There's a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively- namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions (usually the poorest) are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain. The worm can actually live in the host for 17 years before the host finally dies.

I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.

Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.

What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.

Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.

Sentimentalising is anathema, as far as I am concerned. It leads you into ethical problems about violence and killing and eating meat. The whole world becomes topsy-survy if you impose moralities that were evolved within human society on what a blowfly or what a parasite does... there are lots of emotions you can deduce from an animal's behaviour that are correct, but when you start saying it's feeling guilty or thinking or a loved one or mourning, you must be very careful of those feelings.

No, not a feminist. I'm a humanist. I'm neither one side nor the other.