The Guardian

Tindale Tarn, Cumbria A flock of sand martins skim the choppy water and tufted duck bob on the dark grey water

Buffeted sideways by the gale, we descend to Tindale Tarn, a small lake in the RSPB reserve of Geltsdale. Skylarks spring up from rough pasture around the stony track to sing shrill and sweet as piccolos in a stormy sky. This land, once mined for coal and lead, is an important breeding area for upland birds; curlew, redshank and lapwing call as we huddle in the open-sided hide by the tarn.

A flock of sand martins skim the choppy water, having come here to feed from their nests in a nearby sand quarry. A cormorant is fishing, and tufted duck bob on the dark grey water. Wind catches the surface and runs with it, making flurries of waves. The back of a mute swan, neck submerged, resembles a plump meringue. The female sits on a nest close to the hide, dragging reedy stems around her body with her orange beak, primping and perfecting the huge mound.

Wind is ‘increasingly the cheapest form of electricity’, says industry group, urging Tories to reassess ban on subsidised onshore windfarms

Conservative opposition to windfarms risks the UK missing out on one of the cheapest sources of electricity, according to the head of a Shell-funded industry group.

Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, said wind and solar power costs had fallen dramatically globally and urged the government to rethink its ban on subsidised onshore windfarms.

Victorian government asked to ‘completely prohibit logging’ on more than 100,000 hectares of the state’s mountain ash forest

Conservationists have called for a moratorium on logging more than 100,000 hectares of Victoria’s remaining native forest estate to protect the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum.

Environmental Justice Australia, acting on behalf of volunteer organisation Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum, wrote to the Victorian environment minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, on Monday requesting she implement an interim conservation order to “completely prohibit logging within the critical habitat of the Leadbeater’s possum” in order to ensure the survival of the species, which is at risk of dying out within the next 40 years.

The Goldman prize honours the achievements of grassroots environmental activists in six continents, recognising their sustained efforts to protect natural habitats often at great personal risk

Carmichael project likely to be ‘cash flow negative’ for the majority its operating life, according to Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis

The risk of the controversial Adani Carmichael coalmine becoming a stranded asset has increased in the last 12 months, according to a new report.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), says the Carmichael project is likely to be “cash flow negative” for the majority its operating life, even with concessional loans.

We asked readers to tell us what action they are taking against air pollution. Here’s what some of them said

About 40 million people in the UK are living with illegal air pollution levels, according to analysis commissioned by the Labour party.

Earlier this month the Guardian reported thousands of children across England and Wales are exposed to illegal levels of air pollution from diesel traffic, putting the health of young children at risk in the long term.

Campaigners attack government request to be allowed to breach Monday deadline to publish air quality plan

The government is facing renewed pressure after a last-minute attempt to delay the publication of its plan to tackle the UK’s air pollution crisis.

Ministers were under a court direction to produce tougher draft measures to tackle illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution, which is largely caused by diesel traffic, by 4pm on Monday. The government’s original plans had been dismissed by judges as so poor as to be unlawful.

Many brands use the word organic on labels when their products are not certified as such, warns Soil Association

The makers of many “organic” beauty products have been accused of confusing and meaningless labelling, according to a new survey in which 76% of consumers admitted they felt misled.

According to the Soil Association’s recent market report, sales of organic health and beauty products swelled by more than 20% in 2016, with the market now worth about £61.2m in the UK.

Stamford, Lincolnshire Discovering that a footpath named the Jurassic Way not only glanced my door but set off from it, I decided to walk it piecemeal

It took 10 years of living here before I looked hard at my town’s Ordnance Survey map. There, like most who neglect study of their closest ground, I saw my daily familiar articulated in a diagrammatic, unfamiliar way. Here notable historic echoes inscribed alongside its present. And I discovered that a footpath named the Jurassic Way not only glanced my door but set off from it, travelling 88 miles from this old Lincolnshire town to the unlikely end of Banbury, traversing a ridge-seam of limestone that gave Stamford its stone and the route its name. Drawn, it presents like a diagonal scratch across the belly of England.

With spring here I decided to walk it piecemeal, beginning today with the first mile. With the town’s spires to my back I cross the floodplain of the meadow, joining the bank of the Welland. Its banks are plump with green, the water still but for the odd ripple from a surfacing fish. The path is a balding in the grass.

For 30 years anti-pollution campaigner Wendy Bowman has stood firm against mining giants, supporting other landowners under pressure to sell

Each morning just after dawn, if you stop at the top of the hill that separates the town of Singleton from the tiny village of Camberwell in New South Wales, says Wendy Bowman, “you’ll see this brown scud across the sky”.

“It doesn’t go over the ridges; it stays in the valley, going up and down all the time.” She mimes a slow sieving motion: up, down.

Forced into the militia as a child in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rodrigue Katembo has now been awarded a Goldman prize for risking his life fighting to protect his country’s wildlife

As an enforced child soldier, Rodrigue Katembo saw his little brother die and had to carry the news to his mother. Now 41, he remains on the frontline – but today he protects the extraordinary wildlife in the national parks of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from armed militias.

It is exceptionally dangerous work: 160 park rangers have been killed protecting Virunga national park in the last 15 years, outnumbered 10 to one by militias and poachers. Around the world, about 1,000 rangers have died in the line of duty over the last decade. But Katembo, who is awarded the prestigious Goldman environmental prize on Monday, is resolute, despite the attacks he has endured and the risks he continues to run.

Wendy Bowman, an 83-year-old farmer, has been given the Goldman environmental prize, awarded across six global regions for grassroots work. For three decades Bowman has fought the march of open-cut coalmines across the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and helped organise her community to protect agricultural land and water

• Honour for activist farmer, 83, surrounded by mines on three sides

Campaign group Plantlife unveils list of top 10 endangered species and calls for better management of road verges that have become habitats of Britain’s flora

Some of the UK’s rarest plants are at risk of extinction unless action is taken to look after the road verges that have become their final refuge, a charity has warned.

Species such as fen ragwort and wood calamint are now only found on road verges, with fen ragwort hanging on in just one native spot near a burger van on the A142 in Cambridgeshire, conservation charity Plantlife said.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 27 April 1917

Reports of the arrival of the swallow are coming in thick and fast from all parts of the district; it is impossible to mention them in detail. A few straggled in earlier, but from the 16th onwards they have been arriving or passing in considerable numbers, and now the long-delayed sand martins are with them. On the 22nd a house martin was seen at Stretford. On the 21st, the cuckoo was calling in Hertforshire; we may expect it here any day. Willow wrens, too reported, but so far only odd bird; chiffchaffs, also very late, are now well distributed. Ring ousels and wheatears are on the moors, where twite, curlew, and golden plover are preparing for domestic duties.

Those who imagine that the course of Continental migration is disturbed or deflected should note a report from an officer at the front in France. On the 16th and 17th he saw scores of swallows and sand martins crossing the devastated land, and on the later date noted a house martin, a few tree pipits, two black redstarts, and three scoter ducks. A flock of linnets “insisted on sitting on a derelict bit of telegraph wire where shells fell continually. They were there day after day.” Even the resident birds are little troubled, for my friend adds: “Odd wrens and dunnocks are still in the flattened villages, and a few blackbirds and mistle thrushes.” Another friend comments upon the coltsfoot peeping out everywhere through the shell-torn ground. Nature’s healing touch!

In woods across the UK, an imported American stands higher and broader than the trees that surround it

A wooded ridge overlooking the Ouzel Valley in Bedfordshire has a remarkable set of trees sticking head and shoulders above the rest.

Credited with being able to grow into the world’s largest living thing, they can reach a height of 100 metres, nearly three times as high as a mature oak.

My father, Jon Vogler, who has died aged 77, used his skills as an engineer to set up the UK’s first large-scale recycling system. In 1974, when recycling at home was virtually unknown in Britain, Jon designed a household scheme in West Yorkshire for Oxfam called Wastesaver.

His innovative “dumpy” device, made of metal tubing, held four different coloured bags into which households sorted their waste. With the co-operation of Kirklees council, the sorted material was collected from 20,000 homes and taken to a disused mill in Huddersfield for recycling. The project revealed for the first time the public’s appetite for such schemes. When the collection of waste became unviable due to fluctuations in commodity prices, Wastesaver changed tack to deal with clothes and textiles.

Ex Lib Dem MP Norman Baker has swapped the ‘constant battle’ of working with Theresa May for running a Brighton eco-firm that’s launching a green bus route

Vince Cable and Ed Davey, the former business and energy secretaries respectively, are among the Liberal Democrats that lost their seats in 2015 who are plotting their way back to parliament in this general election.

But an erstwhile colleague has rejected the opportunity to regain his seat in Lewes in East Sussex. Norman Baker, the former transport minister who later quit the Home Office in 2014 after finding working with Theresa May a “constant battle”, sighs: “I don’t need to do the same thing over and over again, that’s the definition of madness.

Designers and architects are exploring the potential of repurposed shipping containers, but critics say they are not necessarily sustainable or cost-effective

Laeticia Brouwer, 17, was killed by a shark in Esperance on Easter Monday but Mark McGowan waited to comment as he did not want to politicise the issue

The premier of Western Australia remains in favour of personal devices to deter sharks instead of culling, nets and drumlines following the death of a 17-year-old girl.

Laeticia Brouwer was surfing with her father during a family holiday in Esperance on Easter Monday when she was mauled on the leg.

Reforms are under way but not enough has been done to end poverty wages in the garment industry

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 2013 Rana Plaza catastrophe, in which 1,134 garment workers in Bangladesh were killed when their factory collapsed. The workers died in the overcrowded and poorly constructed building while working to meet our demands for fast fashion.

Across the world conscious consumers will join fashionrevolution.org – a vibrant global civil movement focused on cleaning up the $3trn fashion industry, based primarily in low-wage economies.