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'This has been my life for past six years': on the anti-fracking frontline
Inside the Lancashire protest camp aiming to disrupt new Cuadrilla wells with direct action tactics
It is a battle that has gone on for years, pitting tireless local residents and environmentalists against a major gas exploration company hoping to get rich – and solve a future energy crisis – by fracking under the Fylde coast.
Last October the government overruled Lancashire county council and gave Cuadrilla the green light to begin drilling, but anti-fracking activists have refused to give up their fight.
Continue reading...'Groundbreaking': Cornwall geothermal project seeks funds
The UK’s first geothermal plant could come online as soon as 2020 – research suggests the technology could one day generate a fifth of the nation’s power
A pioneering project to produce power from hot rocks several kilometres under the ground in Cornwall will begin drilling early next year, if a multimillion-pound fundraising drive succeeds.
Abundance, a crowdfunding platform overseen by the main City regulator, will this week launch a bond to raise £5m for the UK’s first commercial geothermal power station, located near Redruth.
Continue reading...Plastic found in remote South Pacific
'More valuable than gold': Yellowstone businesses prepare to fight mining
Around Yellowstone national park, mining companies anticipate the end of the Obama-era moratorium, but local businesses are fighting back
Bruce Gordon’s Cessna Centurion floats off the runway south of Livingston, Montana, quickly escaping the confines of Paradise Valley, walled on both sides by the Absaroka and Gallatin mountain ranges. Snaking through the alfalfa fields, cottonwood thickets and ranches below, the Yellowstone river is still surging with late spring snowmelt.
As soon as we crest the ridges, the whole of Yellowstone national park is visible to the south, with Grand Teton towering on the far horizon. Places that would take hours to drive between – because of impassable mountains and roadless wilderness – are revealed to be only a handful of miles apart. The nearly 1 million acres of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness is spread out to the east, teeming with unseen elk herds, mountain lions, and grizzly bears. Gordon, who runs the nonprofit EcoFlight, based in Aspen, Colorado, pilots flights like this one to help people understand conservation issues with a view from above. “We’re coming up on Emigrant Gulch now,” Joe Josephson, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, says over the intercom as we fly over the green-roofed buildings of Chico Hot Springs resort, skirting the conical 10,915ft Emigrant Peak. Josephson, an avid mountaineer who recently summited Emigrant Peak to celebrate his 50th birthday, is the Montana Conservation Associate for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a nonprofit devoted to defending the 20 million-acre Yellowstone ecosystem from degradation.
Continue reading...Climate change is ‘great opportunity’ says Richard Branson – video
The Founder and chair of the Virgin Group speaks during a panel discussion in New York on Friday and says the threat of climate change actually offers ‘one of the great opportunities for this world’. Branson urges the business sector to step forward and ‘fill certain gaps that some governments are leaving behind’ in tackling the problem
Continue reading...The eco guide to animal welfare
Britain is an international leader in animal welfare and now, fortunately, the message is beginning to spread – importantly to China
Animal welfare is one of the UK’s most successful exports. When the late Peter Roberts, a Hampshire dairy farmer, founded the charity Compassion in World Farming (ciwf.org.uk) 50 years ago, he rightly feared that industrialised farming would wreak havoc on animals and the planet. Even he couldn’t have envisaged today’s numbers: 70 billion animals are reared globally for meat, milk and eggs each year and two thirds of farm animals are reared intensively. We call it factory farming. The mission of CIWF is to bring it to a halt.
The concept of animal welfare didn’t have an equivalent in Mandarin or Cantonese.
Continue reading...Ancient underwater forest found in US
A mission to the Pacific plastic patch
Maize, rice, wheat: alarm at rising climate risk to vital crops
Simultaneous harvest failures in key regions would bring global famine, says the Met Office
Governments may be seriously underestimating the risks of crop disasters occurring in major farming regions around the world, a study by British researchers has found.
The newly published research, by Met Office scientists, used advanced climate modelling to show that extreme weather events could devastate food production if they occurred in several key areas at the same time. Such an outcome could trigger widespread famine.
Continue reading...Trump regrets 'bizarre mistake' of Paris climate pullout, Branson claims
- Virgin chief tells audience in Brooklyn Trump’s decision is ‘very, very strange’
- ‘I get the feeling the president is regretting what he did’
Donald Trump regrets the “bizarre mistake” of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, Sir Richard Branson has said. The British billionaire also urged the president to help phase out the ailing US coal industry.
Related: Donald Trump offers hand of friendship to Emmanuel Macron on Paris visit
Continue reading...Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win maths' Fields Medal, dies
From Myanmar to Mumbai: your images of plastic waste around the world
Readers document the rising environmental crisis of plastic waste, as the planet struggles to cope with a million plastic bottles being sold every minute
Waiting for the gorse to burst
Bratley View, New Forest The distinct click had been a seed pod twisting and firing its tiny black seeds into the distance
Click. The sound is distinct. A black speck flashes across my vision. I straighten up and think about the two. There can be no doubt what they were, but I am sensorially confused. Which had I actually experienced first? The click, or the speck?
At that moment, I had been adjusting the settings on my camera to try to catch the pink of the clump of common centaury that was looking radiant at the edge of an parched path. I give up on that for the time being, and linger by the gorse bushes in the hope that there will be a repeat performance, and I will solve the puzzle. Though I wait, and later walk some distance through an extensive gorse brake following a route marked out by the ponies, the plants refuse an encore.
World's large carnivores being pushed off the map
Creeping slime moulds hunt in Tasmania
Government’s letter to conservation groups has ominous implications | Lenore Taylor
New reporting rules seem to represent a big win for the campaign by the mining sector and conservative politicians to stifle environmental advocacy
The environment department has recently begun sending letters to conservation groups registered as eligible for tax deductible donations, as they do every year. But this year the correspondence is different, in a disturbing way.
In the past the groups, which include all the big names such as the Australian Conservation Society, The Wilderness Society, Lock the Gate, Greenpeace etc, as well as small local conservation organisations, were simply asked to reveal the total expenditure from their public fund. This year they have also been asked to break down their expenditure into the amounts spent on “on ground environmental remediation”, “campaign and advocacy”, “research” and other administration.
Continue reading...Harvest markets
A Big Country July 15, 2017
Guardian readers making Britain beautiful again | Letters
In our village, we have seen both the potential and the limitations of people-led efforts to tackle litter (Letters, 13 July). The parish council and the local transition village group have worked together to both inform people about the wider environmental problems of litter, especially plastic, and to develop a network of individuals who have undertaken to keep specific roads or areas free of litter. Volunteers were provided with good-quality litter pickers (available from the Keep Britain Tidy campaign) and gloves, and a map was put up in the parish office showing the areas covered.
The results have been fantastic: lots of volunteers mean that most of the village is litter-free most of the time. I am sure that Wendy Harvey’s hope that the sight of people picking up litter raises awareness and discourages (but doesn’t stop) others from dropping litter. A campaign at the local secondary school, has undoubtedly contributed as well.
Continue reading...'Beam me up, Scotty'
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