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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 23 December 1916

Surrey, December 21
Rabbits could be seen playing in the meadow at the bottom of the down right up to the time when darkness came. There was no evening. The afternoon sky was just tinged with a strip of dull red in the west, and this patch of colour moved a little towards the north; then it died out. Nothing was visible except a planet and a few stars shining faintly, and seemingly very far away. Clouds in the higher sky came and completely blotted them; you lost all sense of direction; a mist began to spread upward; it was only by the tread of grass underfoot you had knowledge of being on the earth at all. The light, cold air died away; there seemed to be nothing but a chill, dead vacancy for almost an hour. Then a rustle, very slight, came moving along low down, as of something creeping over the meadow face. Bending, it was possible to discover that this was but the first movement of a light wind, just playing along the grass and hardly to be felt a few feet above the ground. But before the top of the down could be reached it could be heard sweeping among the elms a few yards on the other side; it had driven off the mist, and the great limbs could just be perceived swaying now this way and now the other. In the bottom, by the farmstead, strangely, a barnyard cock crowed hoarsely and twice, with a long pause in between. After another interval a bantam sounded a long shrill note. The wind dropped. But this morning it was wild again, scurrying heavy rain through the bare hazels. We knew then why the rabbits had been so frolicsome.

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$145 wildlife warning devices are designed to scare devils off road and have limited resale value

Thieves in Tasmania are stealing electronic fence posts designed to save the lives of endangered Tasmanian devils.

The thefts have bewildered the manufacturers, who say the $145 wildlife warning devices serve no purpose other than deterring wildlife and have limited resale value.

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Video footage of the rare Hydrolagus trolli, also known as a chimaera or ghost shark, has been taken for the first time off the coast of California

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Also known as chimaeras, the creatures have tooth plates instead of teeth and a retractable penis on their heads

American scientists surveying the depths of the ocean off the coast of California and Hawaii have unwittingly filmed the mysterious ghost shark for the first time.

The team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Center had sent a remote operated vehicle down to depths of 2,000 metres (6,700ft) when the creature appeared on their screens.

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You couldn’t dream up the crazy set of events that have driven fears that South Australia is a sign of the threats to come to power supply reliability.

The AEMC really needs to get its act together in terms of more forward looking in terms of its approach to modelling.

We've read and reported on some remarkably misinformed analysis in recent weeks, including from country's principal energy rule maker and government's favourite energy consultant. But this one on solar and battery storage just about takes the biscuit.

Two new studies of different ice shelves have seen major melting that could portend a less stable future for the region.

Northern Territory appoints leading lights in wind and solar to panel devising strategy for its 50 per cent renewable energy target.

JP Morgan say that with rapid coal generation closure, AGL may be worth more than the market currently thinks. But maybe not.

Carnegie Clean Energy's EMC and Lendlease Services ink major deal to corner Australia's multi-billion dollar microgrid market.

British-Chinese cameraman Jacky Poon is one of a few professionals documenting endangered animals in China.

Powered by Reposit, South Australia has the largest operational virtual power plant (VPP) in Australia.

Encountering a peacock in the wild is a surreal experience. Just one of the sightings among a wealth of exotic and unfamiliar birds at the Uttar Pradesh Bird Festival

There was a flash of the richest blue, as the bird emerged from the forest and strutted across the path in front of us. Instantly recognisable, yet at the same time oddly unfamiliar, it lifted its neck and flicked an enormously long tail, before melting into the vegetation, never to be seen again.

Encountering a peacock in the wild, in its native India, is a surreal experience. I regularly see them in the grounds of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court, where they strut around as if they own the place. Yet now I was watching them in the fields and forests of India’s most populous state, home to the second Uttar Pradesh Bird Festival.

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Timber stockpiled along a logging road. Day Edryshov/Shutterstock

If you asked a friend to name the worst human threat to nature, what would they say? Global warming? Overhunting? Habitat fragmentation?

A new study suggests it is in fact road-building.

“Road-building” might sound innocuous, like “house maintenance” – or even positive, conjuring images of promoting economic growth. Many of us have been trained to think so.

But an unprecedented spate of road building is happening now, with around 25 million kilometres of new paved roads expected by 2050. And that’s causing many environmental researchers to perceive roads about as positively as a butterfly might see a spider web that’s just fatally trapped it.

A Malayan tapir killed along a road in Peninsular Malaysia. WWF-Malaysia/Lau Ching Fong Shattered

The new study, led by Pierre Ibisch at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, Germany, ambitiously attempted to map all of the roads and remaining ecosystems across Earth’s entire land surface.

Its headline conclusion is that roads have already sliced and diced Earth’s ecosystems into some 600,000 pieces. More than half of these are less than 1 square kilometre in size. Only 7% of the fragments are more than 100 square km.

Remaining roadless areas across the Earth. P. Ibisch et al. Science (2016)

That’s not good news. Roads often open a Pandora’s box of ills for wilderness areas, promoting illegal deforestation, fires, mining and hunting.

In the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, our existing research shows that 95% of all forest destruction occurs within 5.5km of roads. The razing of the Amazon and other tropical forests produces more greenhouse gases than all motorised vehicles on Earth.

Animals are being imperilled too, by vehicle roadkill, habitat loss and hunting. In just the past decade, poachers invading the Congo Basin along the expanding network of logging roads have snared or gunned down two-thirds of all forest elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.

Deforestation along roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Google Earth Worse than it looks

As alarming as the study by Ibisch and colleagues sounds, it still probably underestimates the problem, because it is likely that the researchers missed half or more of all the roads on the planet.

That might sound incompetent on their part, but in fact keeping track of roads is a nightmarishly difficult task. Particularly in developing nations, illegal roads can appear overnight, and many countries lack the capacity to govern, much less map, their unruly frontier regions.

One might think that satellites and computers can keep track of roads, and that’s partly right. Most roads can be detected from space, if it’s not too cloudy, but it turns out that the maddening variety of road types, habitats, topographies, sun angles and linear features such as canals can fool even the smartest computers, none of which can map roads consistently.

The only solution is to use human eyes to map roads. That’s what Ibisch and his colleagues relied upon – a global crowdsourcing platform known as OpenStreetMap, which uses thousands of volunteers to map Earth’s roads.

Therein lies the problem. As the authors acknowledge, human mappers have worked far more prolifically in some areas than others. For instance, wealthier nations like Switzerland and Australia have quite accurate road maps. But in Indonesia, Peru or Cameroon, great swathes of land have been poorly studied.

A quick look at OpenStreetmap also shows that cities are far better mapped than hinterlands. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, my colleagues and I recently found 3km of illegal, unmapped roads for every 1km of legal, mapped road.

A logging truck blazes along a road in Malaysian Borneo. Rhett Butler/Mongabay

What this implies is that the environmental toll of roads in developing nations – which sustain most of the planet’s critical tropical and subtropical forests – is considerably worse than estimated by the new study.

This is reflected in statistics like this: Earth’s wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth in just the past two decades, as my colleagues and I reported earlier this year. Lush forests such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and Borneo are shrinking the fastest.

Road rage

The modern road tsunami is both necessary and scary. On one hand, nobody disputes that developing nations in particular need more and better roads. That’s the chief reason that around 90% of all new roads are being built in developing countries.

On the other hand, much of this ongoing road development is poorly planned or chaotic, leading to severe environmental damage.

For instance, the more than 53,000km of “development corridors” being planned or constructed in Africa to access minerals and open up remote lands for farming will have enormous environmental costs, our research suggests.

Orangutans in the wilds of northern Sumatra. Suprayudi

This year, both the Ibisch study and our research have underscored how muddled the UN Sustainable Development Goals are with respect to vanishing wilderness areas across the planet.

For instance, the loss of roadless wilderness conflicts deeply with goals to combat harmful climate change and biodiversity loss, but could improve our capacity to feed people. These are tough trade-offs.

One way we’ve tried to promote a win-win approach is via a global road-mapping strategy that attempts to tell us where we should and shouldn’t build roads. The idea is to promote roads where we can most improve food production, while restricting them in places that cause environmental calamities.

Part of a global road-mapping strategy. Green areas have high environmental values where roads should be avoided. Red areas are where roads could improve agricultural production. And black areas are ‘conflict zones’ where both environmental values and potential road benefits are high. W. F. Laurance et al. Nature (2014)

The bottom line is that if we’re smart and plan carefully, we can still increase food production and human equity across much of the world.

But if we don’t quickly change our careless road-building ways, we could end up opening up the world’s last wild places like a flayed fish – and that would be a catastrophe for nature and people too.

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.

Patrick Barkham is rightly worried about the impacts of urbanisation on our wildlife (Notebook, 13 December). London is home to more than 13,000 species of fauna, flora and fungi, but we are expected to accommodate a population increase equivalent to the size of Leeds by 2050, and building density can only go so far before our needs override those of others we share our city with. While flowering buddleia, dashing parakeets and curious foxes demonstrate adaptability to this brave new world, there are many more species that simply can’t cope – with higher density we’ll lose precious diversity. The London assembly is currently looking at how new housing can do more to conserve wildlife, and we’re encouraged by Mayor Khan’s talk of “good growth” as he sets out his early plans for the capital. We need real commitment to making room for nature and, importantly, room for London to breathe.
Mathew Frith
Director of conservation, London Wildlife Trust

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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There’s good news and bad, it’s a bit of an ethical pick and mix

This is a glorious time of year for confectionary lovers, and in a few days time I’ll embark on my annual mission to hoover up boxed chocolates with customary enthusiasm.
My mission includes house visits, so although I would favour Fairtrade artisanal chocolate brands with top notch ethical sourcing, I can’t always choose.

The good news is that there is evidence the big chocolate brands are wising up with regard to their supply chain. Ethical labels are now widely used on Christmas chocolates in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden.

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Actor and environmental activist tells UN awards ceremony that truth about climate change has spread like ‘wildfire’ despite prominent science deniers

Tackling climate change is the “biggest economic opportunity” in the history of the US no matter who holds political office, the Hollywood star and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio said on Friday.

Related: Leonardo DiCaprio meets Trump as climate sceptic nominated

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Dispute over major tourist attraction and conservation area is tearing local communities apart

“There’s, like, 50 people on the way up, so take your photos,” said a young American man, shirtless, his face daubed with paint, as he came striding through the forest towards the look-out. The view was spectacular: lush tropical foliage clinging to the sheer rock-face of a canyon plunging several 100 feet to a series of stunning turquoisey pools where tourists could be spotted swimming.

This was Semuc Champey, a must-visit on the Central American backpacker circuit and increasingly one of Guatemala’s most well-known tourist destinations. “Hidden”, “unique” and “natural paradise” are all thrown around to describe it. Lonely Planet calls Semuc “arguably the loveliest spot in the country”, while CNN dubbed the River Cahabón, which flows under the pools, the world’s “third best river for travellers” after the Amazon and Zambezi.

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Relive a bit of the 2016 #ASBNexperience!
Another ASBN season has come to a close and what a year it has been! We started the year off with a branding launch and through the year hosted a slew of great conversations and presentations across a variety of topics. We truly hope you, our community, have gotten great benefit from this years events and have enjoyed the knowledge you might have gained and connections made.

Cast: AdelaideSBN