Skip to main content

Sarah Bearchell - Five Way Interview

Sarah Bearchell is a science writer and educator who has created educational activities for charities, learned societies and science centres, and who writes regularly for Aquila. The Future of Agriculture is her first book. 

Why science?

I’ve always been curious. When I was little, I used to make mud pies with different ingredients like stones, grass and sticks. When they had set into hard bricks, I would turn them out and see if they collapsed when I stood on them. It was a long-running and very unscientific investigation which resulted in joy and mess in equal measures. Formal science was the next step…which resulted in more joy and mess as I moved towards ecology, agriculture and horticulture! 

Why this book?

I’ve always wanted to write a proper book, and by that, I mean a book produced by a proper publisher, in hard copy, to be sold in a bookshop and be purchased (and hopefully read by!) people who I’ve never met.

One day, I saw a call-out for agricultural writers for a popular science book. It caught my eye because my academic background is in agricultural botany, but for the last ten years I’ve been writing about diverse science topics for children, so I didn’t feel like the best fit. But then the call appeared again, at a time when I was looking for a new project, so I contacted the series editor. 

He said I’d have some guidance, and it only needed to be 40,000 words, which didn’t feel particularly daunting having written a doctoral thesis. And I found myself thinking why not?

Well, there’s the arrogance of someone who has never written a book before! It has genuinely been one of the hardest work projects I’ve ever done. Agriculture is such a HUGE topic to fit in such a slim volume, and the research phase took me down some fascinating rabbit-holes. It was a real challenge to select the right examples to create a coherent story within the target length.

Should we attempt to make the UK more self-sufficient in food?

Yes! Without a doubt! We can all help towards this by reducing food waste, eating seasonal (rather than imported) food and by reducing the amount of meat and dairy we consume. That would free up land to grow plant-proteins, so we could produce more of our diet from the limited farmland we have available in the UK. 

We also need long-term planning at the government level, which supports both farmers and consumers as these changes happen. That must include accelerating the change to renewable energy to reduce electricity costs, which will make it cheaper to produce delicate salad crops in glasshouses and vertical farms. That would help to both reduce seasonal imports and enable us to grow more crops on less land. 

What’s next?

I normally write about science for children, families and teachers – with the emphasis on practical investigation. I love the challenge of developing activities which explore scientific concepts using everyday resources. I also write and present science shows for festivals, which are designed to be multisensory and participatory, so they work for everyone. It’s wonderful to experience other people’s engagement with science!

What’s exciting you at the moment?

University engineering departments! One of my children is planning to study engineering and I’m finding the departmental tours fascinating. It’s a path I might have taken had circumstances been different…and had my school’s biology teachers not been so incredibly brilliant (thanks, Miss Mappledoram and Mr Woodcock!).

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more