Odd things, knees, when you think about it. At some point in evolutionary history, nature decided that instead of walking on a single, rigid stick, life would be better if we broke the stick in the middle and made it floppy, and then had to have a complicated system of muscle and tendons and ligaments to make it all go straight again. Why? If a straight leg was too long, surely the answer was just to make it shorter. But …
Category: extinction
A few weeks ago, COP27, the international conference on climate change, rolled to a close and barely anyone noticed. It didn’t start well, being billed as the cop that would make people keep the promises they had made at the last one, and then failing in any meaningful way to achieve even that. As a writer I can admire fine-sounding words, but our planet needs a lot more. It needs action, and lots of it. So if that is the …
Five years ago I was moved to tears by one of the saddest things I have ever seen. My wife and I were celebrating our silver wedding anniversary (no, that’s not why I was crying!). We’d broken the piggybank open, burnt our savings, and gone on safari in Kenya. As part of our trip our guide took us, unexpectedly, to rhino sanctuary. And there we saw Sudan. Sudan was as that time the world’s last male Northern white rhino. Since …
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