The Guardian
Surfers Against Sewage ride the wave of the 'Harry and Meghan effect'
In nearly 30 years, a bunch of surfers concerned about pollution have become a serious marine conservation force. An unexpected royal patronage has given them more funding and greater reach than ever to fight plastic pollution
Despite its eye-catching name, Surfers Against Sewage probably owes its existence to plastic. “The advent of panty-liners meant you could really see sewage slicks. Condoms, panty-liners and other plastic refuse made for a visceral, and visual, reminder of pollution,” Chris Hines, surfer and co-founder of this small charity in Cornwall, recalled in Alex Wade’s book, Surf Nation.
Sick of ear, throat and gastric infections, he and others called a meeting in St Agnes village hall. A who’s who of the most committed, passionate surfers in Cornwall – and just about the whole village – turned out. It was 1990 and Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) was born.
Continue reading...High risk of food shortages without pesticides, says chemical giant
Head of Syngenta, world’s biggest pesticide maker, says rejecting farming tech could have serious consequences within 20 years
The world is likely to face food shortages within 20 years if pesticides and genetically modified crops are shunned, according to the head of the world’s biggest pesticide manufacturer.
J Erik Fyrwald, CEO of Syngenta, also said the technologies to produce more food from less land are vital in halting climate change, but that better targeting will mean farmers around the world will use less pesticide in future.
Continue reading...Where have all our insects gone?
When Simon Leather was a student in the 1970s, he took a summer job as a postman and delivered mail to the villages of Kirk Hammerton and Green Hammerton in North Yorkshire. He recalls his early morning walks through its lanes, past the porches of houses on his round. At virtually every home, he saw the same picture: windows plastered with tiger moths that had been attracted by lights the previous night and were still clinging to the glass. “It was quite a sight,” says Leather, who is now a professor of entomology at Harper Adams University in Shropshire.
But it is not a vision that he has experienced in recent years. Those tiger moths have almost disappeared. “You hardly see any, although there used to be thousands in summer and that was just a couple of villages.”
Continue reading...The secret rainforest hidden at the heart of an African volcano - in pictures
A ‘dream team’ of international scientists scaled Mozambique’s Mount Lico and found a wealth of new species.
Continue reading...Faecal transplants ‘could save endangered koala’
Team of researchers changes microbes in koalas’ guts in order to improve type of food they consume
Scientists believe they have found a new weapon in the battle to save endangered species: faecal transplants. They say that by transferring faeces from the gut of one animal to another they could boost the health and viability of endangered creatures. In particular, they believe the prospects of saving the koala could be boosted this way.
The idea of using faecal transplants as conservation weapons was highlighted this month at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Atlanta, where scientists outlined experiments in which they used the technique to change microbes in the guts of koalas.
Continue reading...UK cycling is worth more than the steel industry – where's the strategy?
A new report argues we’d all benefit if the government started taking the cycle industry seriously
If a country wants to make things, it needs a domestic steel industry. Our government considers this industry to be one of national strategic importance. But you would think it was also important to keep people moving, to make sure the air they breathe is clean and to look after their health.
It just so happens that cycling is one of the ways to unsnarl traffic congestion, reduce pollution and make folks hale and hearty. People who cycle to work even have fewer days off sick.
Continue reading...Country diary: a tragedy for the exotic hooligans occupying our loft
Stamford, Lincolnshire: A dead starling chick appears on the ground outside, almost fledged. I’m upset to see it
Scratchings rattle above an upstairs lintel in early April and I think little of it. That nest that’s been occupied for four consecutive years is being renovated, that’s all. The shadows of birds firing from gable to gable over the street, air alive with busy chatter. “But the nest has gone,” my wife says. “Those builders, last year.”
I stand over the street and watch with binoculars. A sharp-edged bird swoops in, then disappears beneath my roofline through what I see now is a hole. Starlings. Brash, boisterous, bully-birds – and colonising our loft.
I keep watch. I see them coming and going. Sometimes they watch me watching them, from an aerial perch, silhouetted against the sky with a wariness I can feel.
The starling is a striking bird. With a sharp yellow bullet for a beak and plumage of dark iridescence, they are exotic-looking, and shimmer in petrol-peacock blues and greens and purples when caught in light. Yet we see them as hooligans. Even the Latin name of the European starling, Sturnus vulgaris, suggests so. Starlings absorb the sounds of their surroundings into their song – car alarms, speech, infant cries. And now, moving in. The human-bird.
I hear them dig in their roost, then nothing for a while, then suddenly the thin mewling of chicks, at the same time loud and delicate in a way that makes you fearfully parental. The days pass and the cries strengthen; I hear scuttlings, then nothing. A dead chick appears on the ground outside, almost fledged, already oiled with that mercury look. I’m upset to see it.
Government faces growing pressure over Heathrow third runway
Government faces criticism from its own advisors over failure to mention emissions targets as campaigners enter second week of hunger strike
The government is coming under growing pressure from environmentalists and its own advisers over its support for a new runway at Heathrow.
The Committee on Climate Change [CCC] has expressed its “surprise” that there was no mention of the government’s legal obligations to reduce greenhouse gases when it announced it was backing Heathrow expansion plans earlier this month.
Delhi's toxic air, Antarctic ice melt and plastic solutions – green news roundup
The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox
Continue reading...Can Scotland save its wildcats from extinction?
The secretive mammals are fast disappearing from the Highlands but last-ditch efforts to save them are fraught with challenges
Set deep in mixed woodland of Scots pine and birch, near the banks of the river Beauly in Inverness-shire, several huge, concealed pens contain two breeding pairs of Scottish wildcat.
Wildcats mate from January to March, and their high, anguished breeding calls through the dark winter nights are thought to have inspired tales of the Cat Sith, a spectral feline of Celtic legend that was believed to haunt the Highlands.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
A colourful sand lizard, a giant baobab tree and a racoon with a head for heights are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...The magical wilderness farm: raising cows among the weeds at Knepp
You can’t make money from letting cows run wild, right? When Patrick Barkham got access to the sums at a pioneering Sussex farm, he was in for a surprise.
Orange tip butterflies jink over grassland and a buzzard mews high on a thermal. Blackthorns burst with bridal white blossom and sallow leaves of peppermint green unfurl. The exhilaration in this corner of West Sussex is not, however, simply the thrilling explosion of spring. The land is bursting with an unusual abundance of life; rampant weeds and wild flowers, insects, birdsong, ancient trees and enormous hedgerows, billowing into fields of hawthorn. And some of the conventional words from three millennia of farming – ‘hedgerow’, ‘field’ and ‘weed’ – no longer seem to apply in a landscape which is utterly alien to anyone raised in an intensively farmed environment.
This is Knepp, a 3,500-acre farm in densely-populated lowland Britain, barely 45 miles from London. Once a conventional dairy and arable operation, at the turn of this century, Knepp’s owners, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, auctioned off their farm machinery, rewilded their land and, as much by accident as design, inched towards a new model of farming. Some view the result as an immoral eyesore, an abnegation of our responsibility to keep land productive and tidy. Others find it inspiring proof that people and other nature can coexist.
Continue reading...Country diary: a powder puff of black feathers swirls down the stream
Hermitage Stream, Langstone, Hampshire: One agitated moorhen was corralling four skittish chicks on the far bank, while the other frantically zigzagged after a fifth
As we walked alongside the Hermitage Stream, we noticed a day-old moorhen chick bobbing upside down beneath the replica wooden mill wheel, its oversized feet splayed to the sky. Without a second thought, my father climbed over the railings and plunged into the water, scooping up the limp body. The chick appeared lifeless, but as he warmed it in his hands it began to stir and slowly raised its tiny bald head.
Moorhens habitually kill their own chicks in order to whittle down a large brood, or in times of food shortage – drowning them by violently shaking them and pushing them underwater. There are six to eight eggs in an average clutch, but it’s uncommon to see adults with that number of well-grown young – usually only two or three will survive to maturity. However, with no parents in sight, it seemed more likely that this chick had been snatched and dropped by a predator.
Continue reading...Leaked UN draft report warns of urgent need to cut global warming
IPCC says ‘rapid and far-reaching’ measures required to combat climate change
The world is on track to exceed 1.5C of warming unless countries rapidly implement “far-reaching” actions to reduce carbon emissions, according to a draft UN report leaked to Reuters.
The final draft report from the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) was due for publication in October. It is the guiding scientific document for what countries must do to combat climate change.
Continue reading...Inside the AEF, the climate denial group hosting Tony Abbott as guest speaker
The Australian Environment Foundation has secured a former prime minister to speak. But what does it actually do?
Securing a former prime minister to speak at your organisation is no doubt a coup for many groups.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy recently got Kevin Rudd. Australia’s Nelson Mandela Day committee has snaffled Julia Gillard for their next annual lecture.
Continue reading...Great Barrier Reef: four rivers are most responsible for pollution
Burdekin, Fitzroy, Tully and Daintree rivers in Queensland pose greatest risk, researchers find
Four rivers are most responsible for polluting the Great Barrier Reef, according to research that scientists hope will help governments better target efforts to reduce damage to the reef from land use.
The Burdekin, Fitzroy, Tully and Daintree rivers in Queensland posed the greatest risk to the reef, the study led by The Nature Conservancy and the University of Queensland found.
Continue reading...Human activity making mammals more nocturnal, study finds
Research involving 62 species found mammals spent relatively less time being active during the day when humans were nearby
Human disturbance is turning mammals into night owls, with species becoming more nocturnal when people are around, research has revealed.
The study, encompassing 62 species from around the globe, found that when humans were nearby, mammals spent relatively less time being active during the day and were more active at night - even among those already classed as nocturnal.
Who’s to blame for the ecological apocalypse? | Letters
If we’ve normalised the ecological damage we are doing to our country, as Chris Packham suggests, it’s only because as individuals we feel helpless (Packham: ‘We are presiding over ecological apocalypse’, 11 June). As it is, the signs are extraordinary, and not just the absence of iconic species like butterflies, bees, frogs and hedgehogs. I have noticed a decline in the number (and size) of ticks, for example, and houseflies and greenflies – even dung flies – are actually rare this summer.
If we do not mourn their decline we are foolish – no flies means no maggots, which means no cleaning up of the dead badgers Packham mentions; no greenflies and ticks means less food for some species up the food chain, which is presumably why there are no birds on our feeders these days. It really does feel like an apocalypse, and yet the government still drags its feet over the poisons which have almost certainly caused it.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
The legal fight to leave the dirtiest fossil fuels in the ground | John Abraham
Enbridge wants to build a new tar sands pipeline
Tar sands are the dirtiest fossil fuels. These are low-quality heavy tar-like oils that are mined from sand or rock. Much of the mining occurs in Alberta Canada, but it is also mined elsewhere, in lesser quantities.
Tar sands are the worst. Not only are they really hard to get out of the ground, requiring enormous amounts of energy; not only are they difficult to transport and to refine; not only are they more polluting than regular oils; they even have a by-product called ”petcoke” that’s used in power plants, but is dirtier than regular coal.
Recycled plastic could supply three-quarters of UK demand, report finds
Circular economy could recycle more plastic and meet industry demand for raw materials, finds Green Alliance research
Plastic recycled in the UK could supply nearly three-quarters of domestic demand for products and packaging if the government took action to build the industry, a new report said on Thursday.
The UK consumes 3.3m tonnes of plastic annually, the report says, but exports two-thirds to be recycled. It is only able to recycle 9% domestically.
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