Eva Corlett It is regarded as the “loneliest tree in the world” but the Sitka spruce on uninhabited Campbell Island has been keeping good company of late – with a team of New Zealand researchers who believe it could help unlock climate change secrets. The nine-metre tall spruce holds the Guinness World Record title for the “remotest… Read More Scientists hope ‘world’s loneliest tree’ will help answer climate questions
Andrew Downie Environmental destruction in parts of the Amazon is so complete that swathes of the rainforest have reached tipping point and might never be able to recover, a major study carried out by scientists and Indigenous organisations has found. “The tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in… Read More Large parts of Amazon may never recover, major study says
In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen style themselves as heralds of some very bad news: societal collapse on a global scale is inevitable, and those who manage to survive the mass death and crumbling of the world as we know it will have to live in drastically transformed circumstances. According to… Read More ‘We’re going to pay in a big way’: a shocking new book on the climate crisis
Only breaking at midday to refuel on peanuts and palm wine, the village works methodically as a unit to grow fonio – a precious grain crucial to their diets that only takes days to germinate and can be harvested in as little as six weeks. Though laborious, growing fonio, one of Africa’s oldest cultivated grains,… Read More ‘Fonio just grows naturally’: could ancient indigenous crops ensure food security for Africa?
When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth. The UK government and the US supreme court look… Read More George Monbiot on Democracy vs plutocracy: Endgame for our planet / Tom Engelhardt: Life in This Literal Hell
The English journalist John Diamond, shortly before his death from throat cancer in 2001, wrote that ‘there is really no such thing as alternative medicine, just medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t’. Ecological knowledge might be thought of as similarly indivisible. There are no alternative birds, non-traditional plants, complementary ecologies. More often than not,… Read More Richard Smyth: Nature does not care
Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand,… Read More Lina Zeldovich: The power of shit
The Associated Press reports that the Conger/Glenzer ice shelf in East Antarctica has collapsed. The event was caught on satellite video, and it is the first such collapse known to have occurred on the east coast of Antarctica, which had been thought to be more stable and less affected by human-caused global heating than the west.… Read More Human-Driven Climate Crisis: East Antarctica Ice Shelf collapses for First Time in Human History
Nature is a tricky term. It can refer to the quality of things, to what moves things into existence or to the world as a whole. Read and heard, from political debate to food labelling, it is in constant use: back to nature, 100% natural, natural order, unnatural acts, natural ways of living, wisdom of… Read More Adele Dipasquale: Careless mothers, sterile goddesses and ungrateful offspring
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction. Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon. The most… Read More The great Amazon land grab: how Brazil’s government is turning public land private
After the truth-shower 