The Guardian
Wake up to the danger of slug pesticides
Last month, it was revealed that levels of a toxic pesticide more than 100 times the EU limit were present in a source of English drinking water. The discovery of record levels of metaldehyde – a chemical used in slug pesticides – was reported by Natural England and the Environment Agency at the River Stour, which supplies water to homes in Essex and Suffolk. There's currently no treatment method available to extract this chemical from drinking water – once it's there, we're drinking it.
This isn't a sudden unexpected situation. The same problem occurred in many areas across Britain last autumn – when slug numbers exploded after the wet spring and summer, conditions that we're seeing emerge again. The problem was identified in autumn 2007, when new analytical techniques allowed testing for metaldehyde, and since then a voluntary stewardship programme with guidelines for the use of the chemical has been instituted. Yet this clearly isn't working.
Continue reading...Desert solar power partners Desertec Foundation and Dii split up
The two main advocates of a European renewable energy revolution driven by a vast grid of desert solar power have split, each accusing the other of poor communication.
Both the Desertec Foundation and the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii) say their plans to generate power from deserts across the world remains uncompromised despite the decision, which was made by the Foundation at an extraordinary board meeting last week.
Continue reading...Whales flee from military sonar leading to mass strandings, research shows
Whales flee from the loud military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, new research has proven for the first time. The studies provide a missing link in the puzzle that has connected naval exercises around the world to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins.
Beaked whales, the most common casualty of the strandings, were shown to be highly sensitive to sonar. But the research also revealed unexpectedly that blue whales, the largest animals on Earth and whose population has plummeted by 95% in the last century, also abandoned feeding and swam rapidly away from sonar noise.
Continue reading...Humans – the real threat to life on Earth
Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency.
We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.
Continue reading...How a giant tree's death sparked the conservation movement 160 years ago | Leo Hickman
Today marks the 160th anniversary of a seminal, but largely forgotten moment in the history of the conservation movement.
On Monday, 27 June, 1853, a giant sequoia – one of the natural world's most awe-inspiring sights - was brought to the ground by a band of gold-rush speculators in Calaveras county, California. It had taken the men three weeks to cut through the base of the 300ft-tall, 1,244-year-old tree, but finally it fell to the forest floor.
Continue reading...Local, self-sufficient, optimistic: are Transition Towns the way forward?
Late last year, Rob Hopkins went to a conference. Most of the delegates were chief executive officers at local authorities, but it was not a public event. Speaking in confidence, three-quarters of these officials admitted that – despite what they say publicly – they could not foresee a return to growth in the near future.
"One said: 'If we ever get out of this recession, nothing will be as it was in the past,'" Hopkins recalls. "Another said: 'Every generation has had things better than its parents. Not any more.' But the one that stunned me said: 'No civilisation has lasted for ever. There is a very real chance of collapse.'"
Continue reading...Fishing ban proposed near Rockall after rare scientific finds
Fishing is expected to be banned near the Atlantic islet of Rockall after a rare methane gas vent in the seabed and two new shellfish species were discovered by British scientists.
The methane, which leaks through a so-called "cold seep" vent in the ocean floor, was found last year by scientists working with the government agency Marine Scotland. It is the first of its kind to be found near UK waters and only the third in the north-east Atlantic.
Continue reading...RSPB accused of hypocrisy for killing hundreds of birds on its reserves
The RSPB has admitted killing hundreds of birds on its reserves, prompting an accusation of "extraordinary hypocrisy" from the Countryside Alliance.
The RSPB recently criticised the licenced destruction of buzzard eggs and nests to protect a pheasant shoot and said a cull of lesser black-backed gulls should be halted. But on Thursday the charity revealed it too had destroyed lesser black backed gulls and other birds that were harming native species.
Continue reading...'Badger-friendly' milk to be sold in just three UK supermarkets
Only three UK supermarkets – Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Asda – can guarantee they will sell milk that does not come from dairy farms inside zones where badger culls are due to take place, according to a survey by campaigners.
The survey also revealed that milk certified as organic will not be guaranteed as coming from farms outside the cull zones in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
Continue reading...Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists
Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.
"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper.
Continue reading...'Canned hunting': the lions bred for slaughter
They are adorably cute, with grubby brown fur so soft it seems to slip through my fingers like flour. It is only when one of the nine-week-old cubs playfully grabs my arm with its teeth and squeezes with an agonising grip that I remember – this is a lion, a wild animal. These four cubs are not wild, however. They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg. Tourists stop to pet them but most visitors do not venture over the hill, where the ranch has pens holding nearly 50 juvenile and fully-grown lions, and two tigers.
Continue reading...Why Britain's barren uplands have farming subsidies to blame | George Monbiot
Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It's illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we're losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.
The majority of wildlife requires cover: places in which it can shelter from predators or ambush prey, places in which it can take refuge from extremes of heat and cold, or find the constant humidity that fragile roots and sensitive invertebrates require. Yet, in the very regions in which you might expect to find such cover (trees, scrub, other dense foliage) there is almost none. I'm talking about the infertile parts of Britain, in which farming is so unproductive that it survives only as a result of public money. Here, in the places commonly described as Britain's "wildernesses", almost nothing remains. And the "almost" has become radically smaller over the past 20 years.
Continue reading...Record Burmese python caught in Florida
Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.
Continue reading...DR Congo waits on funding for world's largest hydropower project
Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity
The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.
In the past 60 years French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have all hoped to dam the river.
Continue reading...India acts to save Asiatic lion by moving it – but hard work has only just begun | Kavitha Rao
Wildlife is under threat in most of India, but there's one state that's clinging to its fauna, if rather too tightly. The state of Gujarat – whose Gir forest shelters the world's only Asiatic lion population – has lost a bitter battle over an ambitious translocation project.
For over 18 years, conservationists have been attempting to move a pride of Gir lions to the Kuno sanctuary in the state of Madhya Pradesh. But the Gujarat government stubbornly refused to let the lions go. Meanwhile, an impatient Madhya Pradesh government bizarrely suggested introducing African cheetahs, whose Asiatic cousin once roamed the area.
Continue reading...PR smokescreen cannot hide the holes in climate teaching proposals | Bob Ward
The Department for Education this month ended a consultation on its controversial proposals for the national curriculum amid protests about its plans to cut back on the teaching of climate change.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, launched his review of the curriculum in January 2011, but it has been beset by problems and delays, including complaints about of a lack of transparency and resignation threats from key advisers. It has also been hit by criticisms over suggestions that climate change would be omitted from a new slimmed-down version of the curriculum, which would be taught in English schools from September 2014.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
The dirty fossil fuel secret behind Burma's democratic fairytale | Nafeez Ahmed
New evidence has emerged that the systematic violence against ethnic Rohingya in Burma - "described as genocidal by some experts" - is being actively supported by state agencies. But the violence's links to the country's ambitions to rapidly expand fossil fuel production, at massive cost to local populations and to the environment, have been largely overlooked.
Over 125,000 ethnic Rohingya have been forcibly displaced since waves of violence swept across Burma's Arakan state last year, continuing until now, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) latest sobering report. The "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Arakan's Muslim minority, although instigated largely by Buddhist monks rallying local mobs, has been the product of "extensive state involvement and planning", according to HRW's UK director David Mepham.
Continue reading...Inside a genetically modified salmon farm in Panama - video
Amazon v the Amazon: internet retailer in domain name battle
When you see the word "Amazon", what's the first thing that springs to mind – the world's biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet retailer – and which do you consider most important?
These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".
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