The Queen’s gardens
This past week it’s been suggested by the writers Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (or Alibi-Brain as she’s known in these parts) and Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) that the Queen should make some of her vast...
Category: Environment
Newark: a pointless road scheme
On Thursday the Guardian reported that the government had ignored official advice to review a massive road-building programme on environmental grounds; taking such advice has been a legal requirement since 2014. This revelation forms...
National parks should be inclusive; that does not mean destruction
Sky News today reported that the chief executive of the Lake District National Park Authority had claimed that the park was geared too much towards the needs of older, able-bodied, white tourists and was...
Plastic bags are not “single use”
It was reported yesterday (Thursday) that since the tax on plastic bags was introduced under the Coalition government (where, you may recall, the Liberal Democrats got this introduced in return for supporting a Tory...
Following in Grandpa Phil’s footsteps
It’s long been a cliché that Prince William represents a “new generation” of British royalty who are unencumbered by the prejudices and stifling customs of their grandparents in particular — the ones who got...
No, ‘patriarchy’ isn’t killing the planet: the modern lifestyle is
Patriarchy is killing our planet - women alone can save her - The Ecologist Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, an investigative journalist best known for work on Muslim civil rights and terrorism, wrote the above article...
Olympic Park: a sea of ugly
Yesterday I decided to have a walk through the Olympic Park, which opened a couple of weeks ago after having been closed since the end of the Olympics in 2012. I was excited that...
Global warming and the circles of denial
Along with the Arctic ice, the rich world’s smugness will melt | George Monbiot (in yesterday’s Guardian) This article appeared in yesterday’s Guardian and it is about the record melting of Arctic ice that...
Arrogant privilege rears its head again
A while back, before I got the hang of Twitter as a means of announcing blog posts and conducting cross-border conversations without having to log into a chat client (and well before getting my...
A footpath round Britain’s coast?
BBC NEWS | UK | Coastal access law changes Rounding the British coast is popular right now; Hilary Lister did it in her little sip-and-puff sailboat, the BBC keeps doing it to make one...
BBC feature on Welsh ‘Degmo’
BBC Radio 4 had a lovely feature this morning about the Degmo Centre, a farm in Wales where Somalis from Britain’s inner cities come to learn about their rural roots. In Somalia, families often...
British company dumped toxic waste in Africa
This really quite shocking story appeared in the Guardian today: a ship chartered by a British firm, Trafigura, dumped toxic waste in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, in 2006, making some 100,000 people...
Heathrow: the sweetener which isn’t
Gordon Brown today gave the go-ahead for the third runway at Heathrow airport, the international airport in the western suburbs of London. I posted what Simon Jenkins wrote about this disaster yesterday, and here...
Nothing overwhelming except the damage
Simon Jenkins: A runway for jobs? It’s time aviation’s bluff was called (The Guardian) An excellent opinion piece on the stream of lies and broken promises which have led to the proposal for the...
Why long-distance day trips are a bad thing
Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both...
Whole Foods and free speech
Been wondering recently why you can’t get The Ecologist in the Whole Foods shops in London? (These include the former Fresh & Wild stores.) The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature...
London’s where we do stuff, innit?
This week it’s appeared that serious consideration has been given to building a third runway, and a sixth terminal, at Heathrow Airport. The project will require the destruction of an entire suburban village, blight...
Mission creep
BBC NEWS | UK | Organic move to cut food flights The Soil Association, the organisation which advocates for and certifies organic food in the UK, is considering stripping organic status from food which...
Mad Mel and the gift horse’s wide-open mouth
Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The emperor’s green new clothes Melanie Phillips lapped up the recent documentary entitled “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, a polemic produced by Martin Durkin, a veteran of the old Revolutionary...
Love miles (and corporate lobbying)
Guardian Unlimited: Pundits who contest climate change should tell us who is paying them A follow-up to George Monbiot’s three articles in the Guardian’s G2 supplement last week on global warming, all edited extracts...