On November 2nd, the award ceremony of the second "China Nature Good Book Award" was held in Wuhan Botanical Garden. This young public welfare award aims to promote the concept of natural reading, convey harmonious natural ecology and local humanistic care, and is a public welfare book award that specially selects works with nature as the main body of writing, and has outstanding achievements in transmitting natural knowledge, disseminating humanistic values, and practicing social responsibility. In addition, the entries must also be book works officially published and publicly distributed in Chinese mainland between June 2018 and August 2019 (subject to the date of the copyright page).
The theme of this year's selection is "Community of Life", and the book selection will start from this perspective to excavate works that can reflect the harmonious coexistence between man and nature, aiming to convey the concept of human respect for nature, conform to nature and protect nature, and concentrate on the green ecological values of respecting life and the ecological aesthetic of "co-adaptation with things".
Let's follow the newly released list of award-winning books and try to get close to nature in books.
International Work of the Year Award: "I'm All-Encompassing"
This is a new natural history of microbes. The author, Ed Young, is a science journalist for The Atlantic and is also known as one of the most eminent popular science writers of our time. In the title, he borrows from Whitman's poem "I am large, I contain multitudes." Indeed, in the course of our lives, microorganisms are not only never absent, but essential. Looking at everything, spotted geese migrate over the Himalayas with microorganisms, and elephant seals also carry microorganisms when they dive into the deep sea. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, the small step they took was both a big step for humans and a big step for microbes.
The book throws out one amazing microbiological insight after another: Vibrio Phylogenes makes the short-tailed squid in the Hawaiian reef glimmer, but the short-tailed squid that can continue to survive after removing the bacteria can not reach full maturity - how do microorganisms affect the development of animals? Wolbach will use "misogynistic" means to exterminate male wasps, and turn around to protect flies and mosquitoes from viruses - are microbes friends or enemies of the host?
"I Am All-Encompassing", by Ed Young, translated by Zheng Li, Houlang 丨 Beijing United Publishing Company, July 2019
Chinese Original Award of the Year: Hatsuhito: Me and My Wild Animal Friends
Young photographer Chu Wenwen is a magical girl, she was carried out of the wild by her father who was engaged in wildlife protection in Xinjiang at the age of 2, she got a camera at the age of 7, and since then she has been fascinated by hiking in the wild, recording the status of wild animals with the camera, and gradually embarked on the road of wildlife protection, and established her own nature conservation association. She collaborated with wildlife hand-painter Wang Yuheng to present chu wenwen's exploration of nature and the pursuit of wild animals with images, hand-drawn and text.
Chu Hitomi: Me and My Wildlife Friend, by Wang Yuheng / Chu Wenwen, CITIC Publishing Group, February 2019
Natural Literature Prize: "Living Mountain"
In the eyes of the Scottish writer Na'en Shepard, the mountain is not only a mound of uplift on the ground, but more like a trusted companion in daily life, a lifelong friend. This is perhaps why Shepard named his only prose work of his life "Living Mountain, Living Mountain." In the book, she devotes twelve chapters to everything in the Cairngorms near her hometown of Aberdeen: from light, water, air, plants and trees to the animals that live in it (humans are just one of them).
In recent years, People have regarded Shepard as the author of British natural literature. In 2016, the Royal Bank of Scotland printed her portrait on a £5 note, and more and more travelers followed her footsteps into The Cairngorms to accompany her, and tried to enter the woods without judgment and conquest, like her, "like visiting a friend with no other intention than to be with him." ”
Natural Literature Award: "Living Mountain", by Shepard, translated by Guan Xiaochen, Wenhui Publishing House, August 2018
Thought of the Year Award: The Evolution of Beauty
In 2017, the first of five non-fiction books in the New York Times' top ten best books of the year was "The Evolution of Beauty," by Richard Plum, an ornithologist at Yale University who has seen more than a third of the 10,000 known species of birds.
We usually think of Darwin's theory of natural selection as explaining every branch of the tree of life: which species will reproduce, which species will go extinct, which species will evolve which characteristics... However, Darwin said, "Whenever I see the tail screen of a male peacock, I feel uncomfortable!" This is because in his theory of natural selection, the overly ornate pattern on the male peacock tail screen seems to have no survival value. In this regard, the traditional scientific view is that the mate selection and display characteristics of animals are "advertisements" that show their genetic advantages or quality advantages.
But with more than 30 years of fieldwork and wild bird-looking experience around the world, Prum challenged that view. Deep in the tropical jungle are diverse, beautiful and elegant birds: male plum-winged petite birds sing with their wings; male big-eyed pheasant wing feathers are spread out into a 4-foot-wide cone dotted with three-dimensional golden-brown spherical patterns, dazzling; male red-crowned petite harriers use space dance steps to court... The authors see many of the animal's ostentatious features, and none of these traits seem to have much to do with the theory of natural selection. In the search for the real answer, Prum excavated Darwin's aesthetic evolutionary theory of spouse choice 150 years ago from the pile of old papers, which was an independent engine that drove the evolutionary process.
The beginning of this evolutionary journey of beauty is the "Tree of Life" and the end of our re-understanding of human evolution and ourselves. The splendor of nature fills a gap in our understanding of evolutionary history and human origins, providing us with a unique scientific perspective on Darwin's theory of evolution in a comprehensive and objective way.
The Evolution of Beauty, [Beauty] Richard M. Written by O. Prum, translated by Ren Ye, CITIC Publishing House, January 2019
Local Care Award: Notes on Plants in Wuhan
Getting close to nature doesn't require a long journey, perhaps starting with a small grass in the neighborhood where you live. The author, Liu Congkang, majored in stratigraphic paleontology at China University of Geosciences, is currently the editor of the publishing house. Over the years, he has continuously observed and recorded more than 700 kinds of urban environmental plants in Wuhan. In this book, in the order of the twenty-four solar terms, he uses nearly 100 hand-drawn pictures to introduce more than 70 kinds of common plants in Wuhan, raspberries in the mountains and forests, wild peppercorns by the East Lake, maple poplars and neem trees on the side of the road, and sorrel grasses on the side of the road.
Botanical Notes in Wuhan, by Liu Congkang, China Science and Technology Press, November 2018
Natural Life Award: "Wild with Insects"
"Wild with Worms" is an author with rich writing experience who grafted his background in college biology and became a "wilderness detective". The author Graduated from the Department of Biology of Yunnan University and has been engaged in collaborative work for a long time. After taking the two one-eyed eyes of humans and looking at the compound eyes of the insects, she realized that all life is a masterpiece of nature, and for five years the author leaned over the earth and looked up or down at the heights, and she found that the world of insects and insects had opened her eyes.
This "book with insects" is by no means a scientific professional treatise, which gives readers a correct account of knowledge and science popularization, and it tells the story of their own experience of sending love to nature in a way that is rich in pictures and texts and mutually corroborative. The author especially emphasizes that she is not an ecological photographer nor a taxonomist, she has only used her mobile phone to photograph bugs up close for five years, using the lens to see the lives of tiny bugs, to see how they survive, to see their love and reproduction, to see their extraordinary skills that have survived on the earth for hundreds of millions of years. All things are miraculous.
"Wild with Insects", by Ban Xia, Guangxi Normal University Press, September 2019
Editor of the Year Award: Hidden Landscapes: A Fossil Of Guangxi Paleontology
Guangxi is bordered by the sea in the east and the plateau in the west, from Weizhou Island in the South China Sea to Jingxi, which is adjacent to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and is rich in fossil sites, which has become another hot spot for ancient human research in China after Beijing Zhoukoudian. Around these sites, it is also the settlement of the Guangxi shiju ethnic group. Three paleontological archaeologists, who traveled together to the important production areas of typical fossil phylums from the Cambrian to the Quaternary period in Guangxi, wrote this book. This book is the first travel-style original natural science popularization book of regional fossil species and production areas in Guangxi and even in the country, which adopts geological chronology and narrative prose as the genre to tell the main fossil sites in Guangxi. At the same time, the book also briefly introduces how to find fossils in the wild, the collection methods of fossils of different categories, and the indoor treatment of fossils.
Hidden Landscapes: A Record of Paleontological Fossils in Guangxi, by Zeng Guangchun, Zhong Ruiwen, and Liu Qi, Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, November 2018