Books and selected writings
Burning Table Mountain
An environmental history of fire on the Cape Peninsula
Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain and the surrounding peninsula, combining a UNESCO World Heritage Site for Nature with South Africa's parliamentary capital, has been a crucible for attempts to integrate the social and ecological dimensions of wildfire. This environmental history of humans and wildfire outlines these interactions from the practices of Khoikhoi herders through Dutch and British colonial occupation, the Union of South Africa into the new South Africa of the 1990s, up to the headline-grabbing conflagrations of January 2000.
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Coexisting with Reptiles
A special issue of Current Conservation
I guest edited this beautifully illustrated special issue for the illustrated conservation journal Current Conservation, carefully selecting the authors and stories, and writing the general introduction. Here's an excerpt from my introduction:
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"Coexistence with reptiles? Surely a preposterous idea! For the common perception of reptiles is that they are primitive life forms, cold-blooded, anti-social, emotionless, vicious and not infrequently dangerous. Well, in this special issue we set out, not to persuade you to join the basking crocodiles on a sun-drenched riverbank, nor to clasp a chilly cobra to your chest, but rather to show you that, whatever the authorities may warn or the media may report in shouty headlines, coexistence between particular human communities and particular potentially dangerous reptiles does, in fact, exist. These are not just-so stories."
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