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In Sweden, most residential heating and hot water comes from heating networks – helping to pool resources and innovation
District heating is sometimes talked about like some kind of unattainable utopia, but in the Swedish capital these low-carbon heating networks are not special.
In fact, district heat is so run-of-the-mill that many Stockholmers do not know that they have it, said Fredrik Persson, as he showed the Guardian around Stockholm Exergi’s pioneering power station in Norra Djurgårdsstaden, a former port and industrial area.
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British eel trader says move will destroy traditional elvering but campaigners welcome decision
Endangered eels caught in British estuaries will no longer be exported to Russia after the government banned the trade.
In a decision that Britain’s last remaining eel trader said would end centuries of traditional elvering, a request to dispatch millions of glass eels – young eels that develop into elvers – to a restocking project in Kaliningrad was refused by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
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Ministers urged to do more after United Utilities discharged raw sewage into Unesco site for 6,327 hours last year
Celebrated by William Wordsworth, Windermere has long epitomised the natural timeless beauty of the Lake District, with millions of tourists drawn to the shores that inspired the poet. But today England’s biggest lake is, some campaigners say, a shadow of its 19th century self: its waters blighted by algae and its wildlife threatened by pollution, in a symbol of all that is wrong with the privatised water industry.
This month the environment secretary, Steve Reed, vowed to break with the recent past, standing on its shores and promising that Labour would “clean up Windermere”. The lake is showing the impact of sewage pollution from United Utilities treatment plants and increased pressure from climate change-induced temperature rises.
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Exhibition aims to help visitors get inside the minds that thought mercury and roasted apples would cure lice
Medieval treatments might make you question the sanity of the doctors of the day, but a new exhibition is set to take visitors inside the minds of such medics and reveal the method behind what can seem like madness.
Curious Cures, opening on Saturday at Cambridge University Library, is the culmination of a projectto digitise and catalogue more than 180 manuscripts, mostly dating from the 14th or 15th centuries, that contain recipes for medical treatments, from compendiums of cures to alchemical texts and guides to healthy living.
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The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their spring encounters with nature
Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months, as the UK enters a new season, we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.
The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a field of early spring flowers, a nest-building bird or a pond full of frogspawn.
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Tao Leigh Goffe argues climate breakdown is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism
We all think we know what is causing the breakdown of the planet’s climate: burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, change the chemistry of the air and trap more heat from the sun, leading to rising temperatures.
But Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York, wants us to visualise a far more specific cause: the shunting of a ship’s prow on to the sandbank of a paradise island in 1492.
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Items taken from a mountain of discarded garments in the Atacama desert were sold for the price of shipping in a fightback against the ‘racist and colonialist’ dumping of unwanted clothing
Every week, Bastián Barria ventures into the Atacama desert in northern Chile looking for items of discarded clothing in the sand. About half of the hundreds of garments he finds are in perfect condition. He collects what he can and adds them to the two-tonne pile of clothes he has stored at a friend’s house.
On 17 March, 300 of those items, including Nike and Adidas shorts, Calvin Klein jeans and a leather skirt, were listed for sale online for the first time. The price? Zero. Customers had only to pay shipping costs. The first batch sold out in five hours, bought by customers from countries including Brazil, China, France, the US and the UK.
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Classes on herbalism connect new generations eager to explore their roots with elders in the South Carolina community
With their eyes downcast in reflection, dozens of people dressed in white crossed a bridge to pay respect to their ancestors last October. They carried flowers, herbs and photos of their loved ones to lay at the foot of an altar on a tiny strip of land in the middle of a pond. For the last few years, this ritual at the start of the annual Gullah Geechee herbal gathering on Johns Island, South Carolina, has served as a link between the living and the dead. “It gives them a sacred space to connect with the land,” the gathering’s founder, Khetnu Nefer, said about the attendees, and to “connect with our communal ancestors”.
Held on Nefer’s family’s land, a stretch of 10 acres (four hectares) of flat grass surrounded by woods, the gathering educates attendees on the herbal traditions of the descendants of west Africans enslaved on the Sea Islands along the south-east US. Over the course of the three-day conference, Black and brown instructors – some of whom are Gullah Geechee – host around 20 workshops ranging from English-based creole lessons to foraging for herbs including chaney root, which is boiled into a tea to heal fatigue or arthritis. During an herbal remedy class, attendees learn which herbs can be used to treat chronic pain, including mullein, a flowering plant that is sometimes boiled into a tea to heal symptoms associated with asthma or bronchitis.
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California Forever is back with a proposal that has some on board: using the land it owns to create a shipbuilding hub
In 2023, a group called California Forever, funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, introduced a splashy proposal to build a new city on tens of thousands acres of farmland it had acquired north-east of San Francisco.
Residents and officials of Solano county, where the city would sit, were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of local input and concerned about wealthy outsiders with big plans to reshape their region. After months of extensive news coverage and efforts to woo over local leaders, California Forever changed track: withdrawing a ballot measure that would have fast-tracked the plans and instead seeking approval through standard county processes.
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