June 2016

  • Do we need to learn to be more welcoming of nature's migrants?

    The current migration of people into Europe from North Africa, the Middle East, and farther afield because of war and other social turmoil has already been linked to climate change – not only because this has been seen as a contributor to...

  • Vote Remain for Nature

    Vote Remain for Nature is a short, but irritating, film urging us all to vote to stay in the EU for the sake of nature.  The blurb says: "Europe's protections keep Britain's wildlife, countryside and nature safe.  Wildlife doesn't queue up at the...

  • World-o-meters

    Writing something about population, I stumbled across the Worldometers website.   This has the goal of "making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world". It's owned by Dadax, which says it...

  • Unesco and environmental education

    I have read that UNESCO's annual report for 2016 is going to be about environmental education (that is, "education for people and planet"). Of course, it rather depends what it has to say, but, taken with UNEP's recent focus on environmental education, people...

  • Empirische Forschung zur Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung ...

    "Empirische Forschung zur Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung – Themen, Methoden und Trends" is the impressive title of my latest book – well, not really, it's a book that I have a modest chapter in.  The editors are Matthias Barth and Marco Rieckmann.  Most...

  • Environmental education badly done

    At the recent GEEP meeting, we watched a video of a child in floods of tears as he was about to be driven home from school.  He was railing about what he'd learned about environmentally destructive policies: "Why are they...

  • Sustainability and the NSS survey

    I've written before about valiant attempts to insert some real-world questions about sustainability into the UK's national student survey within universities.  It's all come to naught, it seems as Hefce hunkers (or is that bunkers?) down to concentrate on core questions;...

  • Brexit and the politics of coitus interruptus

    There's not much humour about Brexit / Brexodus.  The most memorable story for me is still from 1975 when we had an IN / OUT vote and the Conservative party was all enthused about staying IN, and Labour was for OUT....

  • Time to buy Round Up, but not, perhaps, Monsanto Futures

    This is from Reuters: Monday 6 June 2016 15.23 BST "EU nations have refused to back a limited extension of the pesticide glyphosate’s use, threatening withdrawal of Monsanto’s Roundup and other weedkillers from shelves if no decision is reached by the end of...

  • Farmers, wildlife and Brexit

    The National Farmers Union thinks that the UK should remain in the EU, although a majority of farmers seem to think otherwise, if a recent poll for the Farmers Weekly is to be believed.  It seems that many think that subsidies outside the...