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The only firm criterion for the animals was that a species or sub-species be endangered – which, dismayingly, is true for almost every species on Earth. KR: I’m not sure that I’m an optimist, exactly – there are too many, too starkly clear ways for us to destroy ourselves and everything around us – but we have in us such huge, vertiginously deep potential: we have the capacity and technologies to bring about vast change for the better. It is among my proudest boasts, that I was massive Rundell fan before she became a national treasure. Her books for children include Rooftoppers (2013), The Wolf Wilder (2015) and The Explorer (2017), winner of the Costa children’s book award. This Sichuan restaurant, just up the road from the British Library, was one of the things I missed most during the lockdowns.The Somali golden mole is listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species as ‘data deficient’.
In terms of consumption, human-created scarcity often increases demand – pangolin scales, bluefin tuna flesh – rather than curtailing it.At first glance its structure, short essays each prefaced with a beautiful, grey-on-gold illustration by Talya Baldwin, might suggest a children’s wildlife encyclopaedia or a coffee-table Christmas gift book. Hermit crabs are “off-kilter beautiful: the jewelled anemone crab has shocking emerald eyes, on stalks that are striped like a barber’s pole in red and white. Rundell’s chapters are never more than eight pages long, but all are full of similarly vivid details about the creatures themselves, the stories we tell about them, the ways we have interacted with them and why they are now endangered.