I will lift up my eyes unto the hills…

‘I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my floods’ As the Moorland Association brags, 70% of the UK’s drinking water comes from the uplands – so do 70% of the UK’s floods, for water has the habit of flowing downhill.  The River Ouse flowing through York, or over York, is…

Kafkaesque

I complained to Defra about their handling of my FoI/EIR request on 1 September.  Yesterday they replied saying how they were going to handle it – and that was fine. No complaints there. None at all. The letter even said ‘If you have any queries about this letter please contact me.’ which I thought was…

An unfavourable climate for driven grouse shooting

If you had a rainforest, and slashed and burned it, you’d be putting a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, just as surely as if your nation ran a lot of gas-guzzling cars. Natural ecosystems often act as carbon stores which sequester greenhouse gases – forests are the obvious ones but peatlands are also…

BBC Wildlife – the landowners speak

In the same, current, issue of BBC Wildlife magazine in which I am ‘quoted’, so is Tim Baynes of the Scottish Land and Estates. He gets 50+ words to explain why we need grouse shoots. He gets off to a very bad start in a wildlife magazine by writing ‘The red grouse is the only…