A book's preface is often illuminating. The acknowledgement of intellectual debts, shared endeavours and support, alongside the occasional airing of grievances, reveals the context in which the book emerged, and its overall purpose. The preface for the late Stephen Trudgill's Why Conserve Nature? Perspectives on Meanings and Motivations chronicles his serendipitous journey from researching geomorphology, soils and ecology through to a greater focus on philosophy, art and literature, particularly poetry, from being trained in classically positivist thinking about nature and science, to re-engagement with why he was first interested in nature. This journey was shaped by encounters with colleagues and students from many disciplines, and through his work for the Field Studies Council, observing and making decisions about how students should engage with nature. Trudgill aims to accompany the reader on that same journey, and he makes an interesting and erudite travel companion. He would gently persuade many Oryx readers to follow him, to partially reject their scientific training, and re-engage with why they first cared about nature. He does not provide simplistic answers, but nudges readers with thought-provoking questions, the ‘hippy contrarian’ described in his obituary (Elliot, 2022, The Guardian, 7 February 2022).

Trudgill argues that reasons to conserve nature cannot come directly from human-created concepts that purport to be easy, uncontroversial and objective; he peels away veneers of simplicity from concepts such as nature, species and native, using both his scientific training and his deft engagement with social sciences and humanities. Nor does he see them coming from oversimplified catastrophism about impending doom, or from simplistic ecosystem service arguments; he critiques these from multiple angles, but without rejecting their potentially useful aspects.

Rather, people should conserve nature primarily because of the relationships we have with it. These relationships are slippery, amorphous, heterogeneous and personal, but so are the multiple interactions we have with nature, and how they define us and how we want to live, as humans, communities and individuals. There is substantial focus on art, literature and poetry, as Trudgill's passions and as things that simultaneously reflect and create human relationships with nature. An amusing swipe in the preface, lamenting the turn in universities towards metrics and away from the things that matter, could easily be applied to a conservation movement that focuses on measuring, the easily quantifiable, at the expense of the reasons why people get involved in conservation in the first place. The bibliography contains plenty of ecology papers, but these are outnumbered by the references to social science and humanities sources.

For Trudgill, nature here is fundamentally social, but not irreducible to the social alone. Megafauna and mycorrhizae both exist in and of themselves, but our understanding of and relationships with them are mediated by our social values. This is not a new idea, but it is one eruditely developed here, and it forms the basis for the book's fundamental argument. As Trudgill declares, ‘Let us not deny the importance of science and let us not deny the importance of an emotional attachment to sense of place’ (p. 322).

The book begins with an exploration of how we experience nature, drawing heavily on psychogeography, before delving into a slightly incongruous chapter on climate change uncertainty and narrative. It then picks up the pace from this slightly bloated start, and tells a compelling story about how humans have represented nature, and what this tells us about both humanity and nature. This is followed by a detailed section on personal meanings of nature, and about how humans understand and relate to the places where nature is found. The arguments come together in the final, aptly named ‘possibilities’ chapter, which does not identify easy 10-point solutions, but outlines the direction and guiding principles and invites the reader to take their next steps.

Some questions remain unanswered by the book, such as what happens when competing value systems clash. It is also unsurprisingly written from a deeply personal, and therefore English, perspective, and an author from another part of the world would have written a different book. Nevertheless, this book will help the Oryx reader to think through their values and their relationship with nature. As recent work led by Rogelio Luque-Lora (Luque-Lora et al., 2022, People and Nature, published online 2 August 2022), one of Trudgill's colleagues, has shown, conservationists do not get involved in efforts to conserve nature because of a love for dry science, but because of the emotions and values that emerged from their relationship with nature. I encourage the readers of Oryx to buy this book, let Trudgill's seminars reshape their thinking, and (re)discover for themselves why we should conserve nature.