[9] Woodford based the book around intriguing questions he received by email from readers of his popular science website (Explain that Stuff), such as how many pedalling hamsters you would need to generate enough energy to boil water for a cup of coffee.
[23] Apart from writing his own books, he has acted as a science consultant for other authors, including British TV scientists Richard Hammond, Robert Winston, and Johnny Ball, and the British-born American illustrator David Macaulay.
'"[32] English Nature countered that it was "not a campaigning organization" but, in June 1996, in one of the final attempts to halt the road, the issue became the subject of a High Court legal challenge, led by Friends of the Earth.
"[37] Some years later, Woodford ruefully told John Vidal in a Guardian interview how stopping the Newbury bypass had become a blinkered obsession for everyone involved but, more positively, also "a personal turning point, a huge thing where we felt we had really achieved something".
[2] Woodford is, nevertheless, sceptical of what he calls "feel-good" (superficial) environmentalism,[46] which he believes gets in the way of solving urgent problems such as pollution, because, as he told Neil Mackay in an interview in The Herald: "People see [it] as a sort of dilettantism".