Ecologists are calling the age we live in the Sixth Great Extinction. The world is losing more than animal and plant species. We are also losing the vast human legacy of languages, and with it ways of living, seeing and knowing. Glavin sets off in pursuit of the very things we're losing – a distinct species every ten minutes, a unique vegetable variety every six hours, an entire language every two weeks. Along the way he encounters some of the world's wonderful, rare things: a mysterious Sino-Tibetan song-language, a Malayan tiger (the last of its kind) and a strange tomato that tastes just like black cherry ice cream. And he finds hope in the most unlikely places – a macaw roost in Costa Rica, a relic community of Norse whalers and the vault beneath the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A fresh narrative take on the usual doom and gloom environmentalism, The Lost and Left Behind draws upon zoology, biology, ecology, anthropology and mythology to uncover the hidden story of a long human struggle to conserve the living things of the world. 'A thoughtful and engaging book' Times Literary Supplement 'A wise and eloquent writer whose clear-eyed intelligence explores our conflicted relationship with nature. What Glavin has to tell is urgent, important, and well said.' Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress 'An urgent, necessary book. Glavin writes with both passion and authority' Mark Abley, author of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages