The Guardian
Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 finalists – in pictures
A hungry arctic fox, mating sea angels and playful brown bears are among the creatures captured by photographers for this year’s competition. The exhibition opens on 20 October at the Natural History Museum
Continue reading...As the sun rises, another V-shaped skein of geese approaches
Pulborough Brooks, West Sussex One by one, the birds tip dramatically to one side, lowering one wing while raising the other, to lose height
The sharp honking sounds of geese echo across the Brooks. The air is clearing, but the rain still hangs over the low-lying hills in the distance, spreading down the sky like dark ink on wetted paper. As I walk out onto the marshes and towards the river Arun, the sun is rising behind me, spearing through the grey cloud.
Continue reading...Hinkley nuclear power is no match for renewables | Nils Pratley
Energy capacity auction shows offshore wind dramatically outstrips nuclear - and ministers must take note
Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was conceived in the days when offshore wind cost £150 per megawatt hour and a few misguided souls, some of them government ministers, thought a barrel of oil was heading towards $200.
Successive governments swallowed the line that Hinkley represented a plausible answer to the UK’s threefold energy conundrum – keeping the lights on, reducing carbon emissions and producing the juice at affordable prices for consumers and business.
Continue reading...Campaigner to fight Ineos in court over order curbing fracking protests
Joe Boyd is appealing to public for donations to challenge petrochemicals giant over ‘anti-democratic’ injunction
A second campaigner is challenging a sweeping injunction obtained by a petrochemicals giant against anti-fracking activists that has been criticised for profoundly limiting protests.
Joe Boyd, an anti-fracking campaigner, is going to the high court in London on Tuesday in an attempt to stop the injunction which has been secured by the multinational firm, Ineos. He is appealing to the public for donations as he could face a large bill if he loses.
Continue reading...Huge increase in badger culling will see up to 33,500 animals shot
Ministers say culls are vital for cutting TB infections in cattle but scientists say there is little evidence to support the policy
Up to 33,500 badgers will be shot this autumn in an attempt to control tuberculosis in cattle, a huge rise from the 10,000 killed in 2016.
The government has announced that 11 new badger cull areas have been licensed, adding to the 10 already in place. Devon now has six badger culls under way, with Somerset and Wiltshire having three each, with others in Cheshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.
Continue reading...Shark given refuge in Sydney rock pool – video report
A small great white shark was rescued after it was found floundering on a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. The shark was found by beachgoers in shallow waters at Manly beach and was moved to a beach rockpool to be monitored by authorities
Continue reading...Pool shark: beached great white given temporary refuge in Sydney rock pool
Public pool closed to swimmers after injured marine predator transferred for observation by wildlife experts
A juvenile great white shark was rescued after washing up on a Sydney beach – and given a new temporary home in a nearby public swimming pool.
The shark, which washed ashore on Manly beach in Sydney’s north about midday, appeared to be injured and onlookers alerted marine rescue and lifeguards.
Continue reading...Huge boost for renewables as offshore windfarm costs fall to record low
Green groups say record low price should sound death knell for Hinkley Point C after subsidy auction sets price for windpower below even lowest forecast
Offshore windfarms are to be built for a record low price in the UK early next decade, after developers bid far more aggressively than expected for a multimillion-pound pot of government subsidies.
Industry watchers had expected the guaranteed price for power from windfarms around Britain’s coast to come in somewhere between £70 and £80 per megawatt hour, below the £92.50 for the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.
Continue reading...'They lied': Bolivia's untouchable Amazon lands at risk once more | Myles McCormick
Locals blame coca interests for the state’s broken promise on protecting Tipnis national park, biodiversity hotspot and home to thousands of indigenous people
When Ovidio Teco’s Amazon homeland was declared “untouchable” by the Bolivian government in 2011, his war had been won.
The concerns of people like him had been listened to: their beautiful and ancient land would not be carved in two by a 190-mile highway.
Continue reading...Our native grass snake has been promoted but remains elusive
Little Bradley Ponds, South Devon Taxonomy tussles aside, spotting any grass snake can be far from easy, and I circled the ponds several times
This small nature reserve was my final stop: a tranquil oasis surrounded by woodland and set back from the road near Bovey Tracey in south Devon. I had spent the morning visiting gardens in search of grass snakes, nosing around compost heaps and scanning the edges of ponds without luck. Reptiles known to inhabit one glorious wildlife-friendly property on the edge of Buckfastleigh had kept out of sight, while nearby locations offered up handsome slow worms, but not the secretive species I was after.
Continue reading...Peacock and red admiral butterflies out in abundance: Country diary 100 years ago
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 14 September 1917
Already a peacock butterfly has selected our curtains for winter quarters, but it is early for this fly to be going into hibernation, and many are still on the wing, settling on the scabious and ragworts in the lanes or the flowers in our gardens. Perhaps the yellowing foliage of the sycamore and showers of curled, crisp beech leaves already down had given it a warning; it had a duty to fulfil: a long death-like slumber and a short flight next spring to find the young nettles and lay its eggs, thus linking up the years. It is many years since peacocks and red admirals were so abundant as they are now; everywhere people are struck by the numbers, not only locally nor even in other parts of England. A friend in France writes:– “The crops here are barbed wire, thistles, and nettles; I don’t know what the first produces, but the two last have brought out great lots of painted ladies, red admirals, peacocks, and a positive swarm of small tortoiseshells.” The weeds of the war-scarred, untilled land have produced one beautiful crop.
Related: Red Admiral spotting: desperately seeking a British butterfly revival
Continue reading...Britain flouting duty to protect citizens from toxic air pollution – UN
Exclusive: Special rapporteur’s mission finds government has violated obligation to protect people’s lives and health
The UK government is “flouting” its duty to protect the lives and health of its citizens from illegal and dangerous levels of air pollution, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights related to toxic waste.
Baskut Tuncak issued his warning after a fact-finding mission to the UK in January at the invitation of the government in a report that has been shared exclusively with the Guardian before it is presented to the UN human rights council this week.
Continue reading...What was in the air at Birling Gap? Investigations continue
There is still no confirmed cause for the toxic haze that affected the Sussex coastline last month
Items from the shipping lanes frequently wash up on UK beaches. Occasionally hazardous chemical containers appear prompting local beach closures. The incident on the East Sussex coast on 27 August was on much larger scale.
Although media reports focused on the beach at Birling Gap, air pollution monitors tell us that the affected area was much bigger. An apparent sharp rise in ozone was detected on Eastbourne sea front at 4:45pm and then about 30 minutes later at Lullington Heath, 8km to the west and 5km inland from Birling Gap – an area of over 40 square km.
Continue reading...North West Cambridge: a model for affordable urban housing?
At the centre of debates about green belts is the question of trust. In theory it should be possible to build on a very small proportion of the nation’s green belts in such a way that affordable housing and sustainable communities are created, and more people have more and better access to nature than before. In practice few people trust that this will happen, as the available evidence is that we will get instead a smearing of developers’ standard products across the countryside, for sale at inflated prices.
The promise of what’s called the North West Cambridge Development is that it will indeed achieve these good things. Here the University of Cambridge is turning 150 hectares of what was flat, inaccessible and somewhat featureless farmland, located between the city and the M11, into a billion-pound urban district the area of which is not much smaller than the historic centre of Cambridge itself. Three thousand homes are planned, half of them affordable, plus 2,000 postgraduate student bed spaces, 100,000 sq m of research facilities, and the schools, shops, surgeries and the like needed to sustain them. Two new public parks are being created, one between the new development and the old city, the other a series of lakes and mounds that buffer the sights and sounds of the motorway.
Continue reading...Global shockwaves from electric cars will be here sooner rather than later
When Jaguar Land Rover followed in the tracks of Volvo last week with its shift to an electric-powered future, the car maker didn’t just talk about hybrids and batteries.
Its chief executive also showed that his company, like governments and oil firms, is finally waking up to the global shockwaves electric cars will bring about. They are far more profound than whether drivers top up via a pump or a plug.
Continue reading...The eco guide to healthy beaches
It’s not about pristine sands – we need seaweed, coral and mangroves to sustain marine wildlife and protect the world’s coasts
To the untrained eye, all beaches can look healthy – the sea gives them a restorative glow. The Beach Ecology Coalition is based in California, but its indicators for a healthy beach broadly hold for Skegness as much as California’s Laguna. Don’t be fooled by pristine beaches. A healthy one should be strewn with wrack: organic litter including seaweed that sustains beach hoppers and birds.
Healthy beaches should be strewn with organic litter
Continue reading...‘My job is to clean up the environment. China really wants to do that’
Environmental lawyer James Thornton says China’s ‘ecological civilisation’ concept is the best response to the world’s environmental crisis
James Thornton’s specialty is suing governments and corporations on behalf of his only client – the Earth – and he’s very good at it. In his four decades of legal practice across three continents, he’s never lost a case.
Acknowledging this in 2009 the New Statesman named him one of the ten people likely to change the world; ClientEarth, the public interest environmental law firm he started in London in 2007 now employs 106 people.
Land grab in Amazon jungle threatens dispossession, violence and murder
On 23 August it emerged that the president of Brazil, Michel Temer, had issued a decree abolishing the protected status of an immense area of the Amazon forest. The area is in the north of the country, beyond the Amazon river, going up to the frontiers with French Guiana and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana). The estimated size is 4.5 million hectares, the size of Denmark or Switzerland.
The decree was shocking, but not entirely unexpected. Temer is in political difficulties, facing corruption charges and needing political allies. There are more than 30 registered political parties in Brazil, and to get anything done in Congress they form bancadas (“benches” or coalitions). One of the most powerful is the bancada ruralista, consisting of powerful, wealthy agribusiness interests (mostly cattle and soya) together with those who represent mining and other extractive industries. And, making things gloomier, the evangelicals attach themselves to this bancada.
Continue reading...This is how your world could end
In an extract from his book Ends of the World, Peter Brannen examines mass extinction events and the catastrophic outcome of rising temperatures for all the world’s population
Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.
If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike of an even greater magnitude than that so far measured for the end-Permian mass extinction. If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today.
Continue reading...One of world's largest marine parks created off coast of Easter Island
Rapa Nui protection area, about same size as Chilean mainland, will protect up to 142 species, including 27 threatened with extinction
One of the world’s largest marine protection areas has been created off the coast of Easter Island.
The 740,000 sq km Rapa Nui marine park is roughly the size of the Chilean mainland and will protect at least 142 endemic marine species, including 27 threatened with extinction.
Continue reading...