Standing up for Nature
I’d just like to thank the Bournemouth Natural Science Society for being lovely to me. First, they were the first organisation who invited me to talk about Passenger Pigeons. Then they were understanding and allowed me to switch dates so that I could attend the Green Party Conference. Then they were understanding when I arrived…
Butterfly Conservation say: One of the UK’s favourite butterflies – the Small Tortoiseshell, continued its fight back this summer after years of decline, despite enduring the coldest August since 1993, results from the Big Butterfly Count have revealed. The Small Tortoiseshell, whose population has declined by 78% since the 1970s, saw numbers rise by almost…
The weather has been so lovely this week – and I’ve been able to make the most of it. I’ve gone for walks, I’ve sat in the garden reading and writing, I’ve had breakfast and dinner sitting outside. I sat outside a pub with a friend enjoying the conversation and a decent pint of beer. …
Here’s an opportunity for you to win a copy of David Cobham’s book on raptors (reviewed here). It’s a good book and this is a test of your luck and a little bit of your ornithological nous. In the Indian summer of the last few days I have made five morning visits to my local…
On Friday, as on Saturday, I was on a panel with Tony Juniper. This time it was the first AFON conference in Cambridge. We, with Matt Shardlow from Buglife and Donal McCarthy (RSPB), chatted around valuation of nature. If you don’t put a value on it, is it equivalent to valuing it as worthless? If…
The new EU Environment Commissioner is from Malta (and I’m told is a hunter (does anybody know whether this is true please?), and is certainly a former Tourism Minister) named Karmenu Vella. His role could have been written by George Osborne – ‘Protecting the environment and maintaining our competitiveness have to go hand-in-hand’. The new…
I’d never been to a Green Party conference before, but I’d been invited to be on a panel, so I set off from home at 0645 to walk to the bus stop, spend an hour on a bus into Northampton, walk for 10 minutes to the station, catch a train to Birmingham (another hour) and…
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…
Last week I went to an AFON Conference and a Green Party Conference – and I’ll say something about them tomorrow (or later in the week), but the rest of the world kept on spinning. Here are some things that happened: Boris Island got the elbow – hooray! It’ll probably be back one day, but…
Having spent quite a bit of last week making the point that access to the natural environment is good for you, I thought I ought to get some. So Sunday was a day for chilling out – although it was a lovely warm early September day. I started having breakfast in the garden and a…