Dirt On Our Hands And Crisis Ahead

Rubbish!

Rubbish is arguably Britain's most pressing environmental concern. Challenging and controversial, this is a rigorous examination of the problems of waste in the UK and the efficacy of the public and private initiatives designed to forestall a crisis fast ballooning into catastrophe

With a subject that ranges from the noxious to the infernal, it is a wonder that Girling's book manages to be compulsively readable and often hilarious, as well as important.

I believe this is one of the most important books of the year...highly fascinating, totally absorbing, compulsively readable.

A timely intervention for a human race hooked on throwing things away...Girling's sardonic humour makes unpalatable facts compelling prose.

Be scared. Be very scared. But be sure to read this book.

This deeply researched, heartfelt book will make you by turns depressed, angry and inspired to act.

Richard Girling is a senior feature writer for the Sunday Times Magazine. He has been awarded the title Journalist of the Year for two years in a row at the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards 2008 and 2009. He has also been named Specialist Writer of the Year at the UK Press Awards in 2002 and was also shortlisted for this award in 2005 and 2006. He has been a consultant to the former Department of the Environment and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and author of campaigns for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). He is currently a trustee of the Tree Council.

We can no longer cope with our waste. Every hour in the UK we throw away enough rubbish to fill the Albert hall - a statistic quoted so often that perhaps we've stopped imagining what it means. And every year the flow accelerates. 
This is the story of our rubbish - from the first human bowel movement to the littering of outer space. With a hankerchief to his nose, Girling picks through our fridge mountain, our crumbling sewers, trading waste, packaging waste, hazardous industrial waste... it is a mucky saga of carelessness, greed and opportunism, wasted opportunity and official bungling. But Rubbish! is also a plea for us to consider other kinds of waste: the trashing of our landscape, the unstoppable floods of junk that clog our mailboxes, litter the skies and foul the airwaves... 
Rubbish! may not be a conventional battle cry but this is unmistakably a call to arms - not just for the three 'R's - reduce, re-use, recycle - but for us to fight for new ideas, brave initiative rather than reliance on old systems that are crumbling before our eyes.

Greed

A timely polemic on greed: how it drove our ancesters out of their caves but is now sending us careering towards our destruction.

Some cracking sections . . . there's stuff to make your jaw drop . . . Girling also has a very good ear for the telling quotation.

In the course of his wide-ranging and brilliantly written polemic...Girling demonstrates just why we need to keep the monster firmly on the leash.

Richard Girling's Greed is a book to curl up with . . . also curling your lip and maybe your fists as well. Beware though, he has one or two surprises in store . . .

Lively and energetic... an enriching exploration into the ways in which greed and its progeny - selfishness, jealousy, and ambition - are essential to our wellbeing, enjoyment and more,and to our success as human beings.

Richard Girling is a senior feature writer for the Sunday Times Magazine. He has been awarded the title Journalist of the Year for two years in a row at the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards 2008 and 2009. He has also been named Specialist Writer of the Year at the UK Press Awards in 2002 and was also shortlisted for this award in 2005 and 2006. He has been a consultant to the former Department of the Environment and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and author of campaigns for the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE). He is currently a trustee of the Tree Council.

Selfishness and greed have been our tools of survival from the very beginning, ever since our earliest forebears climbed down from the trees and set off across the savannah in search of God. Evolution has given us an instinct that is as crucial to our survival as fear or sex but, in the third millennium, greed has become out of control: 
 
· The world's most expensive sandwich costs £85. 
· A failed banker is given a pension fund approaching £700,000 a year 
· A sacked national football coach waiting out his contract earns £13,000 a day. 
 
Spanning across a whole range of issues including obesity, American evangelism, the Iraq war and GM food, Greed is not just a lament for lost innocence or an assault on the fat cats - it's also a celebration of all that greed has prompted us to achieve and what should be possible for us in the future.

All Creatures Great and Small, and Why They Matter

The Hunt for the Golden Mole

'Natural history at its funniest, most curious, enlightening and heartfelt...like going on safari with Gerald Durrell, Rachel Carson and Redmond O'Hanlon' Nicholas Crane

That rarest of delights: a roaring book of huge importance written by a master storyteller exploring our fragile relationship with the animal kingdom, offering insights into how a hopeful future could yet be snatched from the jaws of despair. Not a hint of preaching, not a whiff of worthiness. A great story written not by an idealist but by a pragmatist with a heart of gold with a clear eyed view of the world.

The Hunt for the Golden Mole is a wonderful book. At one level it is a detective story in which Richard Girling is on the hunt for a very rare creature. But it is much more than that: an understated but passionate advocacy for the biodiversity of the planet which combines lightly worn scholarship with a compelling argument. Overall it is a tour de force

An informed and informative, provocative and rousing work

This is a book that bursts into life from the first page… Rousing, fascinating… Utterly engaging

This book is a sobering, riveting read: part quest, part travelogue, part scientific debate and part much-needed environmental call-to-arms

I loved this book. This is natural history at its funniest, most curious, enlightening and heartfelt. I couldn’t put it down. It was like going on safari with Gerald Durrell, Rachel Carson and Redmond O’ Hanlon … I was alternately wide-eyed with wonder, appalled and then tickled to laughter. It’s beautifully written. And it’s powerful. An elegy to every living thing on this remarkable planet. Impossible to finish without being uplifted by the wonder of the natural world and driven to do something about its plight.

Nicholas Crane, writer and co-presenter of Coast

A gloriously readable, boundlessly fascinating shaggy dog story about the author's quest for one of hte world's more recently extinct species...what makes this book so wonderful: using his eye for detail, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, teaching you to care about the little things.

delightfully written and a splendid romp through one man’s mole-hunting search among the wilds of animal taxonomy

At the heart of this delightfully meandering book is a history of how we find and catalogue species, and a thought-provoking examination of our changing attitudes to wildlife

Elegiac and personal… Highly recommended

A stirring tribute to the marvel of all living creatures

[Girling] writes with verve and passion and he makes his case persuasively, with knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment… Brimful with facts and arguments

Richard Girling is an award-winning environmental journalist. For his work in the Sunday Times he was named Specialist Writer of the Year in the UK Press Awards in 2002, and was shortlisted for the same award in 2005 and 2006. He was Journalist of the Year at the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards in 2008 and 2009. This is his seventh book.

This story is a quest for an animal so rare that a sighting has never been recorded. 
 
The Somali golden mole was first described in 1964, but the sole evidence for its existence is a tiny fragment of jawbone found in an owl pellet. Intrigued by this elusive creature, and what it can tell us about extinction and survival, Richard Girling embarks on a hunt to find the animal and its discoverer - an Italian professor who he thinks might still be alive... 
 
Richard's journey comes at a time when one species - our own - is having to reconsider its relationship with every other. He delves into the history of exploration and cataloguing and the tall tales of the great hunters, traces the development of the conservation movement and addresses central issues of extinction and biodiversity.

Britain's Coastal Catastrophe

Sea Change

Challenging and controversial investigation of our changing relationship with the sea and our coastline.

Girling pulls no punches in this passionate and blackly witty expose of the problems that face us . . . We can only hope that Girling's eloquent analysis of what is wrong might affect the decisions to be made.

This is a vivid and devastating account of the decline and fall of the precious waters lapping our coasts . . . [Girling] is an extremely good writer . . . he also manages to weave a wonderfully dry humour into the long and sorry catalogue of generations of neglect and short-sightedness . . . This is a book to make you think.

Anyone who cares about the coast should read this book - before it is too late.

Scarcely pausing for one slow and adoring gaze across the Norfolk coast he loves, Richard Girling plunges off from the first page into the most brilliant and devastating attack yet written on bungling, political weakness, incompetence and sheer slowness of those who are meant to be in charge of the seas around our shores.

Richard Girling calls the sea our civilisation's "amniotic fluid". His story of its violation by oil pollution, over-fishing, climate-change-driven erosion and our belief that we have the wisdom to "manage" the marine environment is shocking. It's a story of arrogance, ignorance and greed, and in Girling's electrifying prose it becomes a parable of wilful matricide.

For centuries our sea, less our lands, was what characterised us as a people. Now we fly over it, seek it less for work and play, and fail to recognise that it is in crisis. Richard Girling's wonderfully informed, hard hitting and inspired account of what is happening on our shoreline shatters this ignorance. Sea Change is a book which seems to be energised by the ocean itself and one which could bring us back - just in time - to face the gains and losses of our coast.

We have a special relationship with the sea. It is the single most powerful driver of our economy, our lifestyle and our politics. It affects what we eat, how we use the land, how we relate to our neighbours, how we travel, even the thickness of our coats. Yet we go on treating it, with childlike faith and unreason, as if we imagine it to be infinitely resourceful and endlessly forgiving. Sea Change addresses such issues as pollution by sewage, nuclear waste and dumping at sea; extinction of fish stocks; destruction of marine environment, impacts of climate change, coastal erosion and rising sea levels; decline of our seaside resorts; the failure of the 'integrated transport policy';and smuggling. In each case Girling questions: how did the situation arise? What are the consequences? What should be done? And what will happen when we fail? His unique voice blends horror, humour and 'just fancy that'; sifting for solutions in the sands, he is utterly compelling, entertaining and inspirational.

Richard Girling

[A] tumultuously entertaining biography… [An] irresistibly engaging book.

A rollicking ride through eccentric Victorian England. Frank Buckland is the most engaging of subjects...Girling's infectious enthusiasm for his subject shines through

Girling brings to rip-roaring life a fascinating Victorian figure of whom few have ever heard; I so wish I could invite Frank Buckland over for dinner.

Dave Goulson, author of A Sting in the Tale

An irresistibly engaging account of the life of the David Attenborough of the Victorian era.

[A] rousing, brilliantly written book.

This brilliantly entertaining biography argues persuasively why his memory, too, is worthy of conservation.

[An] engaging book… The anecdotes will, of course, keep you turning the pages, but the author never loses sight of Buckland’s importance as a scientific figure.

A long-overdue corrective… Girling is an amiable companion with whom to wander the maze of Buckland’s life.

It was a delight to be introduced to this largely forgotten polymath of that great age of scientific discovery, the 19th century.

After decades of neglect, Richard Girling has brought Buckland out of the shadows with panache. Buckland was clearly a man of parts who exuded bonhomie from every pore… It is impossible not to be left with the impression that Frank Buckland was one of the most remarkable men who ever lived; and Girling does him proud

Richard Girling’s engaging biography chronicles Buckland’s visionary ideas on conservation, as well as his many eccentricities.

Frank Buckland, forgotten hero of natural history

Frank Buckland was an extraordinary man – surgeon, natural historian, popular lecturer, bestselling writer, museum curator, and a conservationist before the concept even existed. 
 
Eccentric, revolutionary, prolific, he was one of the nineteenth century’s most improbable geniuses. His lifelong passion was to discover new ways to feed the hungry. Rhinoceros, crocodile, puppy-dog, giraffe, kangaroo, bear and panther all had their chance to impress, but what finally - and, eventually, fatally - obsessed him was fish. 
 
Forgotten now, he was one of the most original, far-sighted and influential natural scientists of his time, held as high in public esteem as his great philosophical enemy, Charles Darwin.

Richard Girling

Praise for The Man Who Ate the Zoo

Hugely entertaining.

[A] tumultuously entertaining biography… [An] irresistibly engaging book.

A rollicking ride through eccentric Victorian England. Frank Buckland is the most engaging of subjects...Girling's infectious enthusiasm for his subject shines through

Hugely entertaining.

[A] tumultuously entertaining biography… [An] irresistibly engaging book.

A rollicking ride through eccentric Victorian England. Frank Buckland is the most engaging of subjects...Girling's infectious enthusiasm for his subject shines through

Hugely entertaining.

[A] tumultuously entertaining biography… [An] irresistibly engaging book.

A rollicking ride through eccentric Victorian England. Frank Buckland is the most engaging of subjects...Girling's infectious enthusiasm for his subject shines through

Books by Richard Girling

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter