Andrew Balmford is professor of conservation science in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. He is coeditor of Conservation in a Changing World, and he lives in Ely, England, with his wife, two sons, and a lot of animals.

"In beautiful prose, Balmford takes us on an expedition to six continents where he interviews the people behind the successes and comes up with their defining characteristics. People are ultimately responsible for destroying nature through overharvesting, direct destruction, and toxification, but people are also those who can, and must, reverse the decline." (Los Angeles Review of Books) "Balmford... writes beautifully, but more important still, he sees his whole subject as if from a great height. The book is episodic in structure, as he investigates one project after another, and disparate in its sense of geography and scale, as he moves from a town-based afforestation scheme in Ecuador to multi-billion-dollar government programmes in Europe. Yet he is able to weave the various narratives into a single vision. He is also deeply alive to the balance we need to strike between hope on the one hand, and awareness of the hard facts on the other." (Ecologist)"