I have learned as much from my rats as I have learned from Plato," Arne Naess informed a startled Karl Popper. Naess was the highly influential Norwegian philosopher whose ideas about ecology and humans' relationship with the environment have informed and enriched many of today's green activists and movements. His key notion of "deep ecology" is the idea that all of nature matters and deserves equal consideration, not just those parts that impinge upon humans. Among his 30 books, both technical and popular, and hundreds of papers, were such bestsellers as Life's Philosophy: reason and feeling in a deeper world (2002) which made him the man whom Norwegian teen-agers most wanted to meet. Although the environmentalist Bill McKibben called this good-humoured, ever-welcoming creator of "ecosophy" a "universal great-grandfather", Naess shied away from the idea of disciples.

Michael Majerus was a gifted Cambridge scientist and teacher, and a doughty defender of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. Hissubjects were moths and ladybirds, which he saw as perfect tools fordigging into evolutionary questions, but he also loved them for their own sake. He was that increasingly rare phenomenon, a scientist who was also a field naturalist (he was running a moth trap in his garden from the age of 10). Perhaps it was this instinctive "feeling for the organism", allied to his natural vitality and infectious enthusiasm for insects, that made Majerus such a popular teacher, and one in demand by the media.

Here's a nagging thought I'd never encountered before. What do you do if you're a beluga whale and you get an itchy back? There you are, stuck in mid-ocean with the nearest scratchy rock hundreds of nautical miles away, and there's not a lot of point in asking your neighbour to help you out because flippers don't have a very high coefficient of friction anyway. The answer, it turns out, is that you have to wait until the Arctic ice melts and you can roll around in the shingle of a fresh water estuary. We saw a group of belugas doing just that in Nature's Great Events and David Attenborough assured us that they were having a whale of a time. They "whistle with pleasure," he said, which made me wonder where the Natural History Unit had found a fluent speaker of Belugese. It's true that they looked to be enjoying themselves, but can we be sure that they aren't saying, "Bloody hell it's crowded... I know I say this every time but I'm definitely going to a quieter estuary next year"?

The Pope was "very much" misrepresented when he gave a speech before Christmas widely interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales said today.

Far more than just a serendipitous collection made by three curious men in a Cessna 182, The Living Coast: An Aerial View of Britain's Shoreline, by Christopher Somerville, with photographs by Adrian Warren and Dae Sasitorn (Last Refuge, £14.99) is an intimate document of Britain's ins and outs, its ebbs and flows and its precarious ecology, all from "a gull's eye" perspective.

Along with The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, Penguin is reissuing three of John Wyndham's lesser-known novels, each examples of the strain of sci-fi he liked to call "logical fantasy" and each with a notable contemporary resonance.

It is an all-round embarrassing fact that the art of the past often only speaks to us by being misunderstood. It seems to communicate so clearly, but it does this because we've made a mistake. We've imagined that it's talking a language that it couldn't possibly be talking. And knowing that leaves us with a dilemma. Should we give up our delusory delight in old art? Or persist in the delusion, aware that's what it is?