The importance of UK blanket bog peat soils: Richard Benyon, 22 July 2010: Peat soils provide a wide range of ‘ecosystem services’ or functions for society, including carbon storage. UK peat soils are estimated to store around 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 31 times the UK’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions if it…
Tag: Natural England
Wuthering moors 3
The Heather and Grass Burning Code of 2007 may have escaped your attention although it is a quite remarkable document carrying, as it does, the logos of Defra, Natural England, the Moorland Association, the CLA, the NFU, the Heather Trust and the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation. In paragraph 10 that document clearly states that: There should…
Wuthering moors 2
Last Wednesday all Natural England staff received an email entitled Natural England’s work in the uplands. It tried to explain why NE’s Chair, Poul Christensen, had been reported as saying that NE’s Vital Uplands document had ‘let his organisation down badly’. Because not everyone agreed with the NE vision, which you may have noticed was…
Wuthering moors
Last week Natural England ‘reached an agreement’ with the Walshaw Moor estate which is feared by some to be a euphemism for caving in to intense pressure from grouse shooting interests. The joint statement, which reads to me as though it were made through clenched teeth, from NE and the estate, reads as follows: “Walshaw…
Guest blog – Where are all the women? by Sue Walker
My name is Sue Walker and I’m a freelance writer and interpretation consultant for nature conservation organisations, mostly in Scotland. I have my own blog called ‘Writes for Nature’ www.writesfornature.blogspot.com. My thanks go to Mark for giving me the chance to write a guest blog here. His own pithy, witty and well-informed blogs make him…
Cats and sparrowhawks among the pigeons
Gary Burgess posted a comment on this blog on 18 February on a rather old blog and I thought that few would notice what he had written and so I offered him the chance of a Guest Blog to air his views more prominently. I’m really glad that Gary took up the offer but I…
NIAs again
Nature is everywhere, it’s all around us and it is in trouble in many places around us. When government was looking for areas to qualify as Nature Improvement Areas it had plenty of places from which to choose – 76 proposals came forward for the £7.5m funding that was available for just 12 sites. Those…
Nature Improvement Areas
Nature Improvement Areas are a new idea that came out of the report by Prof Sir John Lawton‘s group in 2010. From its strapped resources Defra has found £7.5m to invest in a slightly different type of nature conservation initiative – an area based, Big Society approach. No that isn’t a typo – a paltry…
Newts
Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary last week which made me wonder whether the habitues of Lou and Perry’s diner were all voting for him – maybe they are all Democrats anyway. Newts are tricky things though aren’t they? There are three species of newts in the UK; smooth, palmate and great crested, and…
Guest blog from NT’s David Bullock
My blog on Monday, which questioned the claim of the National Trust to be one of Europe’s leading nature conservation organisations attracted many comments from you. I’m very pleased to post here a reply from David Bullock the Head ofNature Conservation at the National Trust. I’ll come back to this subject, myself, on Monday. …