Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince – review

Gaia Vince's ambitious, all-embracing, compelling journey holds a mirror up to humanity's epoch to reveal all we have destroyed, but may yet be able to save

UN scholars have calculated that within the next 10 years the degradation of farm and grazing land could turn 50 million people into migrants: put them together and they would add up to the planet's 28th largest nation. Almost simultaneously, another UN agency calculated that in the last 25 years, another 3% of the planet's forests had been burned or felled: 129 million hectares of root, branch and canopy. Assemble all those charred stumps in one place and you have an area the size of South Africa.

Once you have read Gaia Vince's book, you start to register the scale of change in a fast-changing world. Adventures in the Anthropocene is one of six books vying this week for the 25,000 Royal Society Winton Science Book prize, to be announced on Thursday (24 September). The others are, in no particular order because each author has already won at least the 2,500 prize that goes with a place on the shortlist, Jon Butterworth's Smashing Physics: Inside the World's Biggest Experiment (Headline); Alex Through the Looking Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life, by Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury); Life on the Edge: the Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden (Bantam); Life's Greatest Secret: the Race to Crack the Genetic Code, by Matthew Cobb (Profile); and The Man Who Couldn't Stop, by David Adam (Picador).