I’ve written in the past about the continent-sized mass of floating plastic debris that circles in the Pacific ocean. There’s one in the Atlantic too, and three others. Each of them marks a confluence of sea currents, so floating waste accumulates there. Biodegradeable waste such as scrap wood will eventually rot away, but plastics just […]
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Saving the forests with layer farming
Forests can be cut down for a variety of reasons – expanding cities or mining, for example, but the biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. In Latin America it accounts for 90% of deforestation – clearing the forest for planting cash crops or raising livestock. This is understandable, especially when it is for subsistence farming, […]
What is nature deficit disorder?
My brother Paul, who started this blog with me a few years ago, used a phrase recently that I’ve not heard before – ‘nature deficit disorder’. He’s been involved with a nascent conservation programme in Glasgow that aims to engage young people in the natural environment, and it’s a key idea for the people behind […]
Closing the door on illegal timber
When Madagascar experienced its latest political coup in 2009, one of the consequences was a pause in government operations. Nobody was quite sure who was in charge and in some of the further flung parts of the country, lines of authority broke down. The logging companies were quick to seize the brief window of opportunity, […]
A line of trees to stop the Sahara
Deserts, as you will know, are mobile creatures. They are not content to sit in one place, but creep about, enlarging themselves at the edges. Over the decades and centuries, a desert can eat a whole country. The Sahara has already swallowed North Africa, and is moving slowly south. It has found a major ally […]
Declining biodiversity around the world
Last week I mentioned the Living Planet Index and the earth’s declining biocapacity. Here’s a little more detail from that report, showing what is happening to wildlife in different parts of the world. As the graph shows, biodiversity is recovering gently in Eurasian half of the Northern hemisphere. It is in decline everywhere else, and […]
Plants for a bee friendly garden
There’s been a fair bit about bees in the news this week as Friends of the Earth launched their new campaign The Bee Cause. It’s an attempt to kickstart a national ‘bee action plan’, in response to the steep decline of the British bee and the cost to the economy of having to pollinate crops […]
On consumerism and rioting
Yesterday I spent my lunch break browsing the official enquiry report on last year’s riots, so that I could comment intelligently on LBC Radio. I was talking about consumerism, which the report dedicates a whole chapter to as a reason for the riots. “The riots were particularly characterised by opportunistic looting” says the report from […]
Mapping for rights
If you live in an urban environment, you probably have a house, legal or illegal, on a street with neighbours in a certain part of town. You know where you’re allowed to go and where you’re not within the highly structured urban geography – pavements for people, roads for cars. Particular buildings and places are […]
Whale.fm
Two crowd-sourcing projects today, both very different in aims, but similar in their online community-based approach. First up, Whale FM is a marine research project dedicated to deciphering whale song. Orcas, or killer whales, appear to be able to communicate with each other in a fairly sophisticated fashion. If you’ve seen the BBC’s Frozen Planet […]
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