s natural world. The work inspired a youthful Charles Darwin, who went on a pilgrimage to Selborne in 1857.But perhaps White’s greatest legacy lies in the chronicling of avian sights and sounds. He kept lists of which birds sang until midsummer and which all year round. Detecting the nocturnal stone-curlew’s cry, he surmised that night-time fliers sent noisy signals to keep their flocks together after dark. Birdsong so obsessed White that he identified three different species of leaf warbler (the chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita), wood warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) and willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus)) by their tunes.Birds from Gilbert White’s journals feature in a stained-glass window in a Selborne church.Credit: RDImages/Epics/Getty

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