HarperNorth (2025)
ISBN 978-0008474157
Reviewed by Chris Holmes
In this beautifully constructed book, Sophie Yeo explores how the actions of humanity have shaped the natural world and looks at what we can do to bring back something of Earth’s past abundance. The book ranges widely, with examples of humanity’s interaction with Nature from many parts of the world including Australia, central France, Finland, Scotland, Transylvania, Wales and the USA. These illustrations of human behaviour make for fascinating and often disturbing reading, but the book also ranges widely over the historical and ‘deep time’ dimensions. I found particularly interesting the consideration of the ‘Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum’ (PETM) which began around 56 million years ago and which saw a rapid, intense global warming lasting around 200,000 years – which may be what we will be repeating in some form!
Despite the worst efforts of humanity over the centuries (and indeed millennia) there may be some grounds for hope, for as Sophie suggests ‘ecosystems are easy to destroy but difficult to obliterate in their entirety’. Using the resurrection of life in restored ancient ponds in Norfolk as an example, ‘that these ecosystems can rise from the dead, irrespective of the sins heaped upon them, seems nothing short of a miracle’.
In nine chapters and an epilogue (along with over thirty pages of source notes) Nature’s Ghosts blends stories and science with a profound emotional intelligence and a sense of nuance – even within all of the desecration that humanity has visited upon our planet.
Towards the end of the book Sophie discusses sacred places and movingly talks about Kingley Vale in Sussex, a place I know well. She writes ‘If we are ever to recover our sense of the sacred we need more wild places… to reconnect with them personally. To get to know their hidden layers.’ I warmed to Sophie’s discussion of spirituality – she is on a journey and makes it clear that it is by no means all worked out. In the epilogue, entitled ‘Old Souls’, Sophie writes about fear, and notes that in the distant past there were good reasons for being fearful of much in Nature, an interesting correction to some of the more simplistic views prevalent today. Here is the final paragraph in the book:
‘I want my daughter to know pinewoods, meadows, winding rivers and frozen lakes. I want her to experience the wonder of an eagle upon a crag. To delight in a beaver building a dam. To feel the electricity of a kingfisher darting downstream. And fear, if she must feel it – let it not be of guns and cars, but of howls in the distance, of shadows in the forest, of eyes in the dark. Let her heart race. Let her feel alive’.