Wildlife
-
The Nature Spectators
It’s tough waiting for all of our planning and other preliminaries to be resolved before we can build anything. We’re not even able to construct rain-water harvesting systems to enable us to grow on the land at this point. One consolation has been the chance to use the first permaculture principle, OBSERVE and INTERACT. For at least 6 months during COVID-19 lockdown, we were physically separated from the land and relied on our powers of recall (with some help from Google Earth) to visualise our interactions with it. We had only recently discovered that we had purchased more than we had realised in the form an area of woodland at…
-
No Words
Tried today to measure river flow rate to scope hydro power feasibility. Got messy…
-
Bees on The Brink
Many species of bee are on the brink of extinction in parts of the UK – and some types have been lost entirely, a report has found. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution and disease are threatening the pollinators, the analysis of 228 species concluded. It discovered that 17 species were regionally extinct – including the Great Yellow Bumblebee, the Potter Flower Bee and the Cliff Mason Bee – with 25 types threatened and another 31 of conservation concern. The bee’s pollinating services are worth £690m a year to the UK economy. Published on World Bee Day, the ‘Bees Under Siege’ report by WWF and Buglife recommends a number of conservation actions to help reverse declines: Ensure that…
-
The Truth About Species Extinctions
UN Climate Change News, 6 May 2019 – Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, and climate change is amongst the five direct drivers of change in nature with the largest relative global impacts so far. This is one key finding of a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), approved by governments in Paris last week and presented to the public today. The report finds that the distribution of 47% of the proportion of terrestrial flightless mammals and 23% of threatened birds may have already been negatively impacted by climate change. Even for global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius,…