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…
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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…
Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and lead in meat
Last week Wild Justice published five blog posts about lead in game meat sold by two leading supermarkets, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. On Monday: Sainsbury’s game meat – and why we tested its lead levels did just that – it was because Sainsbury’s were misleading and evasive about lead levels in game meat on sale in…
Sunday book review – Wild Winter by John D. Burns
This is the second of John D. Burns’s books I have reviewed here, but whereas Sky Dance was fictional (although it read pretty true to life to me) this is a story of walks by the author, sometimes with friends, in the mountains of Scotland, in winter. I’m going to read his other two books…
BBS 2020 report published
And so this report is different, maybe refreshingly so (just because everyone likes a change now and again) and has fewer trends (because they can’t be calculated reliably) and more reflection. I like reflection. I was quite surprised that in England there were as many as 1757 BBS squares covered compared with 2934 in 2019,…
Richard Benyon returns to DEFRA
Richard Benyon, the toffish ex-MP returns to DEFRA as a Lords Minister. DEFRA now has two lords a-leaping and with Zac G being unpaid, it rather looks like a strange BOGOF deal. As a minister in the upper house Lord Benyon will have to answer difficult questions from the likes of Baroness Bennett and others…
Sunday book review – Women on Nature edited by Katharine Norbury
Anthologies are always worth a look because, at the very least, you can rely on the compiler to have done a lot of work in sifting and selecting and, yes, discarding, to arrive at their final selection. And this is quite a tome with 400+ pages of selections and another 50+ pages of notes and…