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The eco guide to sanitary products
Menstrual pads are hard to talk about, and also an eco disaster on our beaches – but we need to change our ways
This column nearly didn’t happen. When a manufacturer of eco friendly menstrual pads bounded up to me and asked me brightly in public: “Are you a flusher or a binner?” I stared at her in total horror. Menstrual products and their disposal represent one of the last great consumer taboos – odd in a society which cheerfully discusses the vajazzle. It’s a taboo that powers a huge environmental issue. In their 2016 beach clean-up, the Marine Conservation Society found 20 tampons and sanitary items per 100 metres of shoreline.
Why not embrace the rise of the reusables?
Continue reading...Waterworld
Battle for the mother land: indigenous people of Colombia fighting for their lands
The 50-year civil war is over but, in the Cauca Valley, indigenous communities are on frontline of fight against drug gangs, riot police and deforestation
A green-and-red flag flies over a cluster of bamboo and tarpaulin tents on the frontline of an increasingly deadly struggle for land and the environment in Colombia’s Cauca Valley.
It is the banner for what indigenous activists are calling the “liberation of Mother Earth”, a movement to reclaim ancestral land from sugar plantations, farms and tourist resorts that has gained momentum in the vacuum left by last year’s peace accord between the government and the paramilitaries who once dominated the region – ending, in turn, the world’s longest-running civil war.
Continue reading...Forget cod and salmon: Britons urged to rediscover the humble Cornish sardine
At close to midnight, the crew of the Rachel Anne are surprisingly cheerful, given they have spent seven hours fruitlessly searching the English Channel for sardines. Scanning the screens in the wheelhouse, Richard Chamberlain, the skipper, suddenly spots a red blob on the echo-sounder which indicates a sizeable shoal is close by. “It’s looking good,” he shouts, checking its location and satisfied that it is a “tight” (and therefore plentiful) shoal, and not too deep. “Let’s shoot.”
The nocturnal silence off Cornwall is shattered as a huge circular net is catapulted or “shot” overboard by a hydraulic winch and – engine revving – the boat lurches ahead in a giant curve, the net unfurling behind.
Continue reading...Chimpanzees among 33 breeds selected for special protection
Octopuses 'walking out of the sea' on the Welsh coast
Growth strategies: illustrated houseplants – in pictures
While at university, self-taught gardener Emma Sibley often swapped houseplants and cuttings with friends. Now, her desire to combine nature with city life has led to Urban Botanics (Aurum Press £18), a book illustrated by Dutch artist Maaike Koster, guiding readers through 70 indoor plant varieties, their origins and upkeep. “Having plants in your home helps to purify the air. Living in a city, this is a welcome benefit,” says Sibley, who also runs the shop London Terrariums. While a houseplant isn’t a true substitute for being out in nature, she says, it can create a “calmer, greener environment that helps both productivity and relaxation”.
- To tie in with the book, Emma Sibley will demonstrate how to make a terrarium at Heals, London W1 on 2 November
Caimans helped out of a sticky situation in Brazil
Organic or starve: can Cuba's new farming model provide food security?
Once it grew only sugar and was heavy handed with fertilizers and pesticides, now Cuba is in the grip of a small-scale organic farming revolution
In the town of Hershey, 40 miles east of Havana, you can see the past and the future of Cuban farming, side by side.
The abandoned hulk of the Camilo Cienfuegos sugar plant, shut along with 70 other cane refineries in 2002, towers over the town. But in the lush hills and grasslands around Hershey, fields of cassava, corn, beans, and vegetables are a sign that there is life after sugar.
Continue reading...Stephen Hawking gives talk on black holes at Oxford University
Country diary: on the Severn Way with a heron and buzzard for company
Caersws, Powys Afon Hafren meanders to the flood plain, a broad, stately, river in comfortable middle age
Long before the Romans built their two forts at Caersws, the ridge to the west of the town was dominated by the ramparts of Cefn Carnedd. In the low afternoon sunshine the defensive banks that still rise above the hillside woodland were picked out by deep shadows.
The iron-age fortress stands above a kempt farmed landscape drained by the afon Hafren (river Severn) as it meanders across the valley floor. Only a few miles from where it rises, gathering volume from the tributary streams funnelling in from the many side valleys, it has already changed from a lively moorland torrent to a broad, stately, river in comfortable middle age.
Continue reading...Warming waters threaten kelp
“Minister for Adani” is back – and pushing for mega coal mine and new coal generator
Professor Stephen Hawking's PhD viewed two million times
Hit the frog and toad
'Way off the planet': regional businesses use renewables to slash costs
From solar to running generators, some have quit the energy grid and several others are showing interest in ‘defecting’
In the heart of Queensland’s mining belt, a businessman who has grown his enterprise mostly off the back of the coal industry sees the energy sector going only one way.
“I think renewable energy is where the market’s going – what we class as the energy revolution,” says Jason Sharam.
Continue reading...Trump to shrink two national monuments following Zinke's proposal
President will reverse protections established by two Democratic presidents on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, sparking fury from environmentalists
Donald Trump is shrinking two national monuments in Utah, accepting the recommendation of interior secretary Ryan Zinke to reverse protections established by two Democratic presidents, a Republican senator said Friday.
Related: National Park Service wants to sharply raise entry fees at most popular parks
Continue reading...Eat less fish to help replenish our fish stocks | Letters
The WWF is absolutely right that our fish stocks are at risk from leaving the common fisheries policy (Call for Brexit monitoring of UK fishing fleet, 27 October). This is because in reality fish stocks all round Europe are precarious and all the (welcome) “recovery” in cod stock means is that there are now very few fish instead of very, very few.
My contribution to the future of fish stocks is to not eat fish until there are marine conservation zones all around the UK and fish stocks are allowed to increase massively.
Continue reading...Farming sector aims to cut antibiotics use to help tackle human resistance
Taskforce from UK’s pig, dairy and poultry farming sectors will aim to bring down use seen as major cause of increasing antibiotic resistance
Farming organisations have set new targets to reduce the use of antibiotics in raising animals for food, in an effort to cut the widespread overuse that has been blamed as a significant factor in increasing medicinal resistance among humans.
The chief medical officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, has repeatedly said that the rapidly increasing resistance to antibiotics and the rise of resistant “superbugs” is one of the greatest threats to human health, which could make even routine operations life-threatening in future.
Continue reading...The call of the foghorn mournful | Brief letters
I recently completed my tax return for 2016-17 and as I owe less than £3,000 HMRC is happy to let me start paying the bill on my tax code from April 2018. This generosity from the government for those of us fortunate enough to have taxable income seems in stark contrast to those being moved to universal credit (Rent arrears spiral in universal credit pilot, 24 October), where it is deemed better that vulnerable people live without any money for a few weeks because the money tree can’t afford it.
John Beer
Farnham, Surrey
• Pilgrim Tucker’s article (25 October) points out that, under universal credit, workers on low incomes will be forced to look for extra hours. Not only that, but if an unemployed person applies, their partner who has a part-time job which they love will also be forced to look for full-time work. This applies even if they have a young child. How cruel can this government get?
Diane Smethurst
Chester
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