He writes regularly on gardening for the Daily Telegraph. Mini-bio: Ken Thompson was for twenty years a lecturer in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

He discusses, too, whether our fears could be getting in the way of conserving biodiversity, and responding to the threat of climate change. But do we need to fear invaders? And indeed, can we control them, and do we choose the right targets? Ken Thompson puts forward a fascinating array of narratives to explore what he sees as the crucial question – why only a minority of introduced species succeed, and why so few of them go on to cause trouble. We have all heard the horror stories of invasives, from Japanese knotweed that puts fear into the heart of gardeners to brown tree snakes that have taken over the island of Guam. In a controversial new book WHERE DO CAMELS BELONG Why Invasive Species Aren’t All Bad (Greystone Books September 9, 2014, 17.95, 978-1-77164-096-1), Ken Thompson investigates an array of invasive and natural species to determine how much we really need to fear alien invaders, such as the tamarisk. This is a classic example of the contradictions of ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ species, a hot issue right now, as the flip-side of biodiversity. They evolved in North America, retain their greatest diversity in South America, and the only remaining wild dromedaries are in Australia. Synopsis: Where do camels belong? In the Arab world may seem the obvious answer, but they are relative newcomers there.

Where do camels belong book