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Four key signs to watch at COP23, the Bonn climate conference
Concerns over 5-minute rule as ESB warns of perils of wind and solar
Country diary 1917: passing companionship in the wood
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 3 November 1917
Surrey, November 1
Unlike the bare ground at the foot of the beech, grass spreads almost up to the root-trunk of our oaks, and fallen leaves lie thick among the bents. Underneath them are acorns, a full crop this year. It takes but a little time to collect a full sack. They are so plentiful that a litter of young pigs throw small showers upward as they nose about while they scutter along the edge of the wood. A sudden loud whirr of wings is heard. A cock pheasant, all brown and gold, goes one way just above the yet green nut-boughs; three hens fly the other. There is passing companionship, but not much more, among these birds. Rooks now chatter together in the upper branches of elms, going from one to another as though to test which will best stand the coming winter gales. The old hedger, slicing off faggot wood with his bill-hook, “reckons them as almost overwise. If they could but speak they would tell us a good deal more than we’d know.”
The air is warm, bees in something like small swarms are out on the remaining autumn flowers. St.John’s wort is here and there open on the hedge bank, and in a corner of the cornfield which has not been ploughed a few poppies bloom, but they are dull, not scarlet as in summer. The campion has not all gone, but it is foliage and fruit which to-day complete the picture of the hedgerow. This week the robins sing longer and oftener. While one pipes another will accompany you along the lane, flitting from side to side, but never far away.
Continue reading...'Curing Affluenza — how to buy less stuff and save the world'
Buying fresh potatoes and carrots all year round is destroying Australia's soil
BZE Rethinking Concrete Technical Session
Queensland poll to be stress test for future of renewables in Australia
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
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