I've followed Stephen Moss's writing with interest over the years, getting to know it first through his Guardian columns on birdwatching.

This book is about wildlife. About birds, certainly, but equally about all the other wild creatures - animals, invertebrates, fish and so on - which call Britain home. He examines all their possible habitats in turn: farmland, woodland, moorland, water and wetland, seaside, towns and cities. He discovers how our imperative to produce ever-increasing quantities of cheap food is destroying and impoverishing the habitats of so much wildlife: not just on farmland increasingly turned over to agri-business, but also on moorland, the sea, and wetlands. He illustrates his arguments not only by drawing on research and statistics, but with anecdote and personal stories.

This is a very thorough and convincing account of the perilous state that much of the wildlife we think of as part of our natural heritage is in. Though he's careful to point out that every creature, even if not cute and well-loved like the hedgehog and red squirrel, has a part to play in ensuring the health of some other creature in the food chain. And he writes too about success stories - the re-introduction of the red kite: the egrets which, now that our climate is generally warming, are making regular appearances on UK waterways are just two examples.

He writes this book as a warning, wanting everybody who reads it to become part of the fightback in a cause he regards as too important to lose. His style is informal, very easy to read. Even when he's making known the results of various studies, or sharing dismal statistics, the information is easy to absorb, and I continued to read with interest and attention.

Nevertheless, little of what he writes about here is unknown to the averagely well-informed and concerned reader. Though I really enjoyed reading this book, I'm not sure I learned a great deal that at some level I didn't already know about. I'd like to think that if I gave a copy to someone who doesn't yet think too hard about environmental matters, they'd find it an approachable and worthwhile read, and one which might change their viewpoint a little. I want this book to find a wide audience. ( )

Ever since William Blake wrote the words ‘Englands green & pleasant Land’ in 1804 it has always been considered one of the best descriptions of the British countryside. For millennia humans have been changing the landscape in this country and the wildlife co-existed with us and the habitats that were formed. Now days only green could be considered correct; decades of industrial farming has wreaked untold devastation amongst the wild creatures and flowers that had once made our countryside so pleasant. Headlines scream at us from the papers about how our native wildlife is in trouble and the facts about what has been happening are frankly terrifying.

In amongst the grim news, there have been some success stories, species have been dragged back from the very brink of extinction or have been part of successful introduction programmes; these should be celebrated for good reason. But while we have been concentrating on the rare and the spectacular, our once common animals, house sparrows and the hedgehog and others have suffered catastrophic falls in numbers. Moss decides to find out for himself just what the state of our nation's wildlife is. Starting with what is the largest land area in our country, farmlands, we go on a whistle-stop tour through our woods, seashores, and mountains. As wildlife is as much a part of the urban jungle nowadays, especially with the fox living off the waste that humans leave behind and peregrines hurling themselves from skyscrapers in the very centre of our capital.

The countryside is being exploited by self-appointed, minority-interest pressure groups whose claims to be the guardians of the countryside would be amusing, were the consequences not so serious.

This is another superb book from Moss, but more importantly is it timely too. The state of the wildlife in the country is at a tipping point after decades of pummelling from chemicals and dramatic loss of habitat. There have been some reintroductions of natives like beavers and the cleaning up of the rivers has seen the spectacular return of the otter that can be claimed as successes and there have been places where farmers and landowners have taken it upon themselves to re-wild the land which have proved successful. The points that he is fairly forcefully making are being echoed elsewhere too, most recently in Bee Quest by Dave Goulson and The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel, guys with their pulse of the countryside. This is a book to read if you care about the very future of our countryside and more importantly this should be a book that all politicians should be made to read. ( )