Climate change, ecology, nature, environment, eco-friendly politics, non-profit projects, human rights, preservation, wildlife... all that we care about.
Environmental writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot knows a lot more about environmental issues than I do. But his latest article, ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’, seems too much of a flip-flop: from advocating one ‘extreme’ lifestyle to going a bit close to absolving meat eating’s [...]
The rise of inexpensive non-European wines and convenience-obsessed consumer culture are threatening the ancient and sustainable cork industry. But besides the potential loss of long-established ‘green jobs’ and the fact that plastic stoppers and screw caps are bad for the environment, the cork industry also sustains large areas of industry-managed forests, which are hotspots for [...]
A recent piece for The Ecologist, entitled ‘Biomass Britain: do fields of energy crops spell an end to grazing livestock’, explores the possibility of a revolution in the UK’s land use.
70-80% of land in the UK is used by the British livestock industry. The possibility of a near-complete shift from livestock farming to the growing [...]
I’ve assumed that transport via boat, whether shipping goods or people, is less polluting and has a lower carbon footprint than flying or road freight, for example. Not so, according to both scientific research and inside information from the maritime shipping industry.
While diesel cars – once known as smelly, noisy polluters – have relatively cleaned [...]
When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my brother had a poster on his wall depicting an artist’s renderings of three possible future environments with the headline, ‘Which future would you choose?’
One showed a future in which man had chosen to live in harmony with nature and developed eco-friendly technology. A thriving green [...]
Is there is just too much revenue in big oil to stop dangerous deep sea drilling? The oil industry, like the massive investment banks behind the financial crisis of 2008, is considered by some to be ‘too big to fail’. Yet also like financial crashes, disasters are calculated by those in charge as risks worth [...]
The annual seal hunt is currently winding down in northern Newfoundland, Canada. Clubbing and hooking baby seals while they squeal helplessly on the ice is a disturbing image – even for some hunters. It’s a plainly brutal practice that draws lots of sympathy, especially in societies that categorize animals into sometimes-arbitrary roles. Cats and dogs [...]
About six years ago I took a summer course on migration at Lund University in Sweden. The classes were taught by a University of California professor and focused on the contemporary issues of global human smuggling and human trafficking. A brief distinction between the two: Human smuggling is a ‘victimless’ crime in which a migrant [...]
Major environmental groups are ignoring climate scientists while lining their pockets with money from big polluters and the fossil fuel industry.
That is the gist of Johann Hari’s thorough piece of journalism in The Nation, entitled ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’. Apparently some seriously big players in the environmental movement are helping to greenwash big business [...]
According to a piece in the London Times ‘two thirds of dairy farmers in England and Wales have gone out of business in the past decade,’ with another failing every day. The culprit? For one, it’s cheap milk. Prices are so low on standard, non-organic milk that dairy farmers in the UK have trouble turning [...]
