Standing up for Nature
The headline caught my eye ‘Greenpeace loses £3m of public donations after currency gaffes‘. ‘Crikey!’, I thought, ‘How awful!’. Then I read the piece, and the similar piece in the Guardian, and relaxed. Greenpeace International (not Greenpeace UK) has cocked up on some currency deals and sacked the person responsible. OK – not clever, but…
It’s no fun, I guess, to be stuck in a Russian jail. The fact that you are there because you were carrying out a peaceful protest because of your beliefs about the environment won’t make it any more fun. Ralph Underhill and I bring you these Christmas cards on environmental themes and any profits from…
I attended many political party conferences in a former life and I got to grow to enjoy them. Moving from the LibDems to Labour to Conservative conferences became part of the autumn scene. There were individual members of every party with whom one could have sensible and constructive conversations about nature and the environment but…
Last week I pointed out that every form of energy production has snags – and suggested that we should give a higher priority to reducing our energy needs. Here’s another example, and it’s rather similar to the situation regarding biofuels (described in Chapter 13 of Fighting for Birds). Using biomass to fuel power stations looks…
2% of the public are officially stupid. That’s the only explanation for the result of a recent YouGov poll where 2% of people rate David Cameron’s government as the ‘greenest government ever’. Or perhaps, by chance, there were 35 Tory MPs in the random sample across the GB population. Given that David Cameron’s coalition government…
This blog, prompted helpfully by reader Richard Wilson, attempted to spell out why the government’s proposed planning reforms are bad news for wildlife (click here but do read the comments as well as the blog). I don’t know how good a job I made of it but I haven’t found anything much better on the…
This is quite a long blog – for you it’s a ‘cup of tea and two chocolate digestives’ blog, for me it was a ‘two glasses of Rioja’ blog. And I write of the subject covered by Peter Marren in his thought-provoking opinion piece in the Independent last week (and the news piece written by…
Everybody seems to be talking about NGOs this week – last week government was shouting at them! Greenpeace is 40 this week . WWF is 50 this week. The late, great, Sir Peter Scott who founded the Wildfowl Trust, now Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and had a lot to do with setting up the WWF…
I’m sure we all share the sentiments of Bob Neill, the CLG Minister, who attacked the National Trust for being a den of lefties. It has long been a worry to me that the National Trust has been such an anarchic and, frankly, revolutionary body, always championing underdogs, speaking out loudly on environmental issues and…
The question is – has the government gone mad or is it just wicked? The Red Tape Challenge potentially opens up any regulation anywhere to challenge but the government has included biodiversity, wildlife and natural environment regulation in this mix. Following the disproportionate clobbering that Defra received in the Comprehensive Spending Review compared with other…