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UPDATE – Ontario to abstain from August WCI auction as new Premier Ford announces end of carbon market
CN Markets: Pilot market data for week ending Jun. 15, 2018
RGGI auction clears above secondary market as compliance entities shy away
What a load of crocs!
The week in wildlife – in pictures
A colourful sand lizard, a giant baobab tree and a racoon with a head for heights are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
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The magical wilderness farm: raising cows among the weeds at Knepp
You can’t make money from letting cows run wild, right? When Patrick Barkham got access to the sums at a pioneering Sussex farm, he was in for a surprise.
Orange tip butterflies jink over grassland and a buzzard mews high on a thermal. Blackthorns burst with bridal white blossom and sallow leaves of peppermint green unfurl. The exhilaration in this corner of West Sussex is not, however, simply the thrilling explosion of spring. The land is bursting with an unusual abundance of life; rampant weeds and wild flowers, insects, birdsong, ancient trees and enormous hedgerows, billowing into fields of hawthorn. And some of the conventional words from three millennia of farming – ‘hedgerow’, ‘field’ and ‘weed’ – no longer seem to apply in a landscape which is utterly alien to anyone raised in an intensively farmed environment.
This is Knepp, a 3,500-acre farm in densely-populated lowland Britain, barely 45 miles from London. Once a conventional dairy and arable operation, at the turn of this century, Knepp’s owners, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, auctioned off their farm machinery, rewilded their land and, as much by accident as design, inched towards a new model of farming. Some view the result as an immoral eyesore, an abnegation of our responsibility to keep land productive and tidy. Others find it inspiring proof that people and other nature can coexist.
Continue reading...Energy Security Board releases draft detailed design paper on the National Energy Guarantee
ESB adds some meat to skeleton of “do nothing” NEG
Country diary: a powder puff of black feathers swirls down the stream
Hermitage Stream, Langstone, Hampshire: One agitated moorhen was corralling four skittish chicks on the far bank, while the other frantically zigzagged after a fifth
As we walked alongside the Hermitage Stream, we noticed a day-old moorhen chick bobbing upside down beneath the replica wooden mill wheel, its oversized feet splayed to the sky. Without a second thought, my father climbed over the railings and plunged into the water, scooping up the limp body. The chick appeared lifeless, but as he warmed it in his hands it began to stir and slowly raised its tiny bald head.
Moorhens habitually kill their own chicks in order to whittle down a large brood, or in times of food shortage – drowning them by violently shaking them and pushing them underwater. There are six to eight eggs in an average clutch, but it’s uncommon to see adults with that number of well-grown young – usually only two or three will survive to maturity. However, with no parents in sight, it seemed more likely that this chick had been snatched and dropped by a predator.
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