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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 14 December 1916

Passing through the Severn Tunnel one got a strange contrast in weather. On the Welsh side mist, clinging, cold, dreary; on the English side hoar frost over the grass, a blue sky and hot sun overhead. The trees are bare now and showing their clean anatomy. Never are they more lovely than when one can see every finest twig outlined with characteristic gesture against the sky. Elms especially show to advantage when bare; where they have to be lopped for safety it is indeed a sore sight, for their habit of ending in a fine spreading plume is so individual and so beautiful. Along the banks of a canal the rows of pollard willows make quaint reflections in the still water. Farther on, by the river, the beech woods are grey, with scarcely a shade of brown from the tightly packed scrolls of buds. But the chestnut tips are thick and sticky, and it will be worthwhile cutting a few branches to put into water. Sprays of birch also may be treated in the same way, and it is a great joy to watch them unfold.

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We think of wood burning as natural, but experiments show that wood smoke contains shocking levels of harmful particles

Walk round many suburbs on a winter’s night and your nose will tell you that wood burning is being used for home heating. A recent UK government survey found that 7.5% of UK homes now burn wood. The vast majority use it for supplementary heating or decoration. Wood burning is most popular in the south-east where it is used by around 16% of households and it is least popular in northern England and Scotland where it is used by less than 5%.

We think of wood burning as being natural and therefore less harmful to the environment when compared with fossil fuels. However, particle pollution from UK wood burning is now estimated to be more than double diesel exhaust.

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This week EU fisheries ministers meet to decide the north-east Atlantic fishing quotas for 2017 at their annual December conference. Let’s hope our minister, George Eustice, does not repeat his performance of last year, when – in the face of a desperate need to end overfishing – he acquired for the UK a 2016 quota that exceeded scientific advice by more than any other EU country and proclaimed this as a good deal. Overfishing is “a good deal” only for the short-term interests of the smallest but wealthiest sector of the fishing industry, whose mega-trawlers hoover up the stocks, destroy their habitats and exacerbate their chronic over-exploitation. It is to be hoped that Eustice will also conform to another requirement of the common fisheries policy – the provision of a greater share of the quota to the small, under 10-metre, boats that constitute the largest part of the fleet, fish more sustainably, employ more fishermen, provide real benefits for their communities and enhance their prospects of both survival and a renewed prosperity. While representing about 80% of the Welsh and English fleet, they have just 6% of the quota.
John Stansfield
Bristol

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Clean Energy Finance Corporation loan comes three months after minister slammed SA’s over-reliance on wind power

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has made a multi-million dollar loan for a new windfarm in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.

It comes three months after Joyce slammed the South Australian government’s over-reliance on wind power, and linked SA’s damaging September blackout on the state’s lack of coal-fired baseload power.

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A look back at the things we learned from David Attenborough's latest BBC One series Planet Earth II.

Demand for charcoal in sub-Saharan Africa is surging. While foreign investors focus on renewables, domestic companies are findings ways to make it cleaner and more efficient. Photographs and words by Nathan Siegal

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We humans have polluted our world into a new geological epoch

If you’re feeling unsettled by the Brexit/Trump future, consider this: since the 1950s humans have ramped up the pressure on the planet to such an extent that we have very likely propelled ourselves into a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. Now that’s what geologists call change. The thing that freaks me out is that it’s rarely mentioned.

To unwrap that: for the past 10,000 years or so, we have hung out comfortably in what we call the Holocene epoch. During this period we have been able to rely on the Earth’s systems to dampen the effects of “forcings”. These are different factors that affect the Earth’s climate, such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.

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Google’s timelapse project allows users to see how anywhere in the world has changed in the past 32 years using Landsat satellite images. These images of Australia show the extent of development around its largest cities, as well as the changes brought by projects such as the Cubbie Station cotton plantation in Queensland, the Fimiston goldmine in Western Australia and mining development in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

Google’s satellite timelapses show the inconvenient truth about our planet

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The 2016 Bragg Prize for science writing was won by Ashley Hay for her superb essay on Australian trees.

A new campaign led by medical professionals is calling for all diesel cars to be banned from London.

Every year more than 100 wildlife rangers are murdered in the line of duty. Why do they get so little support? And where is the outrage?

Cameroonian ranger killed by wildlife poachers

As we sat by the campfire, Gervais, a ranger from the forests of Malawi, slowly pulled back his hair to expose a 20cm scar left by a machete attack that nearly killed him. Poachers, he told me.

I was at an international rangers’ conference, held 13 years ago in a national park on the southern tip of mainland Australia. Another ranger, Jobogo Mirindi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), showed me a photo taken five years before. Arranged football team-style were 30 or so of his smiling colleagues. Six rangers’ heads were circled in red; those were the only ones still alive.

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Two to three rangers are being shot a week as poachers step up their predations on the world’s wildlife

Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them

A Cameroonian ranger was ambushed and killed by ivory poachers on Wednesday while patrolling to protect elephants and gorillas. During the last morning of a 10-day patrol in Lobéké National Park, Bruce Danny Ngongo was shot three times, once in the thigh and twice in the hip.

“[Ngongo fell after] an ambush by a gang of poachers heavily armed with Kalachnikov [sic] who immediately opened fire on the surveillance staff,” said Lobéké National Park director Achille Mengamenya Goue, in a letter sent on the evening of the incident to Cameroon’s forestry and wildlife minister, Philip Ngole Ngwese.

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Bosherston, Pembrokeshire To stand on the cliff as green combers thud into the walls beneath, roar into the cave and recoil in white chaos is to become aware of even rock’s fragility

The bird ledges on Mowing Word, a cock’s spur of a limestone point on the south Pembrokeshire coast, are empty now. The guillemots and razorbills that jostle, cackle and croon here through the spring months, their single eggs perilously free from nests’ constraints, are far out to sea, searching for food.

The cliff on wild days is storm-watchers’ domain. To stand on top as green combers thud into the walls beneath, roar into the cave and recoil in white chaos is to become aware of even rock’s fragility. Sometimes the whole narrow headland shakes beneath your feet, and white spume that looks so light lashes the skin.

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Laysan albatross known as Wisdom is also the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild and has had a few dozen chicks

The world’s oldest known seabird is expecting – again.

Biologists spotted the Laysan albatross called Wisdom at Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge earlier this month after she returned to the island to nest.

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During the prolonged dry period between 1997 and 2010 37 species of birds declined significantly. Three years later, even with abundant water only 5 species showed signs of recovery.

The world's largest cold energy storage plant, which can act like a giant battery for renewable energy, is being commissioned at a site near Manchester.

Living out almost their entire life within cow pats, dung beetles are the unlikely heroes of both biological control AND Australian barbecues. This is a repeat episode from the Off Track archives.

Japan launches a cargo ship equipped with a half-mile long magnetic tether to clear space junk.

A former shearer turns his hand to growing native flowers in the Wimmera; scientists conduct a bio-blitz on Fraser Island; we spice up the day with a visit to a pepper farm; and meet a world champion tractor collector.

Tina Louise Rothery – part of a protest group known as the Nanas – staged a three-week occupation of a field near Blackpool

An anti-fracking campaigner has been spared jail after she refused to pay more than £55,000 of legal fees to the oil and gas firm Cuadrilla.

Tina Louise Rothery, 54, had been ordered to pay £55,342 of fees to the British company and a group of landowners, or face a 14-day prison sentence, after she sought to stop an injunction that would prevent protesters gathering on a stretch of land being considered for shale gas exploration.

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