June 2015

A new guide highlights the environment in England's school curriculum.  In it, the National Association for Environmental Education [NAEE] asks: How can teachers respond to the challenge of teaching about pollution, endangered species, deforestation, climate change, and other environmental issues? The Association has looked at the opportunities that...

I wrote back in May about  the growth of renewables in electricity generation. It was a positive picture.  Today's post is a somewhat more sober one. A recent BP report says that world-wide solar energy generation grew by 38% last...

Are you looking forward to WEEC at the end of June?  The programme says that there are 23 keynote speakers.  "23!", I thought, "that's over 7 a day; hardly time for lunch. Who's going to eat all that herring?" I need not have...

I wondered about this as I was browsing the recent flush of 'zoos are a problem – but we love them' stories in the media.  According to Wiktionary, there isn't such a term – yet.  But I think that NAEE might just have...

The publisher's blurb for Michael McCarthy's new book, The Moth Snowstorm: nature and joy, begins like this: Nature has many gifts for us, but perhaps the greatest of them all is joy; the intense delight we can take in the natural...

The Economist recently ran a story under the headline: Genetically Modified People.  The graphic was itself appropriately graphic. The point of the piece was that human beings’ ancestors routinely absorbed genes from other species.  The article began: OPPONENTS of genetically modified crops often...

Another well-written post from the Daly News landed in my in-box last week.  It's focus was how economics has ignored thermodynamics over the years and centuries.  I touched on the issues it raises in my talk at Cambridge last week...

Several newspapers this week, and the PM programme on Radio 4, have covered a story about the RSPB in Cheshire as it appears to seek to sell land for housing that it was given in a legacy on the proviso...

I was going to write a post about a recent Telegraph article about children's dwindling knowledge of nature.  It's another pessimistic view about how people know less and less, about less and less, at least as far as "nature" is concerned.  Mind...

As I mentioned last week, Ken Webster and I shared a platform yesterday in Cambridge, at a Climate Histories seminar hosted by the wonderfully named CRASSH – the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. Ken explored the...