This book is pretty old now (it was originally published in the early 1970s I believe) but its bite-sized essays on humans and the environment are clear and thought-provoking. To leaven the science, it's cleverly punctuated with a number of readings from non-science sources - including The Grapes of Wrath and A Modest Proposal. What's bumping this up to 4 stars from a likeable 3, however, is the inclusion of a reading that I've never come across before: a pamphlet written by John Evelyn, first published in 1661, in which Evelyn rants in hugely entertaining fashion on the disgusting level of smoke and air pollution in the London of his day. (Highlights include: "And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall cloud of SEA-COALE?" / "...poisoning the Aer with so dark and thick a Fog, as I have been hardly able to pass through it, for the extraordinary stench and halitus it sends forth" / "Whilst these are belching it forth their sooty jaws, the City of London resembles the face rather of Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli, or the Suburbs of Hell, than an Assembly of Rational Creatures...") Poor old Evelyn goes on and on and on and it is both tragic and gloriously entertaining.

I tell you, I'm keeping hold of this book just for that reprinted pamphlet.