The irresistible account of building a life on the frontier of climate change in Africa’s last wilderness, by the bestselling author of The Zanzibar Chest.
PARADISE OF THORNS: Adventures in an African Wilderness
by Aidan Hartley
Atlantic Monthly Press, Spring 2022
Aidan Hartley is the bestselling author of The Zanzibar Chest, which was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson and Duff Cooper Prizes and appeared on best of the year lists from the Economist and Publishers Weekly. In his new book, Hartley chronicles an adventure in one of Africa’s last patches of wilderness. Concerned by the increasing violence of city life, Hartley moves north with his young family. His aim is to acquire a herd of cattle and live alongside the Samburu, a tribe of nomads who for centuries have lived in harmony with immense herds of wildlife in an unspoiled natural paradise north of Mount Kenya. The family buys a tract of remote desert where they carve out a life from scratch, establishing a ranch in a rugged terrain still teeming with elephants, lions, and other wildlife. Over the next seventeen years in this harsh Eden, the family builds a home and learns to live off the land. There are scorpions and snakes under every stone, charging buffalos, and leopards stealing through camp—but there are no fences in the endless landscape and in the night sky far from towns, the stars twinkle brighter than anywhere. As they build their farm alongside their Samburu neighbors, Hartley finds that the nomads’ way of life has been thrown off balance by environmental collapse and corrupt politics. Worsening droughts instill tribal tensions as these once-proud people compete over dwindling resources. And when a demagogue gains power in Hartley’s district, he uses the unpredictable rains to incite division and bloodshed—leading armed militias into wildlife conservation areas and farming hamlets where villagers are murdered, elephants are poached, and the pastures are worn down to dust. In the end, the demagogue is beaten at the polls by an enlightened Samburu woman famous for breastfeeding her baby in parliament, the scented African rains finally arrive to wash away the bad memories, and harmony returns. The nomads find redemption in a great coming of age ceremony for their young generation. A mother cheetah births a litter of cubs on the plains above the Hartleys’ home and the family resolves to preserve nature in what’s left of paradise. In this age of environmental collapse, PARADISE OF THORNS gives us a unique view from the frontline of climate change in Africa’s last wild spaces. It is infused with the romantic spirit of all writers seeking their own redemption in the natural world—or at least what’s left of it.
Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and grew up in East Africa. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest, an international bestseller that was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson and Duff Cooper Prizes. He has covered the Balkans, the Middle East, and Russia for Reuters and currently writes a column about Africa for the Spectator in London. He lives in Laikipia, in northern Kenya with his wife and two children.
WATER ALWAYS WINS makes clear that we need to fundamentally rethink our relationship with water. We must embrace the reality that we are an integral part of nature and need learn to live in harmony with these forces that we cannot conquer. This requires humility, not arrogance; collaboration, not aggressive control and setting a goal, which is to determine what water wants and figure out a how to make way for it, while protecting and securing our lives. The overarching theme is that such a mindset is essential in all our dealings with every aspect of nature, if we want our planet to survive. As Erica Gies so beautifully states, water is life, it “flexes with the rhythms of the earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance upon the land.”
There is something afoot in the world of animals and plants, something which has so far caught too little attention. Wherever they can, animals and plants are moving towards the earth’s poles to flee from rising temperatures and drought in their natural habitats. Tropical zones lose their inhabitants, beavers are settling in Alaska, gigantic shoals of fish disappear just to reappear in front of foreign coastlines. Sea creatures move an average of 72 kilometres a year, land creatures an average of 17 kilometres. In this exciting and vivid book, Benjamin von Brackel describes a phenomenon which demonstrates nature’s impressive adaptability as well as the dramatic consequences of climate change – not the least for humankind, for the migration of species won’t leave us unaffected. 
Most of us do not give much thought to the centerpiece of our bathrooms, but the toilet is an unexpected paradox. On the one hand, it is a modern miracle: a ubiquitous fixture in a vast sanitation system that has helped add decades to human lifespan by reducing disease. On the other hand, the toilet is also a tragic failure: less than half of the world’s population can access a toilet that safely manages bodily waste, including many right here in the United States. And it is inefficient, squandering clean water as well as the nutrients and energy contained in the waste we flush away. While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo—in part because the topic of toilets is taboo. Fortunately, there’s hope—and PIPE DREAMS daringly profiles the growing army of scientists, engineers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and activists worldwide who are overcoming their aversions and focusing their formidable skills on making toilets accessible and healthier for all. This potential revolution in sanitation has many benefits, including reducing inequalities, mitigating climate change and water scarcity, improving agriculture, and optimizing health. Author Chelsea Wald takes us on a wild world tour from a compost toilet project in Haiti, to a plant in the Netherlands that harvests used toilet paper from sewage, and shows us a bot that hangs out in manholes to estimate opioid use in a city, among many other fascinating developments. Much more than a glorified trash can, the toilet, Wald maintains, holds the power to help solve many of the world’s problems, if only we can harness it.
After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we’re in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing book UNDER THE SKY WE MAKE, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power—we’re going to have to seize it for ourselves.
Dr. Kimberly Nicholas is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund, Sweden’s highest-ranked university. Born and raised on her family’s vineyard in Sonoma, California, she studied the effect of climate change on the California wine industry for her PhD in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. Since then, she has published over 50 articles on climate and sustainability in leading peer-reviewed journals, and her research has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, Buzzfeed and more. She has also been profiled in Elle and The Guardian, and gives appearances at around 50 lectures each year, such as the recent Climate Change Leadership summit.