I’ve always liked; No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus The same is true of autumn. Just now the autumn colours are lovely round here – hardly spectacular but wonderful in an understated English way – simply lovely. When I…
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Murmuration
This is the season of Starling murmurations. On Monday i visited a local nature reserve, Summer Leys south of Wellingborough, and to the south of the road a little west of the car park there was a good display of Starlings swirling around over the reedbed before they dived into it to roost. It wasn’t…
Symbolic
This is an image of my mate Chris Packham last spring after he had picked up his CBE for services to nature conservation. He scrubs up pretty well doesn’t he? Check out the tie with the Extinction Rebellion logo on it. Chris wore that to St James’s Palace (I think it was) where his CBE…
Seven Worlds, One Planet
Last night’s first episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet was stunningly beautiful. If you missed it, then catch up with it on BBC iPlayer (link above) I recommend. There was noticeably more in this first episode about threats to the wildlife on which our eyes were feasting than is normal – that’s a good thing,…
Vicious flying rats
Worcester City Councillor Alan Amos (Conservative) is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as calling gulls ‘vicious flying rats’. Apparently if people behaved like gulls do, then they would be arrested, but then, let us consider, shooting people for pooing on your car is illegal so shall we agree that gulls aren’t people, councillor? Natural England…
Time jerks
Remember that tonight the clocks go back – actually you’d better check that, as I find it difficult to work out from first principles which way the time-change goes (I know, I’m a bit thick). But it’s definitely different tomorrow. I think that changing the clocks twice a year is one of the clearest examples…
Importance of peatlands for carbon storage
Europe’s peatlands are drying out – due to a combination of factors including human actions. And recent estimates of carbon stored in peatlands are twice as high as previous ones. Here is an accessible and useful account of these two papers with interviews with a range of scientists. Altogether peatlands are even more important than…
I noticed…
… the following quote from Inside Science (click here about 12min 40secs into programme); it’s one of those things that on the surface you think more people, more emissions, more resource demand, food demand, whatever it is but when you look at the numbers, we produce enough food in the world now to feed everyone,…
The population elephant in the room
About 10 days ago Ian Parsons bravely wrote a guest blog on the subject of population. It elicited a lot of comments as raising this subject almost often does. This post is not a reply to Ian, nor to any of the comments made, but simply comprises some developed thoughts, with some data, on the…
Bad deal for the environment
The Brexit deal on the table is a bad one for the environment. It moves the protections for the environment and workers’ rights out of the divorce agreement (which is a binding treaty, in effect) and into the polital declaration which is non-binding. This is the change to the level playing field that the Johnson…