A report by the watchdog Natural England says many farmers responded to impeding grassland protection laws by digging up their meadows before the tighter rules could be introduced. Some 98% of English meadows have already been lost to intensive farming and the rate of loss nearly doubled after announcement that rules would be changed. Rules …
Continue reading Regulation doesn’t work, but what else is there when people don’t care?
Category:5 Environment
Eating The Planet: ecological debt is over 4 months of human consumption.
The Global Footprint Network reports that humanity has already exceeded the ability of nature to absorb our waste. Our demand for recycling CO2, O2, H2O etc via natural processes, like weather, carbon cycle, etc exceeds the ability f natural systems by 50%. So the GFN has helped us get a perspective by pointing out that …
Continue reading Eating The Planet: ecological debt is over 4 months of human consumption.
Say goodbye to elephants
More elephants are being killed each year than are being born. There aren’t that many left anyway; maybe as many in the world as the number of people that live in the town you live in. There’s not much to be done. People think it’s OK to kill elephants, after all “they are a resource …
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Toxins in your drinking water?
It happens regularly now. Tonnes of agricultural fertiliser and sprays running off the land in to the water system causing eutrophication. Algae bloom and everything else dies. And even massive municipal treatment plants can’t clean the water. Farming practices and climate change cause the problem, which will not go away until we all choose to …
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Cows are eating the planet.
Since primary school it has been clear that animals require more food than plants. Those food pyramids with grass at the bottom and lion at the top made it quite clear that it takes far more land and resources to fee a lion than a patch of grass. Later on, as an observer of human …
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Climate change is happening “even” in the USA.
“Climate change is already affecting the American people in far-reaching ways.” So begins an extensive report issued by the U.S. Global Change Research Program on May 6, 2014. Among the changes is an increase in temperature, as illustrated in this image. Acquired 1991 – 2012 And scientists also observed changes in precipitation. acquired 1991 – …
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The numbers are staggering – over 1/6th of carbon emmissions come from deforestation.
The numbers are staggering and often hard to absorb. Close to 25 million square kilometres of tropical forest are spread across 75 countries on three continents. The trees in those forests store 225 to 250 billion tons of carbon. Each year, vast tracts of those trees are lost to development and agriculture—about 90,000 square kilometres …
Continue reading The numbers are staggering – over 1/6th of carbon emmissions come from deforestation.
Weird weather is a symptom of worse to come.
The IPCC released the second report on climate change. It is more very bad news, but even so might still be insufficient to stimulate action from leaders or followers. Last September a summary on the physical science of climate change showed that climate change is real, and humans are the “dominant cause”. Now the IPCC …
Continue reading Weird weather is a symptom of worse to come.
A world without growth – IMF.
Well that doesn’t seem natural because the plants grow every year and add to the planet’s biomass. When the IMF talks about no economic growth for years, it should raise concern. The head of the IMF talks technically about inflation and capacity but irrespective of accounting, laws and economics, the natural resources of the planet …
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Badger culls were ineffective, inhumane and expensive.
Start with the money: Over £ 4,000 per badger culled. That’s a big number. We didn’t like the badger culling “solution” to bovine TB because killing ought to be a last resort – we value life, so it is very sad to hear that the deaths were inhumane with 20% taking longer than 5 minutes. …
Continue reading Badger culls were ineffective, inhumane and expensive.