Good things and bad things

If you are subscribed to my free monthly newsletter then last week you would have received my thoughts on George Eustice’s environment speech – there were good bits and less good bits. The most worrying looking bit was the announcement that DEFRA was going to fiddle about with the Habitats Regulations now that we are…

Guest blog – The Cultural Landscape in the Anthropocene by Karen Lloyd

Karen Lloyd is the author of Abundance: Nature in Recovery, published by Bloomsbury in September 2021, and the award-winning author of The Gathering Tide; A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay and The Blackbird Diaries, both published by Saraband. She is an environmental activist and produced and edited the Curlew Calling Anthology to raise…

Sunday book review – Britain’s Insects by Paul D. Brock

There are over a million species of insect in the world and over 25,000 in Britain and Ireland. How can one produce a useful field guide to those species? This, the latest in the WILDGuides series, is a masterful exercise in clarity, clear design and will get you to the right identification of the species…

Pow on Woman’s Hour

This was a cracking interview of Rebecca Pow, DEFRA minister, by Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour on Thursday. We moved through plastic bags, plastic waste exports to Turkey, tree-planting v HS2, road building, coal mines, trade deals with Australia and where to go on holiday. It was robust, tough but pretty fair, and went to…

Hen Harriers

Hen harriers are nesting in the hills, and the persecution and the brood meddling go on. Here are three items of news, although the first of them is an ongoing item of non-news that may soon be of itself newsworthy. 1. Brood meddling legal challenge The story so far; 2018 – Natural England issue licences…