“I’m an avid reader, or at least I was until my son was born. Now I’m an opportunistic reader – buses, bathtubs, brushing my teeth,” says Malhi.
Surprises? “I often find good popular science books are as enlightening and relevant in informing my thinking and work as any academic text.” Although he now considers himself an ecologist, he trained as a physicist with no high-level education in biology, so “the rich detail in biology books is still a source of revelation”. Signs of Life by Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin (Basic Books, 2000) inspires him by showing how counter-intuitive, large scale properties emerge from parts of…
