Some have criticized Boyle for a lurking cruelty which they claim to find in his work. Boyle discerns more than a little hypocrisy in that complaint. We love to read about desperate straits. We revel in the suffering of others. Given this jaundiced view of the human condition to which one of the writers Boyle most admires, Evelyn Waugh, would no doubt subscribe, Boyle approaches his environmental topics with a keen eye for the discrepancy between the idealism and the hidden premises of the most radical nature writers.
Nature writers have a misanthropic streak.
They don't seem to like people. And that's not illogical, if six billion people are destroying the earth. We are, after all, the illness, and logically if there are less of us, that is the cure. I have a misanthropic streak myself. I'm writing about this partly to challenge that tendency in myself.