Your first book is Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams. What does the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have to do with the environment?

Well, Douglas Adams was one of the most brilliant writers who ever lived. The insight that you get from the Hitchhiker’s stuff is astonishing. For example, when his character Ford Prefect comes to earth and names himself Ford Prefect because he mistakes the dominant life form: he thought it was cars. He just has such a clever and insightful way of looking at the way that we are, as well as making it screamingly funny.

His book Last Chance to See is a travelogue where he went around the world with Mark Carwardine, who worked in conservation, and basically looked at disappearing species. They looked at the Yangtze River dolphin and a parrot on an Australian island.

For me, Last Chance to See is a real eye-opener, with the idea that you can take a depressing subject – species on the verge of extinction – and present it in a way which is so engaging, so funny and so humane. I would like to be able to do that as a writer.

What was your favourite creature that they visited in the book?

Well I can remember the Yangtze River dolphin, and the authors describing how they were dropping microphones wrapped in condoms into the water (the condoms were to keep the water out) so they could hear the dolphins. But they never did get to see one. I think they were more or less extinct already. It’s a pretty sad tale.

And what about you, what animals are you worried about becoming extinct due to global warming?

Well it isn’t so much global warming that’s an issue. It’s all the other things we do as well. For example, the blue fin tuna – we are literally eating our way through them. Somehow it brings it home more, when it is people just eating things rather than displacing habitat.

And the way they eat them as well.

Yes, the fact that we fish them out until they are all gone. It just brings the greed of it all really to the fore. There is a good chance that the blue fin tuna will be fished out completely and made extinct next year. But I’ve been involved in campaigning on this and one of the good things is that the UK government says it is going to take the case to the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species. We want them to try and stop the fisheries, because it really is at a critical point now for the tuna in general.

Your next author proposes an interesting hypothesis, which evolved from his work in detecting life on Mars…

Yes, James Lovelock wrote The Ages of Gaia, I think, in 1988. It wasn’t his first Gaia book, but it is probably the best written one. I have just been re-reading it recently and certain themes that he picked up on are ones that are still considered novel today. Not just the whole idea of the way the earth works, almost as a living organism. But also looking at the way humanity is going to have to reconcile itself with the constraints and the limits of the planet.

What exactly was his hypothesis?

The Gaia hypothesis was something which sprung from Lovelock’s work for NASA when he was trying to figure out ways to see whether Mars and other planets had life on them. He realised that having lots of reactive gases altogether in an atmosphere indicated that something must be there constantly producing them, which is life. Mars is obviously a dead planet because there’s nothing in the atmosphere which hasn’t been there for millions of years. Whereas if you look at Earth it’s a churning mixture of dynamically unstable gases. It was that insight which made him think about why these very dynamic systems have been stable for so long. Why levels of oxygen haven’t been below 15 per cent or above 30 per cent for probably close to a billion years.

So, reading this book, you can get a better understanding of how the Earth works?

Yes, I mean I don’t buy the Gaia theory completely. I can see all sorts of criticisms. He thinks of life as a sort of self-regulating mechanism keeping the planet habitable with life, and I don’t actually see many ways of how that operates in the real world. It’s a great theory and it seems to be what happens, but I don’t think many scientists can point to the ways in which it supposedly operates.

So why is the book one of your choices?

Lovelock is one of the most important thinkers on the environment and science generally in the last 50 years. One of the things that always impress me about people who are interdisciplinary is that he is quite happy to range across different areas. I mean there is a chapter in the book called God and Gaia, talking about theology and whether he can reconcile faith in God with what he sees in terms of biology and so on. So his ability and breadth of knowledge I always find really striking.