Tapestries Of Life by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Tapestries Of Life by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson and published by Mudlark.

About the Book

Trees clean air and water; hoverflies and bees pollinate our crops; the kingfisher inspired the construction of high-speed trains. In Tapestries of Life, bestselling author Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains how closely we are all connected with the natural world, highlighting our indelible link with nature’s finely knit system and our everyday lives.

In the heart of the natural world is a life-support system like no other, a collective term that describes all the goods and services we receive – food, freshwater, medicine, pollination, pollution control, carbon sequestration, erosion prevention, recreation, spiritual health and so much more. In this utterly captivating book, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson sets out to explore these wonderful, supportive elements – taking the reader on a journey through the surprising characteristics of the natural world.

About the Author

Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is the bestselling author of Extraordinary Insects. A professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in Ås, Norway, she is also a scientific advisor for The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research NINA. She has a Doctorate degree in conservation biology and lectures on nature management and forest biodiversity.

My Review

So far we have not found life anywhere other than this planet. And the life that we have here is in every part of the planet, from the microbes floating in the stratosphere to the organisms that are at the very bottom of the oceans 11km down. The breadth of life that is around is staggering too, almost every niche has been exploited by something that a lot of the time can only live there. It is a complex and beautiful system that is self-sustaining and abundant.

Sadly we have been trying our best to muck it for the 300,000 years or so that we have been around. We seemed to have altered almost every place on earth in one way of another, sometimes only a little, but in other places there has been wholesale destruction and obliteration. It is a sorry state of affairs, especially when you think that we are in a heavily interdependent life support system and one of the 10,000,000 or so species on this planet that has an equal right to be here.

How these systems really work is only recently being understood in more detail. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, is one of those who is in a position to be able to understand and explain just how these complex and interdependent systems actually operate.

In this fascinating book, she takes us on a tour of the planet to show us what exactly happens and how this keeps life ticking over. We learn about the way that mycelium networks help plants grow, how insects keep us fed and how there is a cure for almost anything out there in the rainforests of our world. Sverdrup-Thygeson describes how we consume vast resources of stuff in our desire to eat everything we possibly can and buy ourselves new things all the time and how we totally depend on these resources to exist. Our physical consumption has doubled since 1980; we are stretching the resources too thinly and something will break soon. She describes how in America they use thousands of tonnes of chemicals on their lawns to clear wildflowers and insects and need thousands of tonnes of fertilizer to make the grass grow properly.

I liked this a lot. Sverdrup-Thygeson is an engaging writer with a strong belief in the natural world and how we need to treat it to be able to survive and thrive on our only planet. Using the evidence of some of the mad things that we do, she calmly advises that there is another way to move forward and not only thrive on this planet but give the other 9,999,999 species that we share it with, an equal chance of surviving too.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Blog Tour Poster

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne Cater from Random Thing Tours for the copy of the book to read.

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2 Comments

  1. Liz Dexter

    This sounds fascinating and the work on how everything is connected and linked together to support life is a theme I keep seeing, with lots of research obviously being done and now coming through into more popular science works.

    • Paul

      And it is so true. There are very few things that can be removed from the ecosystem that will not have some effect in one way or another.

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