A clear explanation of how inventions, gadgets and devices work, revealing the workings of everyday technology. With step-by-step text and simple graphics.

An accessible introduction to ecological science, with nearly one-hundred events and developments explained. Features quotes from leading ecologists, scientists, philosophers and politicians, including Charles Darwin and Eugene Odum.

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one.

Indeed the ver...