Catch-up 2

Mark 4 Comments
  • Tomorrow I’ll be missing an event hosted by Zac Goldsmith MP calling for a massive Marine Protected Area around Ascension Island. I hope it happens but I’d put Pitcairn Island (see here, here and here) ahead in the queue, and maybe also the South Sandwich Islands. What price an announcement of one or more of these in the period just before the general election (just like Labour did last time around)?
  • The House Martins on our street are still flying overhead – I like them a lot.
  • Some wildlife NGOs (to me, it’s a little unclear which ones) held a conference in London to follow up the State of Nature report of last year. The Conference for Nature seems to have been seen as an RSPB conference by some but a joint conference by the RSPB. I wasn’t there. I’m a little confused about it. The idea was that it would be game-changing – but I’m not sure what the change was. Maybe Bob will tell me.
  • Two former bosses of FoE had a spat about rainforest destruction – Jonathan Porritt and Tony Juniper – Tony won (I think).
  • Ineffective badger-killing has resumed – pointless, cruel and wasteful.
  • Vote for Policies reached its target – thank you to all who contributed.
  • The NBN now contains 100 million records covering 44,000 species. I wonder how many are records of species which no longer occur where previously recorded.
  • Charities should ‘stick to their knitting’ and avoid politics says Minister Brooks Newmark in a ridiculous statement. I’d just like to put on the record my view that I wish that more of the charities that I support would get more into politics. I give them my money to make a better world – not to stick plaster on a broken one.
  • A Swift flew over my garden yesterday evening.
  • The new Natural England Chief Executive, James Cross, has emailed all staff and told them that ‘We are able to do something that no other organisation is able to do, and that is to find the way for the environment and the economy to thrive together, for this generation and the next. To find the “win-win” in the decisions we make. I believe that no other organisation is as well placed as ours to do this.‘.  I wonder how many Chief Execs of development organisations say the same thing – none, I would guess. Win-wins are good, and too rare – we need more of them. But they shouldn’t mean that the environment always has to give way.
  • Make a date for the Peoples Climate March in a city near you on Sunday 21 September.
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4 Replies to “Catch-up 2”

  3. A Swift in Carlisle had young leave the nest on 5th September.
    for the environment and the economy to thrive together means simple green tourism. Check Scotland out for its amazing response to this.

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