Environmentalist
The only place there is hysteria about these heatwaves is in the Daily Mail, because climate change is something it has tried to deny for a long time, and we are now seeing that the experience that people are having is confirming what the scientists have been saying. The Daily […]
The record that we are looking at to measure the trend in temperature rise is not short at all, it goes back hundreds of thousands of years. There are a whole lot of ways that we can measure the trend in temperatures, for instance by looking at tree rings and […]
We have underestimated the amazing loss of soil that our current agricultural practices have caused, so Prince Charles is quite right to focus on that and the soil is a tremendous absorber of carbon, so restorative, regenerative agriculture is a particularly important part of it. But there are also other […]
Fifty years ago, extending the rule of law over the then wild frontier of the British environment was the main challenge facing environmental campaigners. Post-Brexit, the challenge we now face is protecting the rule of EU environmental law from populist politicians. Environmental law is the tool we use to balance […]
One of the hardest truths about the pandemic which so abruptly cancelled everyone’s future plans is that, even now, we do not fully understand what this means. Despite a colossal global effort we are still some way from being confident of being able to ensure public health as we release […]
One of the things that has become very clear, in the last five years or so, is that we have a serious problem, not just with bees, but with insect life in general. We are seeing massive declines in insect populations, and they are extraordinarily important because they play a […]
Outside of the global wars of the twentieth century humanity has never experienced a shock as sudden or as profound in its implications as that brought to us by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. It surprised everyone bar a very small number of medical and ecological scientists. For them, the canaries had […]
This coronavirus has caused three shocks. There is a health shock the worst of which should be behind us by the end of this year if governments manage it well. There is an economic shock which will last for far longer. There is a psychological shock which we will never […]
This is an enormous shock to the way that we think about ourselves in the world, and it’s a real reminder, of how important it is for us to work with each other to deal with things. It is giving us a real sense that there are no borders anymore, […]
Civilisation is the thin film of order we build around the chaos of events. Courtesy of a coronavirus we are now getting a chilling reminder of just how thin that film is. It would have been inconceivable a few weeks ago that a microscopic assemblage of lipids, proteins and ribonucleic […]