“The greenest government ever” was what David Cameron promised as he formed his coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The precise policy plans were laid out in the coalition agreement. So, 18 months in, how are those measures going? The Wildlife and Countryside link is an umbrella group of many of Britain’s [...]
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A positive angle on carbon offsetting
Carbon offsetting is the practice of reducing CO2 emissions by carrying out carbon positive action somewhere else. I could pay a company to plant three trees on my behalf in Costa Rica, and by balancing their carbon absorbing capacity against my carbon emitting activity, the net result is a zero carbon footprint for me. There [...]
What’s a tree worth?
As Tom Hodgkinson says, the first thing you should do when you move to a new house is plant a tree. This we did two years ago, two apple trees and a cherry tree, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve picked the first apples off our little cordon apple in the back garden. [...]
Positive News
Just a quick shout out to Positive News, which for some reason I hadn’t come across until very recently. It’s a quarterly newspaper “dedicated to promoting environmental sustainability, peace, social justice and equality, cultural diversity, political co-operation, individual fulfilment, and community empowerment.” The title of the paper reflects a desire to focus on solutions, which [...]
Silent Spring and the mixed up story of DDT
Last year I picked up an old copy of The Limits to Growth report from the Club of Rome. It’s a much-maligned book, and I was surprised to find that almost all of the commonly held beliefs about the book are false. You only had to read the book and the controversies evaporated, but several [...]
Book review: The God Species, by Mark Lynas
This is a book I’ve been looking forward to. A couple of years ago an article in Nature explained a new way of looking at sustainability, as a series of planetary boundaries. The earth has a number of systems that need to be held in balance, and human activity can overshoot them. Climate change is [...]
Post-green environmentalism
This week I’ve been reading The God Species, Mark Lynas‘ new book. It explores the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’, and how we manage the earth we find ourselves in charge of as a species. It’s also a broadside at the environmental movement. Every other page seems to take a pot-shot at the greens, accusing them [...]
Madagascar: a new species a week
I had the immense privilege of growing up in Madagascar. It’s one of the world’s most fascinating countries, from an anthropological and biological point of view. A vast island, it separated from the African mainland so long ago that its wildlife evolved more or less independently. As a result, the majority of its plants and [...]
Your garden in a changing climate
I didn’t get to the Chelsea flower show this year, or any year come to think of it, but I was curious to see what the Royal Horticultural Society was up to with their urban garden. The RHS has done some great work on gardening in a changing climate, assessing the changes as they happen [...]
Why the tar sands are bad for Madagascar
As a child growing up in Madagascar, I remember the fleet of distinctive cars driven by the American oil workers. They had their own school for the children of AMOCO families. They even had their own supermarket, which we only found out about when the company pulled out. Like the rest of the expatriate community [...]
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