-
Research project team say Labour’s proposed nature restoration fund would end up being a ‘pay-to-destroy system’
“There are the most extraordinary things we could learn from them,” says Brian Briggs, as he checks yet another of the bat boxes that he and his wife, Patty, have put up just outside Heathrow. “They’re completely fascinating, from all kinds of angles.”
It’s a damp Sunday morning at Bedfont Lakes country park, and the Nathusius’ research project team, led by Patty, is checking the artificial roosts, looking at the health and number of different bat species. This outing, however, is a little different from normal; the conversation is focused not on the bats but on the government’s planning and infrastructure bill, which the following day will be having its final reading in the House of Lords.
Continue reading...
-
Serial killers and violent criminals dominate the headlines. What if we covered ecocide and pollution in the same way?
Whenever you read, watch, or listen to the news, you’re likely to be exposed to stories of violence and murder. As a criminal psychologist, I’m often asked to comment on these cases to pick apart the motives of the perpetrators. People want these kinds of insights because murders feel frightening and horrifying, but also oddly compelling. There’s a level of focus and fascination, and the way these crimes are covered profoundly influences our perception of what the most urgent problems facing society are.
One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?
Continue reading...
-
Environment Agency says pollutant in Norfolk river is ‘an unknown substance’ and is investigating
Dead fish have been found on a river in Norfolk where a large stretch of white foam appeared, the Environment Agency has confirmed.
Images shared by the agency on Saturday showed the foam covering an area of the River Thet.
Continue reading...
-
Snettisham, Norfolk: The spectacle is magnificent enough, but this time it was the sounds that moved me, of curlews, whimbrels, skylarks and knots
When I say the wader roost on the Wash at this RSPB reserve is one of the greatest sights in British nature, it understates one of its central elements: the everyday ordinariness of it. After all, it unfolds once every 12 hours throughout autumn and winter. Go for half a day and you couldn’t fail to have an encounter.
Each visit is also different. Some friends have been to photograph it on hundreds of occasions, and still they return. It can occasionally be quite flat – the birds, perhaps 250,000 of them, follow the tide’s incoming and outgoing, but only slowly, sub‑flock by sub-flock; no alarm, no drama or sudden movement, and little adrenaline. Usually, however, it is unforgettable.
Continue reading...
-
According to planning conditions, Wolborough Fen in Newton Abbot must be protected as groundworks are prepared for 1,200 homes
A 2,000-year-old wetland which is one of England’s most protected habitats has “bulldozers at its gates” after developers said conditions to protect it were blocking the growth the government is demanding.
Wolborough Fen in Newton Abbot, Devon, a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), must be protected from any damage by developers Vistry Group as they flatten hills and prepare the groundworks for 1,200 houses, according to planning conditions.
Continue reading...
-
Exclusive: Environment Agency not testing for ‘forever chemical’ made by factory despite evidence of emissions
Regulators measuring “forever chemicals” near a Lancashire chemicals plant are not testing for a substance made by the company itself, despite evidence it could be reprotoxic and is being emitted in large volumes.
Reprotoxic means a substance can be damaging to a person’s sexual function, fertility, or their child’s development and, now,
Continue reading...
-
Manningham, Bradford: Twenty-six years after this great industrial hub closed down, it still has resonances with the community via its thrilling wildlife
A peregrine comes bombing down from the ornamented parapet of the 76-metre mill chimney Lister’s Pride, and a hundred pigeons scatter. I’m on Patent Street, Bradford, by the west wall of what was once the biggest silk mill in Europe, called Lister’s Mill, or sometimes Manningham Mills. It was thrown up in the 1870s by Samuel Cunliffe Lister, and for more than a century was one of the great industrial palaces of the north. Since shutting in 1999, about half has been restored as offices and high-end flats; the other half is derelict. Forests of buddleia cover the concrete floors, and fox trails wind through the weeds.
Peer through steel grilles into the basements, and see hart’s-tongue ferns as thick and green as cabbages in a vegetable patch. Rust is everywhere (what John Ruskin called “living” iron: “It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to be so fond of getting rusted”). On the stretch of grass across the street, gulls gather in great numbers. Today they’re mostly black-headed, with one hulking lesser black-back comically conspicuous in the middle of the throng. At the back I spot two first-year common gulls, paddling their feet in a hopeful worm dance.
Continue reading...
-
The complexities of the climate crisis are a tough sell to audiences but these plays in New York show it can be done
Despite (or perhaps because of) its overwhelming awfulness, the climate crisis has been oddly underrepresented on stage and screen. Humanity’s greatest challenge has often been deemed too much of a downer, too complex or too dull a topic to spawn shows and movies.
A burst of recent climate-themed cultural output, however, suggests this may be changing. Weather Girl, a one-woman play about the unraveling of a TV meteorologist who can no longer bear to gloss over climate breakdown in California, has just closed in New York City to upbeat reviews.
Continue reading...
-
Set up by three ‘eco-anxious’ farmers, WildEast has created UK-wide version of pledge to encourage people to restore nature
A grassroots movement to wild a fifth of East Anglia is going national with the launch of Wild Kingdom’s “map of dreams” to collect pledges and connect communities, businesses and ordinary people seeking to revive nature.
WildEast was formed five years ago when three “eco-anxious” farmers decided to commit at least a fifth of their land to nature. Since then, thousands of people have pledged to rewild gardens, school grounds, communities and businesses.
Continue reading...
-
An upside-down mindset is emerging around the world. We have to rethink our relationship with the environment and the technology that has caused it harm
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a society inthrall to the values of science and technology. It is set in the futuristic World State, whose citizens are scientifically engineered to fit into a hierarchy. Eugenics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals and classical conditioning are employed to maximise stability and happiness. Huxley’s novel does not describe a conventionally authoritarian system, but one in which the desire for freedom and dignity has simply been eliminated. The World State is a radical technocracy.
It’s a satire on the consequences of importing scientific thinking into the realm of social policy. The Controllers of the World State preside over a society that has rationality and efficiency as its guiding principles, and when those principles conflict with human nature, it is human nature that is required to give way. Rather than building a society that engenders happy human beings, the Controllers seek to design human beings that can function in the society into which they are “hatched”.
The idea that we would invert our relationship with the world in this way strikes us as sinister, as antithetical to what it means to be human.
And yet something resembling this upside-down mindset is now emerging across the globe, particularly in the debate around climate change.
Having built a system that is destructive of the environment that surrounds and sustains us, we are now proposing to change … the environment! In his dystopia Huxley imagined a society that only worked when the humans within it were made into something not quite human. Today, many scientists and engineers imagine a planet that has been similarly transformed: nature itself must yield to the system. We need a technological fix.
Continue reading...
