Broadcaster and nature campaigner claims Labour’s attack on wildlife in push for economic growth is ‘PR disaster’
Bats are being “scapegoated” by Rachel Reeves, Chris Packham has said, after the chancellor suggested the winged creatures were getting in the way of economic growth.
Reeves recently said she wanted businesses to “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”, and this week the press release announcing her shake-up of all the UK’s regulators mentioned bats six times. A very niche directive to Natural England, the nature watchdog, to take advice from the Bat Conservation Trust out of a planning document, became the linchpin of Reeves’s deregulation plan.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
03/21/2025 - 06:03
Campaigners welcome long-delayed proposals to reduce pesticide-related harms to pollinators
The use of pesticides on UK farms is to be reduced by 10% by 2030 under government plans to protect bees and other pollinators.
Campaigners welcomed the news, but said they were disappointed that the target applied only to arable farms and not to urban areas and parks.
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03/21/2025 - 05:00
As Trump pushes ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda, Greenpeace verdict offers startling outlook for environmental activism
A pipeline company’s victory in court over Greenpeace, and the huge damages it now faces, will encourage other oil and gas companies to legally pursue environmental protesters at a time when Donald Trump’s energy agenda is in ascendancy, experts have warned.
On Wednesday a North Dakota jury ruled that three Greenpeace entities collectively must pay Energy Transfer, which was co-founded by a prominent Trump donor, more than $660m, deciding that the organizations were liable for defamation and other claims after a five-week trial in Mandan, near where the Dakota Access pipeline protests occurred in 2016 and 2017.
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03/21/2025 - 04:00
The pumping of sewage into rivers and seas has become a scandal in Britain. Photographer Dylan Martinez has spent years travelling around the country to capture the story of its broken sewage system.
In England, water companies discharged sewage for 3.6m hours in 2023, polluting streams, rivers and coastlines, littering them with sanitary products and condoms, damaging ecosystems and habitats, and scaring away tourists.
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03/21/2025 - 03:00
Water companies let waste disposers, for cash, dump their loads into sewage farms. When it is recklessly used as fertiliser, we are all at risk
If humanity has an epitaph, it might read something like this: “Knackered by the things we missed.” It is true that several existential threats are widely known and widely discussed. But some of the greatest dangers we face appear on almost no one’s radar.
How often have you thought about this one: spreading sewage sludge on farmland? I would guess very few would include it in their top civilisational hazards. Despite the best efforts of a handful of us, it trundles on, unknown to most. Surprising as it may seem, new research suggests that it could help call time on us.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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03/21/2025 - 03:00
The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world
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03/21/2025 - 00:49
I love them all even the creepy weird ones
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03/20/2025 - 22:47
Kangaroos and wallabies are the only hopping species heavier than 5kg, and the small musky rat-kangaroo might help us learn why
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Scientists stalking a small marsupial through a remote Australian rainforest say they may have found a clue to the mystery of why its bigger kangaroo cousins hop instead of walk.
Kangaroos and closely related wallabies are the only large animals to hop upright on two legs, researchers from Australia’s Flinders University said Thursday, but why remains a mystery.
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03/20/2025 - 18:40
Hilo office, with scientists and their volcano-monitoring equipment, may have lease cancelled from Doge cuts
As Hawaii’s most active volcano shot out fountains of lava on Thursday, some of them reaching as high as 700ft, scientists from the US Geological Survey have been posting regular updates on the scale and pace of the eruptions.
But those same scientists, along with their volcano-monitoring equipment, may soon be evicted from their office because of Elon Musk’s federal government cost-cutting, the Honolulu Civil Beat reported.
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03/20/2025 - 18:00
Unesco report highlights ‘unprecedented’ glacier loss driven by climate crisis, threatening ecosystems, agriculture and water sources
Retreating glaciers threaten the food and water supply of 2 billion people around the world, the UN has warned, as current “unprecedented” rates of melting will have unpredictable consequences.
Two-thirds of all irrigated agriculture in the world is likely to be affected in some way by receding glaciers and dwindling snowfall in mountain regions, driven by the climate crisis, according to a Unesco report.
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