The Guardian
George Barker obituary
George Barker, who has died aged 77, was a champion of wildlife conservation in towns and cities. During his long service in the government wildlife service, the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), and its successor bodies, he became the acknowledged expert on urban nature conservation, a field that had been largely neglected. His openness to new ideas, unusual in a public servant, and gentle advocacy over four decades, helped to make a success of urban wildlife conservation both at home and abroad.
Acting almost alone at first, Barker set about destroying the myth of the “urban wildlife desert”. Long before ecosystem services became a crucial part of urban planning and design, Barker realised that city landscapes can be surprisingly rich in wildlife, especially in post-industrial “brownfield” sites such as quarries and spoil-heaps. These places were seen as derelict land and were completely unprotected. Barker also understood that urban parks and even gardens can become reservoirs for wildlife if managed in the right way.
Continue reading...Brussels criticised for delays in banning toxic chemicals
European commission’s inaction is putting people’s health at risk, law firm says
People’s health is being put at risk by Brussels’ slow response to the use of dangerous chemicals, according to a report.
A study by ClientEarth, an environmental law organisation, found that in nine out of 10 cases the European commission’s decision to ban a toxic chemical after it had been identified was “excessively delayed”, sometimes for up to four years.
Continue reading...Copenhagenize your city: the case for urban cycling in 12 graphs
Danish-Canadian urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen busts some common myths and shows how the bicycle has the potential to transform cities around the world
- Copenhagenize is published by Island Press
The Wall Street Journal keeps peddling Big Oil propaganda | Dana Nuccitelli
The WSJ disguises climate misinformation as “opinion”
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Opinion page has long had a conservative skew, and unfortunately that has extended to politicizing climate change with biased and factually inaccurate editorials.
Over the past several weeks, the WSJ’s attacks on climate science have gone into overdrive. On May 15th, the Opinion page published a self-contradictory editorial from the lifelong contrarian and fossil fuel-funded Fred Singer that so badly rejected basic physics, it prompted one researcher to remark, “If this were an essay in one of my undergraduate classes, he would fail.”
Continue reading...Cycle touring with children: it can be done
Don’t think bringing children along for the ride means you have to miss out on one of cycling’s true pleasures. You just need to do a bit of extra planning
One of the great joys of riding a bike is touring – pedalling from place to place, without a fixed timetable, ideally with camping gear and everything else you need strapped to your bike. So that poses a question: can you do it with children?
The answer is a qualified yes – qualified in the sense you just need to do a bit more planning. We recently tried out a first brief family cycling tour with our son, now seven, and learned a lot in the few days of cycling through the Surrey and West Sussex countryside.
Continue reading...Meadow alive with colour and the sound of birdsong - country diary archive, 15 June 1918
15 June 1918: Colour shimmered in the sun and seemed to pervade everything
Surrey
The morning air was so light that it hardly touched the tops of the tall poplars, yet it was strong enough to sway poppies in the wheat and make yellow charlock tremble slightly in a farther outfield. Colour shimmered in the sun and seemed to pervade everything; a sense of it came with the rich scent of hay, raked, cocked, waggoned, and pronged by young women, who did everything but shape the stack which now stands on a log foundation near the wood. There timber, mostly ash, was cleared early in the year; birds who had used it as a great grove flew aimlessly across; it then lay bare, a place of the dead, and itself a dead place. Now it is a green copse alive with song; finches twitter, a yellow-hammer perches on the five-barred gate which spans the cart road, foxgloves line the ditch bank. The young sprouted ash with hazel hushes make an underwood through which you must push your way, the open spaces are green with ferns, and in the evening, from birches which were left standing, a blackcap whistles a short but strong tune.
Related: Fields of gold: the best of Britain’s wild meadows
Continue reading...Chris Packham warns of 'ecological apocalypse' in Britain
Springwatch presenter says Britain is increasingly ‘a green and unpleasant land’
He’s currently enjoying a great bounty of nature, from tree-climbing slugs to blackbird-gobbling little owls on this year’s Springwatch, but Chris Packham warns that we are presiding over “an ecological apocalypse” and Britain is increasingly “a green and unpleasant land”.
The naturalist and broadcaster is urging people to join him next month on a 10-day “bioblitz”, visiting road verges, farmland, parks, allotments and community nature reserves across the country to record what wildlife remains – from butterflies to bryophytes, linnets to lichens.
Continue reading...Country diary: 'Bilbo' Bagness maps the terrain for cunning runners
Bigland Hall, Lake District: Lost in the fog with a recalcitrant compass, I’m glad to encounter the former coach of the British orienteering team
A sea fret creeping in from Morecambe Bay has me baffled. The ancient ride I’ve been following through a corner of the Bigland Hall estate is covered in fog. Normally my compass’s needle points to magnetic north no matter which way I turn. Today? Useless. The needle spins around like a roulette wheel. With visibility down to a few metres, I’m lost. I have the verges to guide me, but is the Flookburgh-Haverthwaite road still to my right? Or have I inadvertently turned through 180 degrees, so that the B5278 is now to my left and I am walking back the way I came?
Continue reading...Feral horses are incompatible with a world heritage area. It's one or the other | David M Watson
After the NSW government gave them heritage protection with the brumby bill, I had no choice but to quit the NSW threatened species scientific committee
Last year, I drove up to the New South Wales high country with my oldest son. We arrived at Geehi, found a camp site, rigged up our rods and waded into the crystal clear water, hoping to snag a trout. Between casts, my attention was drawn to a pair of black cockatoos, sailing overhead. Looking up, I noticed the main range of Kosciuszko. Ancient and imposing, granite worn smooth by rain and snow, embroidered with lichens and wildflowers. I don’t know how long we stood there, in silent awe of the jagged peaks, but it’s a treasured moment frozen in time.
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Continue reading...Anti-Adani protesters target construction firm Wagners over $30m contract
Queensland company contracted to build airstrip for troubled Carmichael coalmine
Anti-Adani activists say they have launched an escalating disruption campaign against Queensland construction company Wagners, which is being targeted over a $30m contract to build an airstrip for the Carmichael coalmine.
Members of the group Galilee Blockade entered a Wagners industrial site at Pinkenba near the Port of Brisbane on Sunday afternoon, dressed as superheroes, as a precursor to further protests.
Continue reading...The Swansea Bay tidal power lagoon would bring many benefits | Letters
You reported that the government is planning to reject the Swansea Bay tidal power lagoon because it is considered too expensive (UK taxpayers to help fund new nuclear plant, 5 June).
The government has not yet announced its decision but it should, in any case, first publish its internal economic analysis of the proposed scheme so that its rigour and robustness can be checked. I have offered, as a former chief economist of the World Bank and head of the UK Government Economic Service, to have a constructive look at the analytical work. That offer stands; the analysis should be in the public domain and subject to scrutiny before a decision is taken.
Continue reading...A scandal for all seasons: those Scott Pruitt ethics violations in full
Lobbyists, hand lotion and Chick-fil-A – it’s hard to keep up with the scandals engulfing the EPA administrator
Scott Pruitt, the seemingly immoveable administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has an eclectic, almost itinerant, taste in corruption scandals.
Pruitt is best known for the ethical quagmires in this administration, shared with other Trump cabinet members, such as indulging in taxpayer-funded first class travel and spending much of his time playing an amenable host to corporations he is meant to regulate.
Continue reading...Why do so many Mormons back Trump? Some say it's about the land
Trump’s Utah campaign chief shrugs off Stormy Daniels and praises cuts to parks: ‘The land belongs more to me than you’
In February 2017, weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, a conservative political operative named Don Peay trudged up a steep, sagebrush-covered hillside outside Salt Lake City. Peay served as Trump’s campaign manager in Utah and is a hunting advocate who has gone out shooting with rightwing icons such as Dick Cheney, Ted Nugent and Donald Trump Jr.
Peay wanted to point out a particular parcel of public land that used to be overrun by highly invasive cheat grass. Several years ago, he worked with local land managers to revegetate it with native plants favored by deer and elk.
Continue reading...Charles Mann: ‘The relationship between population and consumption is not straightforward’
Charles C Mann is a science journalist, author and historian. His books 1491 and 1493, looking at the Americas before and after Columbus, were widely acclaimed. His new book, The Wizard and the Prophet, examines the highly influential and starkly contrasting environmental visions of Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet). Borlaug (1914-2009) was instrumental in the green revolution that vastly expanded the amount of food humanity has been able to cultivate. Vogt (1902-1968) was a pioneering ecologist who argued that humans had exceeded the Earth’s “carrying capacity” and were heading for cataclysm unless consumption was drastically reduced. One believed in scientific ingenuity as the answer to our problems, the other was convinced that it only deepened the crisis.
What made you frame this story of humanity’s future in terms of these two individuals?
It really started the night my daughter was born 19 years ago. I was standing in the parking lot at three in the morning and it suddenly popped into my head that when Amelia, my daughter, became my age there would be almost 10 billion people in the world. And I believe that centuries from now, when historians look back at the time when you and I have been alive, the big thing that they’ll say happened is that hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Latin America and Africa lifted themselves from destitution to something like the middle class. So not only will there be 10 billion people but all those people will want the same things you and I want – nice homes, nice car, nice clothes, the odd chunk of Toblerone, right? And so I stood there in the parking lot and thought to myself: how are we meant to do this? I’m a science journalist, so when I was talking to researchers, I’d say: “How are we going to feed everybody, how are we going to get water for everybody, house everybody? What are we going to do about climate change?” After a while I realised that the answers I was getting fell into two broad categories, each of which had a name that kept being associated with it: one was Borlaug, the other Vogt.
'Australia doesn’t realise’: worsening drought pushes farmers to the brink
Liverpool plains farmer Megan Kuhn says cows are being slaughtered because there is no way of feeding them after years of extreme weather
In the south-west corner of NSW’s Liverpool plains, in an area called Bundella, farmer Megan Kuhn runs beef cattle and merino sheep with her husband, Martin.
They have 400 breeding cows that will calve in six weeks. Shortly, 89 of those cows will leave the property, sold to an abattoir because the cost of feeding the animals during drought has become too great.
Continue reading...Mud, sweat and tears on the Dorset Gravel Dash | Laura Laker
The 100-mile on- and off-road bike-packing event is undoubtedly a challenge, but there is a true sense of adventure
Twenty-two miles from the end of a gruelling, beautiful and intensely varied 100 mile cross-country bike ride through Dorset, the rear derailleur on my bike clacked, pinged and, in the manner of a wounded fly, ended its journey upside down, immobile and missing several parts.
I stood on the dirt track peering down at it, wondering how I’d finish the ride, before my riding buddies set about trying to get me pedalling once more.
Continue reading...Country diary: the loneliest house in Wales?
Cefn Garw, Migneint, Snowdonia: Decades ago old Mr Roberts, who shepherded on horseback, departed his remote tyddyn, leaving the moor to fox, raven, pipit-hunting merlin
There are places among the Welsh hills where you may “grow rich/ With looking”. In my copy of RS Thomas’s Collected Poems, the verse from which that’s taken is marked with a curlew’s feather, picked up by Cefn Garw, perhaps the loneliest house in Wales. I’ve often followed the four-mile, climbing track to it alongside the Serw river. Rough ridge, place of quagmires, silken stream – such perfect simplicity in the way Welsh toponymy describes landscape’s essence.
Continue reading...The 'dark fleet': Global Fishing Watch shines a light on illegal catches
Low light imaging data being used to expose unregulated and unreported fishing on the high seas
New data is being used to expose fleets of previously unmonitored fishing vessels on the high seas, in what campaigners hope will lead to the eradication of illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.
Global Fishing Watch (GFW) has turned low light imaging data collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) into the first publicly available real-time map showing the location and identity of thousands of vessels operating at night in waters that lie beyond national jurisdiction.
Continue reading...Miami woman bitten and likely killed by alligator, officials say
Florida woman was identified from evidence collected from a necropsy after she disappeared while walking her dogs by a lake
A woman who disappeared while walking her dogs near a lake in Miami, Florida on Friday was bitten and likely killed by an alligator that was later captured, wildlife officials said.
A necropsy confirmed the alligator bit Shizuka Matsuki, 47, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said in a statement. They believe Matsuki was killed and were searching for her body. Commission spokesman Rob Klepper said they were able to positively identify the woman from evidence collected from the necropsy of the alligator, but he wouldn’t specifically say what that evidence was.
Continue reading...Move over Elon: global energy prize goes to Australia's solar guru
UNSW professor Martin Green, who revolutionised photovoltaics, says sun’s power is ‘the best option out there’
The “father of PV” – University of New South Wales professor Martin Green – has become the first Australian to win the global energy prize from a shortlist that included Tesla’s Elon Musk.
UNSW said Green had been selected from 44 contenders from 14 countries by a committee of leading scientists to share the $820,000 prize with Russian scientist Sergey Alekseenko, an expert in thermal power engineering.
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