Category Archives: Environment news

Feral: the pathetic fallacy, but not as we know it

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Midway along his life’s path, George Monbiot found himself on a dreary moor with no track to show him the way.

Lacking a poet ghost to guide him on the necessary descent into the circles of hell, through purgatory and on to paradise, Monbiot’s new book Feral conjures an Edenic fantasy of re-forested uplands, prowled by wolves, beavers and other top predators. In his dreams, he has banished the pesky sheep and hill farmers who between them have degraded this once and future biodiverse ecosystem.
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Arid Regions Green As CO2 Levels Rise

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A new scientific paper reports on the greening of semi-arid regions since 1982, as a result of the “carbon fertilisation” effect.  Plants grow by photosynthesising atmospheric carbon dioxide and turning it into hydrocarbons to feed on.

Australian scientist Randall Donohue and his team predicted that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the result of increased fossil fuel burning worldwide, would increase the growth of plants in semi-arid areas.

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Greenpeace Oceans campaigner’s reply to ‘Greenpeace – Running With the Arctic Hare and Hunting With Washington Hounds’.

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Richard Page, Greenpeace Oceans campaigner, has written the following reply to ‘Greenpeace – Running With the Arctic Hare and Hunting With Washington Hounds’. (Links added by Changing More Than Lightbulbs.)

Unsurprisingly and, as explained previously, we do not share your analysis of the current situation. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides the international legal framework for the management of the ocean and has delivered many benefits. Remember, before UNCLOS there was a virtual free-for-all. It is true that under UNCLOS, countries are able — within the rules set out by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf  — to extend their continental shelves and have rights to minerals on or under the seabed, but our Arctic campaign is clear that with rights come responsibilities and that the Arctic coastal states must act responsibly. The establishment of a sanctuary in the central Arctic Ocean is entirely feasible but is dependent on political will. Our campaign is designed to push the global community to do the right thing.
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Northern hemisphere food security at risk from climate change, warns leading scientist

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A leading British climate scientist has warned that the further warming to which the world is already unavoidably committed will cause problems for farmers.

The scientist is Martin Parry, visiting professor at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, visiting research fellow at Imperial’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and a former co-chair of Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
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Greenpeace – Running With the Arctic Hare and Hunting With Washington Hounds

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Greenpeace support for the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has allied it with US national interests and oil companies that stand to benefit from an underwater land grab of around 1.5 million square miles of sea bed. This is the area that UNCLOS has opened up for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration by U.S. firms alone. It includes part of the Arctic sea. At the same time, Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign aims to create a sanctuary in the uninhabited area around the North Pole and a ban on offshore oil drilling and industrial fishing in the wider Arctic region.
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Join This is Rubbish at Parliamentary launch of Counting What Matters on May 15th!

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This is Rubbish are heading to Parliament on May 15th to launch Counting What Matters, their recently completed Report into ways of reducing food industry waste.

This is Rubbish say,

“We have some great guest speakers, and are excited to share our findings surrounding research into industry perceptions surrounding the introduction of a Mandatory Food Waste Audit (MFWA) mechanism.

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Voluntary food guidelines let antibiotic-tainted meat onto the US market

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US magazine Mother Jones reports that,

“while the Food & Drug Administration dithers with voluntary approaches to regulation, the meat industry is feasting on antibiotics and sending out product tainted with antibiotic-resistant bugs.”

The FDA last year proposed a set of voluntary ‘guidelines’ that aimed to reduce the meat industry’s antibiotic habit. It seems they might just as well have saved their breath to cool their porridge, as this infographic from Pew Charitable Trusts shows.
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