Ric Edelman is a conservationist and creative writer. His new book CHEETAH Caught in Conflict, with illustrations by Iranian artist Sama Soltani, gives 50% royalties to cheetah protection. Ric co-founded Green Light Trust which mentored 60 community woodlands and now brings marginalised groups closer to nature through the learning of conservation skills. My…
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Guest blog – Crow Hill Junction of CEP (240 MW) by Nick MacKinnon
Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won…
Evolution – Chris
And so we bid farewell to another very good BBC wildlife series. Evolution is a tricky subject as the motion picture camera hasn’t been around for much of Earth’s history and so there is a lot of leaning on CGI (which wouldn’t have been available in David Attenborough’s days) and fossils. But ending up with…
I thought it was an NFU advert…
I saw this advert at a rare visit to the cinema to see the Odyssey – so there was little escape.
Farming always plays the victim
Always beware of headlines with the word ‘could’ in them, and look for evidence of the dire event weakly predicted – often there is little evidence to back it up. Which food is going to be short and what is the evidence? This isn’t a great piece in the Guardian but, I’m afraid to say,…
Rod Liddle
I met Rod Liddle several times, going back to the time when he was editor of the Radio 4 Today programme and visited the RSPB at The Lodge. I’ve been interviewed by him several times for radio and Times TV. He was a proper journalist and tended to ask the right questions with enough vigour…
Chris – Evolution
The fourth of the five episodes was about dolphins and intelligence. Chris is still wearing the same T-shirt(s) – I wonder how many of that model-T he has. The shape of the programme was the same as the others; start with a well-loved vertebrate (elephant, ostrich, bat (OK – partly loved in this case), dolphin…
Sunday book review – Drifting North by Dominic Hinde
This is a very good read and I see it is long-listed for the Wainwright Conservation Prize. I wish it well, because it’s a good book, but it has about as much to do with conservation as it does with cricket. This is a book about carbon in many different guises. The author travels across…
Sunday book review – Bitter Honey by Jennie Durant
I’m offered quite a few American books to review and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I’m so glad I did say yes to this one as it is a very well-written and interesting book about a general subject which is highly relevant to UK readers but a specific case study that is unfamiliar…
Scotland’s rarest mountain woodlands get £108k lifeline in Lochaber
One of Scotland’s rarest habitats is set for recovery thanks to a funding award granted this month to landscape-scale nature restoration partnership, Loch Abar Mòr. The £108,000 award from the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund, managed by NatureScot, will go towards ‘Wee Trees Lochaber’, a project that will protect, enhance and expand mountain woodland across…