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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

Dr Nick Middleton

Academic Profile

Dr Nick Middleton's background is in the physical side of geography but his interests span the entire subject. His academic role is supplemented by his work as an environmental consultant and freelance author having written more than 200 articles in journals, magazines and newspapers, and 16 books. He has also co-written and edited another nine volumes.

Current Research

Nick Middleton's main research interest is in the nature and human use of deserts and their margins - see his Desert Dust in the Global System (Springer, 2006), World Atlas of Desertification (second edition, Arnold 1997) and Desertification: Exploding the Myth (Wiley, 1994) - but he also works and teaches on a wide variety of environmental issues. He has written on environmental topics for schools (e.g. Atlas of Environmental Issues, Oxford University Press, 1988), popular audiences (e.g. The Nature of Botswana, IUCN, 1990), undergraduates (e.g. The Global Casino: An Introduction to Environmental Issues, fourth edition, Hodder Education 2008), and for policy-makers (e.g. Intellectual Property Rights: A Battleground for Trade and Biodiversity?, IUCN, 1999). His name is well known to UK geography students as the author of the Environment Today column in the A-level magazine Geography Review. He also works for the Economist Intelligence Unit as an economic and political analyst on the Horn of Africa. He has worked as a consultant to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the EU and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Nick is a firm believer in the steadfastly geographical maxim that travel broadens the mind. So far, he has visited more than eighty countries, with a variety of excuses. He has reviewed industrial development in Mongolia for the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and written information boards for a Kenyan National Park. He has taught earth sciences in Oman and investigated whale-watching in Ecuador, assessed educational tours in Ghana and led wildlife expeditions to Namibia. Foreign travel also provides him with the material for his other geographical passion: writing travelogues - see The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia (Phoenix, 1992), Kalashnikovs and Zombie Cucumbers: Travels in Mozambique (Phoenix, 1994), Travels as a Brussels Scout (Phoenix, 1997), Ice Tea and Elvis: A Saunter through the Southern States (Phoenix, 2000). In 2002, he won the Royal Geographical Society's Ness Award in recognition of widening the public enthusiasm for geography through his travel writing, and his articles appear not infrequently in the travel section of the Sunday Times.

His most recent travelogues - Going to Extremes (Pan, 2003), Surviving Extremes (Pan, 2004) and Extremes along the Silk Road (J Murray, 2006) - have been written in association with three four-part television series broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK and National Geographic Channel in most other parts of the world. In Going to Extremes, Nick travels to the world's hottest, coldest, wettest and driest inhabited places, and the success of this series is followed by Surviving Extremes in which Nick investigates how four traditional communities adapt to life in harsh environments: the Inuit in northern Greenland, the Congo's Biaka pygmies, the Tubu of the Ténéré Desert and the Kombai of Papua. Going to Extremes: the Silk Routes is a string of similar adventures among traditional societies across Central Asia. His most recent television series is about the British weather.