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RSSCelebrating nature Bristol fashion
THE UK’s biggest festival of the natural world will be happening on 7 and 8 June 2008 in Bristol.
prone met the festival organisers at Bristol Zoo. It’s the fifth oldest zoo in the world (since 1835) and these days, one of the most well-loved.
The zoo’s part of the Bristol Natural History Consortium which includes the BBC Natural History Unit, WWF-UK, Bristol University, Wildscreen – including the world-beating ARKive project – and more.
At prone we also really love the Bristol Naturalists’ Society. It’s been going for 150 years as well, and still prints a little newsletter with sections in it about insects, spiders, flora and fauna. They have things like an Otter Group and organise walks where you can go into the woods and look for bats, or meet at dawn and watch the peregrine falcons. Awesome really.
Truth is, most people care about wildlife and want to preserve it.
But what’s the best way?
Are zoos the way forward? Or a digital ARKive?
Leave a comment in the box below and tell us what you think.
Renewable energy needs PR
Last March, EU leaders did something stunning.
They vowed to lead the world in the fight against climate change.
And they promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by the year 2020.
Their report tells us that the EU is already a world leader in renewable energy.
But it also admits that development is “uneven” across member states.
Sadly, that unevenness means Britain. A report on a leaked DBERR document in the Guardian today revealed that the UK’s way behind on renewable energy. Only Malta and Luxembourg have a poorer record.
Incredibly, we’ve installed only 270 solar photovoltaic (PV) systems on houses in 2007. That’s compared with 130,000 in Germany, say.
Overall, we produce only 2% of our energy from renewables. The EU has slapped our wrists and told us we’ve got to get that up to 15% by 2020.
So there’s everything to play for.
It’s not that people don’t care – they do. It’s just that we don’t know.
There are Government grants for putting photovoltaic panels on your house. They will pay you to do it! And then your electricity bills drop to nothing and if you’re lucky, you can even SELL ENERGY BACK to the National Grid.
How about that for eco-conscious?
Government grants DO exist to convert our houses to green energy. But they don’t get picked up because people don’t know about them. Department for Business grants for households to install solar, wind or hydro-power are expected to be underspent by £10m over the next year – more than half the £18m allocated for the three years to March 2009.
So they’re starting to be cut back.
Meanwhile, as revealed in the Daily Telegraph, our power bills are going to rise in the coming year by 10 to 15 per cent.
Where’s the sense in that? Let’s join up the dots, people!
If we get the Green message out there, and the woman in the street can see a real cost saving in going green, the whole of Britain could be soaking up the sun and selling the energy back to the grid by the summer.
Think of that. 50 million homes, all humming with Government-sponsored home power. Beaming energy back to the world. Cutting emissions and growing flowers. And all because they got the message and heard the call.
All because the Green cause was properly told. PR’d and promoted.
So who’s doing it? Who’s spreading the word, holding Government to account, letting people know, building the popular pressure?
This is what proper promotion can do.
It’s time to start.
What will you do when the oil runs out?
Yesterday in The Guardian, George Monbiot wrote about peak oil.
He said:
“A report published last week by Citibank, and so far unremarked on by the media, proposes “genuine difficulties” in increasing the production of crude oil, “particularly after 2012”. Though 175 big drilling project will start in the next four years, “the fear remains that most of this supply will be offset by high levels of decline”.
“Does this mean that oil production in these nations has already peaked? If so, what do our governments intend to do?
“Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its assessments of global oil supply. The results astonished me: there weren’t any. Instead it relied exclusively on one external source: a book published by the International Energy Agency. The omission became stranger still when I read this book and discovered that it was a crude polemic, dismissing those who questioned future oil supplies as “doomsayers” without providing robust evidence to support its conclusions.
“Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: “The government agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas) reserves are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future.” Perhaps it hasn’t noticed that the IEA is now backtracking. The Financial Times says the agency “has admitted that it has been paying insufficient attention to supply bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more slowly than once expected … natural decline rates for discovered fields are a closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned that the data it currently holds is not accurate.” What if the data turns out to be wrong? What if Opec’s stated reserves are a pack of lies? What contingency plans has the government made? Answer comes there none.
“The European commission, by contrast, does have a plan, and it’s a disaster. It recognises that “the oil dependence of the transport sector … is one of the most serious problems of insecurity in energy supply that the EU faces”. Partly in order to diversify fuel supplies, partly to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it has ordered the member states to ensure that by 2020 10% of the petroleum our cars burn must be replaced with biofuels. This won’t solve peak oil, but it might at least put it into perspective by causing an even bigger problem.
George goes on to argue against the use of biofuels for various very good reasons. He finishes:
“All these convoluted solutions are designed to avoid a simpler one: reducing the consumption of transport fuel. But that requires the use of a different commodity. Global supplies of political courage appear, unfortunately, to have peaked some time ago.”
prone have been on this case for some time. And we’re happy to report we’re seeing a solution.
We’ve been watching the rapidly-growing Transition Towns movement, supported by a host of green organisations including the Soil Association, and spreading through communities in the UK and internationally since its inception in the Devon town of Totnes just over a year ago.
It’s radical, it’s real, and it’s of the people.
Politicians, as so often, are behind the curve.
Out there in the communities, up and down the land, ordinary people are showing they have the nerve by the bucketful that George Monbiot publicly called for yesterday.
prone was publishing about this as long ago as November 2007, when in the Western Mail, Cymru’s national newspaper, we wrote:
The Transition movement recognises several key points.
First, every community now faces an imminent crisis in two areas – climate change and “peak oil”. There simply will not be cheap, freely-available oil for very much longer.
Second, communities can assess their resilience and prepare for the transition to a post peak-oil economy and climate change.
And third, to be effective, the organisation should work from the grass roots up.
None of this is about sustainable buildings alone. It’s about sustainable thinking, in groups and communities.
Ben Brangwyn, co-founder of the Transition Network, said, “Peak oil means we’re very dependent on this cheap resource, and we’re also very close to the point where the amount of oil being pumped into the economy is going to peak, plateau and then decline. We need to face up to that now.”
Many experts believe the crisis is already starting. Three weeks ago, the international Association for the Study of Peak Oil noted that the price of oil has risen eight times in less than 10 years. Industry leaders are predicting that production will peak in less than 20 years. Before that, the oil price could hit $150 per barrel – almost twice its current price.
But the Transition movement says all communities can do something to help themselves – a message that’s now being heard from parish pumps to the corridors of power.
Patrick Holden, director of organic food and certification organisation the Soil Association, said:
“I think things are going to get difficult very soon. The first requirement of any civilised society is to have a reliable and sustainable source of food. We need to stop depending on oil to get our food to us.
“We’ve lost our local food infrastructure and that’s dangerous. That’s why the Soil Association wants to support the food and farming element of the Transition Movement.”
Watch this space. It’s happening.
Melting snow in the High Tatra
So Zakopane. Eastern Europe’s most famous ski resort, beloved by Poles across the world. A spa town nestled in the high Carpathian range, population 30,000 with a million visitors annually, peaking at holiday times.
And this January, no snow.
We’ve heard it before. We know that glaciers in the Alps are retreating by tens of metres every year.
It’s happening elsewhere too.
In Zakopane, they tell how a strange, unseasonal wind blew in off the high peaks this winter, and with its warm breath melted the snow away and brought the driving rain.
They explain how the wind – they call it the ‘halny’, like the Fohn in Switzerland – rushed through the valleys and down the mountainsides so that even the snow machines had to grind to a halt.
People did their best to ski, but it was a bit of a lost hope. The Presidential trip to open the latest cable car passed without much fanfare, in the circumstances.
They murmur that it was just the same last January. But before that, never.
They wonder, put on a brave face, keep the hotels open.
And they watch as the tourists leave town.
Sir Jonathon Porritt on rainforests and more
You Ask The Questions: Sir Jonathon Porritt
The founder director of Forum for the Future answers your questions, such as ‘How can we save the rainforest?’ and ‘is there any good news about the environment?’
Judging by your early writing, you used to be a real green radical. Have your beliefs mellowed over the years? Josh Hogan, Cheddar
Not really. I wrote Seeing Green in 1984, before the collapse of Communism, so my political criticism in those days was even-handed – “a plague on both your houses”, communism and capitalism. If anything, I am now even more critical of contemporary capitalism, based as it is on short-term, planet trashing, people-crushing, profit maximisation in every corner of the world. But I have come to accept (as explained in my latest book, Capitalism As If The World Matters) that we have got no immediate solution other than to promote a radically different kind of capitalism – genuinely sustainable and equitable. I believe such a thing is, just about, possible if those who care about capitalism (and are its principal beneficiaries) realise the terrifying consequences of the entire system collapsing in the not too distant future, in the teeth of social implosion and ecological meltdown.
If we don’t change our ways, what will happen to the planet? Lynn Green, Hampshire
It depends how you interpret the threat of “irreversible climate change”. If the planet just kept on getting hotter and hotter, then not only would we become extinct, but so would the vast majority of life forms. Would life on Earth eventually be restored? The evidence from previous “extinction spasms” indicates it probably would, over hundreds of millions of years, with as great if not greater a level of species diversity.
In that case, it’s not so much the planet we should be worrying about, in the long run, as ourselves. Indeed, there has always been a particular school of green thinking which argues that the best thing we could do for the planet would be to accelerate our own demise – as in “cutting out the cancer of human kind”. I don’t subscribe to that view.
Many people still aren’t convinced about climate change. The evidence is mixed, so don’t you need to be more honest about man made changes to the environment? Henry Blackthorpe, Winchester
The evidence on climate change is not “mixed”. The overwhelming weight of evidence now points to a rapid acceleration in human-induced changes in the climate, with rapidly worsening consequences for humankind. And every government in the world (including China, India, Saudi Arabia and the benighted Bush Administration in the United States) signed up to that consensus when they accepted the 2007 Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The real dishonesty lies in those vested interests which exploit any residual scientific uncertainty for their own political and commercial purposes.
How can we tackle the idiots who regard denying man-made global warning as a badge of right-wing ideological purity? Chris Clayton, Waverton, Cheshire
The brigade of “idiots” gets smaller every year, and although they still have a disproportionate effect on the media and public opinion (sewing confusion, reinforcing inertia and so on), they are less and less relevant. Much more problematic are today’s politicians who theoretically buy into the scientific consensus about climate change, but whose responses remain pathetically inadequate.
Will a British government ever really have the guts to take serious measures on climate change? Keith David, London
Despite all the fine words, emissions of CO2 in the UK have risen over the past few years, though Defra has just announced a tiny reduction of 0.1 per cent for 2006. It’s all very slow, with faltering progress on both energy efficiency and renewable energy – the two most important pillars of any low-carbon economy – and absolutely zero progress on addressing emissions from road and air travel. Frankly, the political will just isn’t there, and as economic conditions worsen, there seems to be little prospect that this is likely to change any time soon.
Has the Sustainable Development Commission had any effect on the Government, or are you just there to make it look greener? Neil Stockman, Southwark, London
The Sustainable Development Commission is an independent advisory body. We advise; Ministers either accept or ignore our advice. That’s the way the system works – quite properly. On the credit side, this government takes sustainable development more seriously than most OECD governments, has developed an excellent Sustainable Development Strategy, with serious efforts being made by a number of different departments. It has set some ambitious targets both for itself and for key sectors (such as zero carbon housing by 2016), and the Climate Change Bill going through Parliament is widely recognised as a major step forward.
On the debit side, delivery against those targets remains poor, and the Treasury has proved itself an implacable barrier to any serious, cross-government progress being made. Since 1997, there have been frighteningly few ministers who have taken the trouble to think through the challenge of “sustainable wealth creation” in any serious way.
Has the Sustainable Development Commission served as a green fig leaf obscuring these inadequacies? I don’t think so. And I don’t think that’s how ministers or officials see it either.
How do you feel about the Government’s apparent full endorsement of nuclear power? Annie Lennox, by email
The Sustainable Development Commission came up with the figure that nuclear power would only reduce emissions by 4 per cent after 2025. So why hasn’t Brown listened? H Shah, by email
(answer to both questions) Simply stated, it is the view of the Sustainable Development Commission that this Government has got it completely wrong on nuclear power. Despite the fact that it’s going to cost UK taxpayers at least £75bn to clean up the legacy of our current nuclear programme, that we still have no solution to the problems of nuclear waste, that nuclear power remains very expensive, that the risks of proliferation and threats to national security remain high, and that the contribution from a new nuclear programme (if it ever materialises) to total energy needs and CO2 abatement will remain relatively low, ministers are now putting more effort into encouraging nuclear power than they have devoted to the entire field of renewables over the last 10 years.
As they see it, this is the only manageable mega-fix available to them, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. But this is a sad and extraordinarily ill-judged illusion.
How can we stop the Brazilians chopping down their rainforest? Should we just pay them not to? Deane Craven, by email
For Brazil, (and other rainforest countries), their forests and the land beneath them are valuable economic assets. But they also have huge value for the rest of world in terms of climate regulation, sequestering of CO2 and so on. So the rich world needs to develop financing mechanisms to make it at least as beneficial economically for Brazil to maintain its forests intact as to cut them down – in effect, compensating them for “profits foregone”. And the billions involved would still represent good value for money for the whole of humankind – given that deforestation currently accounts for around 18 per cent of total CO2 emissions.
Does buying trees on carbon trading websites to counteract our flights really make a difference? Or is that all nonsense? Katy Langmore, Wombwell
Offsetting emissions from any form of transport is not nonsense – if it’s done in the right way. And that means avoiding journeys where possible, choosing the most CO2 – efficient form of transport where possible, and when you have to fly or drive, offsetting the CO2 emitted with the kind of offset providers (such as Climate Care) who are able to guarantee gold standard offset projects. As it happens, Forum for the Future does not support forestry-based offsets – we prefer to invest in renewable energy projects in developing countries – particularly those that achieve positive social outcomes as well as climate change outcomes.
One of the partners of Forum for the Future, an organisation you founded, is BAA. How on earth can you work with a firm that wants to build more airport terminals? Linda Rankin, Aberdeen
Forum for the Future works with BP, involved in what The Independent called “The Biggest Environmental Crime in History”. Why? Grahame Jacklin, by email
(answer to both questions) Working with companies such as BAA and BP is really difficult for an organisation like Forum for the Future – and recent decisions (to support a new runway at Heathrow by BAA and invest in the tar sands in Canada by BP) have made it even harder. But we set ourselves some very strict tests here. We have to be able to demonstrate that our advice and challenge to these companies is still making a difference, enabling them – in the round – to reduce negative social and environmental impacts and reinforce the benign impacts of which they are capable. It’s messy, morally compromised. But so are we all at the individual level – or at least, those of us who fly or ever travel in a car.
It’s all doom and gloom from eco-warriors. Is there any good news about the environment? Nick Harris, Southampton
One of the reasons we set up Forum for the Future 12 years ago was to amplify all the good news that is going on out there – about people, communities, technologies, companies and so on. That’s what our magazine, Green Futures, is full of six times a year. Without all that, I would have long since collapsed into a pit of despair given all the bad news that crosses my desk.
No call for the woodpecker
/—/.../-//-/.../-//-/.../—// Black woodpecker’s call (in Morse code)
The Isle of Wolves.
The wildest, darkest and most legend-entwined area of the capital city of Warsaw in Poland.
This is where hapless tourists find themselves relieved of loose change (and loose clothing) by the quick-witted dwellers in Praga, one of the city’s oldest districts by the flowing Wisla river. It’s not a place where most outsiders go.
The black woodpecker, though, really valued it. The peace and quiet there suited him. Plenty of grubs too.
So he drilled himself out a nice homely nesting hole in the rotten trunk of a hundred-year-old willow tree.
Crossing Swietokrzyski Bridge, you could see the ancient scrap of woodland where he lived with his numerous kin, deep in his hollow nest, looking down on the daft tourists who scattered litter in this NATURA 2000 designated area.
Have you ever heard a black woodpecker tapping at a tree?
Too late now.
The nesting hole has gone. So have the rotten, dried-out trees. Instead there’s a service road, cutting right through the middle of this little green wilderness, for the lorries to tow the timber away.
It happened quietly and quickly. It happened without the permission of the minister, the heritage people, or even the Director of Environment for the district of Praga North. Even though the black woodpecker is listed in Annex I of the Birds Directive, and the Port of Praga is within NATURA 2000 boundaries.
No-one gave permission because it wasn’t asked for. No-one took care of the place because no-one had told anyone to. The Praga Port Corporation simply sent in a private firm to tidy up the area, and paid them in firewood. The old rotten trunks were taken away. Who cares?
PS. See you at Euro 2012. In the bar at the Isle of Wolves, the black woodpecker on the plasma screen will look quite lifelike.
Przemek Pasek Ja Wisla foundation
/—/.../-//-/.../-//-/.../—// dzięcioł czarny
Wilcza Wyspa, najbardziej niedostępny i legendą mroczną owiany teren w stolicy. Tam zbłąkanym turystom, prascy obywatele pozbyć się pomagają zbędnej gotówki i odzieży. Spokój i larw dostatek docenił Dzięcioł Czarny i w pniu spróchniałym stuletniej wierzby dziuplę lęgową wykuł. Przejeżdżając Mostem Świętokrzyskim widać z nasypu zarośnięte lasem łęgowym starorzecza. To właśnie tam, w dziupli głębokiej mieszkała spoko familia dzięcioła czarnego, z góry patrząc na kloszarda z kulawą nogą i Chińczyka, co śmieci wyrzuca w obszar NATURA 2000.
Słyszałaś/eś jak w pień stuka czarny dzięcioł? Już nie usłyszysz. Nie ma już tej dziupli i nie ma uschniętego drzewa. Przez środek uroczyska jest za to droga techniczna, dla ciągnika co drewno wywozi. Odbyło się cicho i szybko. Odbyło się bez zgody ministra, konserwatora, ani nawet naczelnika wydziału ochrony środowiska w dzielnicy Praga Północ. Choć dzięcioł czarny jest w Aneksie Pierwszym Dyrektywy Ptasiej, a zielona część Portu Praskiego do obszaru NATURA 2000 należy. Nikt się nie zgodził, bo nikt o zgodę nie pytał, nikt nie pilnował, bo nikt pilnować nie kazał. Prace porządkowe na zlecenie spółki Port Praski przeprowadziła firma prywatna w zamian za drewno na opał. Zniknęły pnie spróchniałe i stare. Kto by się tym przejmował?
PS: Do zobaczenia na Euro 2012. W barze Wilcza Wyspa, na plazmie dzięcioł czarny będzie wyglądał jak żywy.
Przemek Pasek