Owen Paterson must have been really hacked off by the vote in Europe yesterday to enforce a temporary ban on neonicotinoids. But at least it explains why some in his party think that we are going to be flooded with Romanians looking for jobs and benefits any time soon – we have a…
Category: Uncategorized
So what is Defra for, exactly…?
Owen Paterson is keen on showing people photographs of himself with dead squirrels and Richard Benyon is the richest MP in Parliament, but David Heath is completely invisible. That’s Defra for you. The last Labour government came to ‘power’ in 1997, and by autumn 2000 it had enacted the CROW Act which widened the right…
Re introduced species
I think this is a great cartoon by Ralph Underhill. A clever take on the word ‘introduced’ and great expressions on the faces of the grey and red squirrels. Rather bizarrely the CLA issued a press release at the beginning of this week supporting Owen Paterson’s culling of grey squirrels on his land. Well,…
Harrumph!
I see that an RSPB member of staff is talking at a League Against Cruel Sports event today. I’m not sure that’s a first, but it won’t have happened very often. This has been greeted with lots of harrumphing by those mild and consensual people in the Countryside Alliance who regard LACS as extremists. When…
Little owls on St George’s Day
The little owl is an introduced species in the UK but a common species just the other side of the English Channel. Little owls were successfully introduced into the UK at Lilford Hall by the 4th Baron Lilford in 1889; on St George’s Day, his gamekeeper found a little owl on a nest. Lilford Hall…
A natural debt
The first report of the Natural Capital Committee was published a while ago – it didn’t receive much attention in the media (here, here, here). Natural capital is the natural world. It is all that stuff that we inherited that we could pass on to future generations: fish in the sea, carbon in forests, reedbeds…
Questions. Questions! Questions?
There are, aren’t there, many types of questions? Rhetorical questions, leading questions, straight questions, difficult questions. Latin, I dimly remember from school, had particular ways of asking questions to which the expected answer was ‘yes’ and other ways of asking if the expected answer were ‘no’. I’m quite a questioning person myself. ‘Why is the…
Carbon lady 2
I was really surprised to come across these words of Mrs Thatcher: “We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we…
The carbon lady
Say what you like about Baroness Thatcher (and I’m sure you will) but she was arguably the first UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. Arguably in fact, she may have been almost the only UK Prime Minister to ‘get’ climate change. But there is a smidgeon of evidence that Enoch Powell was right to…
Do you tweet?
Here’s a list of nature conservation organisations with their number of followers on Twitter. To be fair, many of the organisations have several (many) Twitter accounts for particular sites or particular subjects, but those listed here are the ‘main’, and sometimes the only, Twitter accounts for these organisations. @nationaltrust 144,824 @natures_voice (RSPB) 52,785 @WoodlandTrust…