News and Updates

I tried out my new COP test on a few websites using CITES, Ozone and Permafrost as markers.  Here are the results [ √ = found; x = not found ]: Think Global – C x    O x  ...

When I wrote about Scott Pruitt's attempts to undermine environmental protection at the EPA, I was blissfully unaware that he had a partner at the Department of the Interior – Ryan Zinke. The Lexington column in last week's Economist –...

I was going to write today about the dangers of trying to be funny in elevators at American conferences – but Rod Liddle beat me to it in the Sunday Times. This spares me writing about the hapless hero of...

The Knowledge and Power seminar at Bath the other day was a bit like being in a Cormac McCarthy novel: old white men (Michael Young, David Packham and friends) wondering what the world was coming to, while the future (Melz...

Just before the new seasons riots started in earnest, an exhibition was launched outside the UNESCO HQ in Paris.  It sets out to explain the 17 sustainable development goals to a global audience and proposes actions we can all take...

I've written before about the tendency of NGO-type organisations with a social justice remit to downplay environmental issues in what they do.  This is, to a degree, understandable; after all, they are interested in combatting discrimination, liberating women and girls,...

I was wondering the other day how that human wrecking ball – Scott Pruitt – was getting on as Director of the US Environmental Protection Agency; specifically, I was interested in how his plan to undo environmental protection in the...

I last wrote about nature, nurture and environment (and intelligence) in June, 2017, when I was still musing about a Cambridge Union debate that I went to in the early 1970s when these issues were much more in vogue that they've...

This is how the Banyan column in a recent Economist began: "EVEN the Minahasan people, who pride themselves on eating bushmeat, call the collection of stalls at Tomohon, in the highlands of North Sulawesi, the “extreme market”.  There is certainly...

A while back, I re-published an extract from the Rank Grass and Bracken Times which had first been written at the time that foot and mouth disease threatened to wipe sheep farming from England's Lake District hills. Here's another lively extract; this...