July 6, 2009

Fire and Rain: an interview with Somali Goldman prize winner Fatima Jibrell

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Considering the endless cycle of televised appeals, the global conferences to alleviate hunger and the ubiquitous twentysomethings standing on street corners asking us to fill out direct debit forms, one might assume that the more that rich countries give to the Third World, the better things would be there.

So when the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) said recently that it was planning to return with ‘interventionist strategies’, everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief. Help was on its way at last. In the hotel where we meet I ask Fatima Jibrell what she thinks of the news.

‘I don’t think the UNDP — or any UN agency, for that matter — will make any difference if it comes back to Somalia,’ she tells me. ‘And if it doesn’t come, it won’t be missed. If the UN comes, it just stays and rents a big house and drives its cars around and then leaves. I don’t seen any improvement. You tell me where it is working?’.
(more…)

 

July 6, 2009

We need to talk about… flying

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Last week I attended a conference for a campaign to gain legal rights for all living beings from trees to tigers, which argued that only when they have such rights can they be properly represented in a court of law. Aside from being truly fascinating and considerably brain stretching at times, it was remarkable for how diverse was the range of its attendees – international lawyers, hippies young and old, direct action activists, a UN ambassador and a bearded man in his fifties who arrived (in the centre of London) barefoot.  (more…)

 

June 23, 2009

Bons Voyages

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In the six years I spent at the Ecologist magazine from 2001-2007, there was only one issue we really shied away from tackling properly. And that was tourism.

We wrote a few articles on topics such as the draining of Spanish water tables for golf courses but we never really looked at whether there might be such a thing as ‘good’ tourism. Despite the growth in popularity of ‘ecotourism’ during those years, I remember just one article on the subject.

Yet I always loved travel, and spent much of my life before the Ecologist exploring the world. Furthermore, two of the experiences which had the most lasting impact upon me while at the magazine were as a result of travelling – first when I went away on an Earthwatch volunteer trip to the Bahamas to monitor whales and dolphins, and second when several of us from the magazine attended the Salone del Gusto Slow Food Festival in Turin. These experiences of meeting people involved in other ways of living, of seeing first hand why conservation, wildlife protection and biodiversity matter have stayed with me and changed the way I act and think far more than anything I have ever read about or seen on TV. While it is true that modern technology enables us to visualise and communicate in ever more powerful ways, there is still no replacement for actual experience. (more…)

 

June 16, 2009

Time to cry wolf?

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Might gray wolves soon return to the UK?

Might gray wolves soon return to the UK?

What remains of the once mighty Caledonian Forest is fast being eroded by an ever-increasing population of deer. Without reintroducing their natural predator, the wolf, to the wilds of Scotland, the forest and its ecosystem are in danger of disappearing forever.

For most of the earth’s history, Scotland was covered in trees – a vast primeval wilderness of birch, rowan, aspen, juniper and Scots pines. On the west coast, oak and birch trees looked down upon a temperate rainforest of mosses, ferns and lichens. When the Romans arrived two thousand years ago, they called Scotland Caledonia, meaning ‘wooded heights’.Today only one per cent of the once mighty Caledonian Forest – the westernmost stretch of the vast boreal forest that once covered the majority of northern Europe – remains, broken up into 35 isolated fragments. Centuries of deforestation have exacted a heavy price. (more…)

 

December 5, 2007

Sweet Smell of Excess – the globalisation of scent

Posted by jmcsmith under Ecology, globalisation, senses | Tags: , , , , , |
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apocalypse_now_smell_like_victory.jpgWhen two members of the Ongee meet, they don’t inquire after each others’ health, but ask instead: ‘How is your nose?’ Living on the Andaman Islands, out in the Indian Ocean, the Ongee universe is defined by smell. The passing of the year is marked by the scents of differing flowers as they come into bloom, and while a Westerner may touch their chest (the nearest point to the heart) when talking about themselves, the Ongee touch the tips of their noses. (more…)

 

November 22, 2007

The environmental cost of skiing

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“No more of parental rules!
We’re heading for the snow!
Good riddance to those grown up ghouls!
We’re leaving! Yukon Ho!”
Calvin and Hobbs

Few head to the mountains and come back disappointed. After months of drudge and commute, what can beat the exhilarating freedom of the slopes, the joy of a cold beer at 3000 metres, the unguent messiness of a fondue with friends and tall tales at the end of a muscle aching day?

No wonder that each year around one million British people and many millions of other Europeans go skiing for their holidays. In the Alps alone, where 13 million people live permanently, 100 million visitors descend (or rather ascend) the mountains each year – accounting for one tenth of the world’s total tourism market.

And in the days of short haul flights to places such as Lyon and Geneva often costing under £10 those numbers are set to grow and grow – with a predicted 250 per cent increase in airline traffic by 2020. Easyjet alone already runs 20 flights from London to Geneva in the peak winter month

Unfortunately, while the joy of skiing may be the liberation from daily cares through closeness to nature, being bathed in dazzling whiteness does not mean that our winter holiday is clean. (more…)

 

November 10, 2007

How will we power our future?

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fuel-protests.jpgSeptember 9, 2000. Coming from all around the country by cover of night, an unlikely and ramshackle force of farmers and lorry drivers meet at the gates of the Stanlow petrol refinery near Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. Quickly they turn their vehicles across the road, blocking the entrance. 60 tanker drivers are now trapped inside, along with 1.8 million litres of fuel destined for hundreds of petrol stations across the UK.

September 12, 2000. The blockades have begun to spread across the country. Queues stretch for hundred of metres from petrol station forecourts, as motorists, ignoring government advice, panic and fill their cars with whatever petrol they can buy. Ambulance services in the north-west cease all non-emergency journeys and impose a 55mph speed limits to save petrol. At some branches of the supermarket giant Sainsibury’s rationing is imposed with shoppers allowed only six pints of milk, three loaves, and two bags of sugar each.

Three days.

It’s now seven years later. Since 2000 the price of oil has risen more than fourfold. By the end of 2005 it was $50 a barrel. In 2006 it averaged over $60. Last week it broke $99 for the first time, the price having risen by almost 50 per cent this year alone. Yet in 2006 for the first time in our history, the UK imported more food than it produced, with air freight being the fast growing method of transport. This October, Money Week – hardly the radical green press – ran an article titled ‘How Oil Peak Went Mainstream’. It says: “Up until today, the idea that there’s only a finite amount of oil in the world that can be recovered, and that once you reach the halfway point there begins an irreversible decline, simply hasn’t been in most people’s awareness….’

Up until today. “the genie,” claims Money Week, “is out of the bottle”. We all, individuals, governments, business, have to acknowledge the coming realities of the low carbon world, and act accordingly. So what should we do? (more…)

 

June 10, 2007

The Lavender Mob – reinvigorating traditional agriculture

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lavender-field.jpgA bumblebee careens clumsily about a lone yellow foxglove, surrounded by row upon row of lavender bushes, their flowers oscillating gently in the breeze. The sun beats down on my neck. I pick a head from a nearby plant, roll its buds between my fingers and inhale its distinctive scent. I sigh happily.

Mmm… Mitcham.

This is surburbia at its most suburban, a world of cul-de-sacs, washing the car, trimming the hedge, dreaming of the countryside, commuting to the city. A land I long to forget.

To me the suburbs are an early example of man’s erasing of history in pursuit of progress. Often all that is left of an area’s past amongst the identikit ‘between-the-wars’ semis lies hidden in seemingly disconnected street signs or the names of the few pubs not yet afflicted with a nasty gastro disorder.

So too in Mitcham, once the world capital of lavender production. Where now all I can see are tiled roves and satellite dishes, once stretched lavender fields as far as the eye could see. (more…)

 

May 22, 2007

Bees mean money – profile of the UK’s most succesful apiarist

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Bees and the honey they produce have always fascinated us. Mesolithic cave paintings show men harvesting honey. The Promised Land of Exodus flowed with it, The Ancient Egyptians embalmed people in it.

bees2.jpgMeanwhile Aristotle, Homer and Virgil all wrote about bees, as did Shakespeare and Milton. For they may be just insects, but their social structure of queen, drones and workers is remarkably complex. They have been shown to be able to learn at a level normally associated with vertebrates. Famously, they communicate direction and distance from the hive to nectar sources using a mysterious dancing sign language known as the ‘waggledance’, the study of which by karl von Frisch was to earn him a Nobel prize in 1973. He correlated the patterns of the dance to the location of food from the hive, discovering that the dance’s orientation correlates to the position of the sun, while the length of the waggle portion of the dance correlates to the distance from the hive. A form of bee semaphore.

Today, this fascination carries on. According to the British Beekeepers Association membership has risen by a quarter to 11,000 in the past two years. And bees (which must tap around two million flowers to make just one pound of honey) are economically important too, with their ‘pollination services’ valued at between £120m to £200m a year. (Compare this to the value of UK honey – about £30m a year.) (more…)

 

November 1, 2005

Starry starry nights – why light pollution matters

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With the chalky cliffs of the Dorset coast stretching for miles in both directions, Bob Mizon sits down on the thick grass of the Purbeck hills, takes out his newspaper and begins to read. A perfect way to spend a relaxing afternoon.

Except this isn’t the afternoon, it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and thanks to the lights of the Poole Ferry terminal some 10 miles away, Bob can still read the nine point newsprint on his Sunday Times.

Bob hasn’t come up to sit atop one of the UK’s few World Heritage sites and read his paper at night because he’s odd. Nor should one question the fact that he spends his days travelling the schools and colleges of southern Britain with a 20-foot inflatable grey planetarium in the back of his car. For Bob is the UK coordinator of the Campaign for Dark Skies, part of an international network that campaigns on behalf of the night sky.

‘Half our environment is above the horizon,’ explains Bob. ‘Half our environment is not protected by the force of law. The night sky, by its very nature a site of special scientific interest and an area of outstanding natural beauty, has, over the last 50 years, been quietly and gradually taken away from those dwelling in towns and urban fringe areas throughout the developed world.’ One of his colleagues in the Dark Skies coalition goes one further, bemoaning the loss of ‘The largest national park in the world.’

The heavens, say Bob and his ilk, are in need of saving. (more…)

 

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