If the science is right, here’s some good news on the climate change front. A downloadable open source scientific paper concludes that permafrost melting in arctic places will not increase methane (CH4) emissions enough to add to further global warming.
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George Monbiot’s Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is worth dipping into – unless you are one of those bourgeois escapists whom Steven Poole’s recent Guardian Review article identified as the likely readership for this genre of nature writing. In which case, you’ll probably want to read it from cover to cover.
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If you own land that could do with ecological restoration, though tree planting or moorland restoration – or you’d like to volunteer over the summer to carry out ecological surveys on Upper Calder Valley uplands or rivers, the SOURCE Open Evening on 16th July is for you.
Just turn up at Hebden Bridge Town Hall Terrace Room on Tuesday 16th July at 7 p.m for a free buffet, followed by presentations from all the SOURCE partner groups. Treesponsibility, the Calder and Colne Rivers Trust, Calder Future, BlackBark and other organisations will be there with information about how landowners and volunteers can take part in the SOURCE project. The event will close at 9pm.
The Food From Here conference at Coventry University Centre for Agroecology and Food Security has identified
” a clear need for more quantitative evidence on the benefits of short food supply chains.”
Another day, another demonstration of how the system is ideologically rigged so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies take our public money, provided by ordinary tax-paying, working people, and hand it over it to millionaires, Dukes and our own Elizabeth Windsor aka The Queen. For what? For doing nothing and owning lots of land.
It all comes down to entitlement trading – an expression that says it all really.
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Cheetahs may be suffering eye damage as a knock-on effect of the greening of semi-arid regions – itself a consequence of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
As a result of carbon dioxide fertilisation, savannah grasslands have become more thickly wooded – mostly with thorn trees like acacia.
Cheetahs are now on the Red List of threatened species.
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There is a conventional view that global action to reduce climate change is a cost to society. But a 2012 Report, Guide to a Cold Calculus for a Hot Planet, outlines how tackling climate change through coordinated efforts between nations would produce much-needed benefits for all, and cost less than sticking with business as usual in the global carbon-intensive economy.
Going where the wild things are stops Monbiot being bored – a problem for him, given his humdrum life of raising a kid, working and paying the bills – and he wants the rest of us to experience the same thrills. He is an evangelist for rewilding, the modish conservation concept that calls for the reintroduction of top predators like wolves, bear and lynx to certain regions where they have become extinct.
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In 2012, 31.752m people were displaced by climate and weather disasters, according to figures gathered by Norway’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
That’s around half the UK population – think of half your town or village being made homeless and desperately needing to find somewhere to go, and then multiply that by every town and village in the UK.
It’s pretty unthinkable, but that’s the reality.
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Join UK campaigners calling on Cameron to withhold £395m in so-called ‘aid’!
African farmers’ movements and civil society groups have rejected the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition as part of a “new wave of colonialism” targeting their food systems for corporate profit.
War on Want explains that this warning comes in a statement that the African Centre for Biosafety sent to G8 leaders on 3 June 2013 in advance of the `hunger summit’ hosted by David Cameron in London today (8 June). This includes a meeting of the G8‘s New Alliance.
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