The Guardian

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.

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.

From solar to running generators, some have quit the energy grid and several others are showing interest in ‘defecting’

In the heart of Queensland’s mining belt, a businessman who has grown his enterprise mostly off the back of the coal industry sees the energy sector going only one way.

“I think renewable energy is where the market’s going – what we class as the energy revolution,” says Jason Sharam.

President will reverse protections established by two Democratic presidents on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, sparking fury from environmentalists

Donald Trump is shrinking two national monuments in Utah, accepting the recommendation of interior secretary Ryan Zinke to reverse protections established by two Democratic presidents, a Republican senator said Friday.

Related: National Park Service wants to sharply raise entry fees at most popular parks

The WWF is absolutely right that our fish stocks are at risk from leaving the common fisheries policy (Call for Brexit monitoring of UK fishing fleet, 27 October). This is because in reality fish stocks all round Europe are precarious and all the (welcome) “recovery” in cod stock means is that there are now very few fish instead of very, very few.

My contribution to the future of fish stocks is to not eat fish until there are marine conservation zones all around the UK and fish stocks are allowed to increase massively.

Taskforce from UK’s pig, dairy and poultry farming sectors will aim to bring down use seen as major cause of increasing antibiotic resistance

Farming organisations have set new targets to reduce the use of antibiotics in raising animals for food, in an effort to cut the widespread overuse that has been blamed as a significant factor in increasing medicinal resistance among humans.

The chief medical officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, has repeatedly said that the rapidly increasing resistance to antibiotics and the rise of resistant “superbugs” is one of the greatest threats to human health, which could make even routine operations life-threatening in future.

I recently completed my tax return for 2016-17 and as I owe less than £3,000 HMRC is happy to let me start paying the bill on my tax code from April 2018. This generosity from the government for those of us fortunate enough to have taxable income seems in stark contrast to those being moved to universal credit (Rent arrears spiral in universal credit pilot, 24 October), where it is deemed better that vulnerable people live without any money for a few weeks because the money tree can’t afford it.
John Beer
Farnham, Surrey

• Pilgrim Tucker’s article (25 October) points out that, under universal credit, workers on low incomes will be forced to look for extra hours. Not only that, but if an unemployed person applies, their partner who has a part-time job which they love will also be forced to look for full-time work. This applies even if they have a young child. How cruel can this government get?
Diane Smethurst
Chester

This year’s Halloween confectionery will contain palm oil grown on land that should lawfully be habitat to orangutans, rhinos and clouded leopards, despite commitment to clean up supply chains

Nestlé, Mars and Hershey have been accused of breaking pledges to stop using “conflict palm oil” from deforested Indonesian jungles, just days before the annual Halloween confectionery frenzy.

The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) says consumers have been “deceived” by promises from the brands to clean up their supply chains which were subsequently delayed, revised or watered down.

Interior secretary Zinke calls himself a ‘Teddy Roosevelt guy’ – but he’s quietly dismantling environmental protections and yielding to oil industry interests

He recently posed for a GQ magazine photo shoot with a fly fishing rod in front of snow-capped Montana peaks.

He rode a horse – named Tonto – down the National Mall to his first day of work at the Interior Department.

Green party councillor Alison Teal was accused of entering ‘safety zone’ erected around trees due to be felled

A Green party councillor has been found not guilty of breaching a court order while trying to stop trees being felled in Sheffield.

Alison Teal, the councillor for Nether Edge and Sharrow, could have faced up to two years in jail for allegedly ignoring an injunction brought by Sheffield city council over its controversial programme that has resulted in about 5,500 mature trees chopped down.

Vaquita, Fynbos flowers and the world’s only alpine parrot are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Non-partisan analysis reveals the cost of energy secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to give handouts to some of the country’s oldest and dirtiest power plants

A Trump administration plan to subsidize coal and nuclear energy would cost US taxpayers about $10.6bn a year and prop up some of the oldest and dirtiest power plants in the country, a new analysis has found.

The Department of Energy has proposed that coal and nuclear plants be compensated not only for the electricity they produce but also for the reliability they provide to the grid. The new rule would provide payments to facilities that store fuel on-site for 90 days or more because they are “indispensable for our economic and national security”.

Woodwalton Fen, Cambridgeshire One magnificent specimen is a metre-wide rosette of oar-shaped leaves

Storm Brian has eased, but the gusts still rustle the sallow, alder and willow leaves and sway the reeds. The firmament transforms rapidly from broken ashen blankets to a solid leaden layer and then a blue sky with fluffy white clouds. We strike south through a wooded area of the fen, towards the low sun glittering through the trees.

A fallen birch trunk hosts many Fomes fomentarius, a heavy-duty bracket fungus known as the hoof fungus. On the tree’s now vertical root-plate wild lettuce plants grow.

University of Melbourne paper combines latest understanding on Antarctica and current emissions projection scenarios

Coastal cities around the world could be devastated by 1.3m of sea level rise this century unless coal-generated electricity is virtually eliminated by 2050, according to a new paper that combines the latest understanding of Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise and the latest emissions projection scenarios.

It confirms again that significant sea level rise is inevitable and requires rapid adaptation. But, on a more positive note, the work reveals the majority of that rise – driven by newly recognised processes on Antarctica – could be avoided if the world fulfils its commitment made in Paris to keep global warming to “well below 2C”.

The winner of the 10th annual environmental photographer of the year competition is Quoc Nguyen Linh Vinh, from Vietnam, for his poignant image of a young girl and her mother, surrounded by filth, danger and pollution, making their living by collecting waste

Data shows companies made much higher payments to developing countries in 2016 than to Canadian, provincial governments

Canada taxes its oil and gas companies at a fraction of the rate they are taxed abroad, including by countries ranked among the world’s most corrupt, according to an analysis of public data by the Guardian.

The low rate that oil companies pay in Canada represents billions of dollars in potential revenue lost, which an industry expert who looked at the data says is a worrying sign that the country may be “a kind of tax haven for our own companies.”

The EU currently sets fishing catch limits in order to maintain fish stocks. The WWF is concerned that poor management post-Brexit could result in over-fishing

All of the UK’s fishing fleet should be fitted with electronic monitoring technology after Brexit in order to protect fish stocks from poor management and potentially illegal landings of fish, campaigners have urged.

Remote monitoring technology, including closed circuit television, is now widely available for fishing vessels, but is often not deployed. A study by WWF, the environmental group, has found numerous examples of fishermen obstructing physical monitoring by independent observers.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary says Adani may have requested letter to help secure Chinese funding

Senior Turnbull government ministers have written a formal letter to China’s government to confirm that the controversial Adani Carmichael coal project in Queensland has passed all necessary environmental approvals.

Frances Adamson, the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told senators on Thursday that Adani may have requested the letter to help it secure funding from the Chinese.

A14, Huntingdonshire: Taken at a chariot’s pace the highway reveals its pockets of wilderness and unexpected beauty

Two thousand years after the Romans cut an urban vein through rural Huntingdonshire, naming it Via Devana (Chester Street), the road is scheduled to shift its course. I decided to follow the old highway at a chariot’s pace, stopping often to seek out the oddities and glimpses of character you invariably find in the slow lane.

My first layby, outside Godmanchester, was jammed with a bumper-to-tail trio of container lorries. A weather-battered and lichen-encrusted fence divided us from a bank of blackthorn bushes bursting with unpickable sloes, and hawthorns with shrunken berries.

Visitors to popular parks, including Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Zion, could see fees double or triple to address backlog of maintenance and infrastructure costs

The National Park Service is considering a steep increase in entrance fees at 17 of its most popular parks, mostly in the American west, to address a backlog of maintenance and infrastructure projects.

Visitors to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion and other national parks would be charged $70 per vehicle, up from the fee of $30 for a weekly pass. At others, the hike is nearly triple, from $25 to $70.