Wildlife and conservation new, wild travel information and links for booking
Biden has set an extremely ambition target of cutting US emissions by 50% in the next 8 years.
There is no doubt that this is required, if we look at the science this is around about what is required to keep 1.5 degrees of warming still within reach; but can it be done?
Continue reading “Biden has set a target for the USA to cut emissions by 50% – by 2030”Many of the environmental issues that the UK faces continue to be worse because we are an island off the coast of Europe. Unlike France, we have to make the conscience choice to reintroduce wolves, where as in France they have returned naturally.
Recent rewilding efforts in Germany and Belgium, saturated the local wildcat population leading to them spreading to Holland next door.
Wildcats disappeared from Holland in the middle ages. With flatter heads and longer legs than its domestic cousin, the wildcats reappearance is hugely encouraging for environmentalists.
The wildcat started to return in 2013. Pine marten have also returned since 2015.
Long may this move continue
One of the most nature deprived parts of the UK is the driven grouse moors. While grouse are native to the UK these grouse moors are definitely not.
While national parks can be important places for conservation, and in Africa are the home of many of the big animals, in the UK that is not the case at all.
Driven grouse moors are regularly burnt of all their natural vegetation. In addition birds of prey in the area suffer pretty blanket illegal persecution.
Alarmingly, these areas makeup 44% of the Cairngorms national park,28% of north moors national park and 28% of the peak district.
If this huge area of land was given over to rewilding, far more of the British population could enjoy these areas. Furthermore, this land would hold vastly more carbon in its natural state, never mind the fact that with a proper balance, we could see many highly endangered animals return to thrive in the UK.
Boris Johnson pledged to preserve 30% of the UK for nature, and importantly included national parks in that total. If these driven grouse moors are not eliminated that is a claim that cannot stand. We are the only country in the world that undertakes this dangerous practice.
It really should not be the case, that large parts of public land are set aside for the extremely wealthy, who could afford to do this on their own private lands.
In the last year, the government has listened to the anger, stopping burning of moorland where peat is more than 40cm thick. While this is a good move from the environmental side of things it is not the sole thing that bothers the average person in the UK.
Grouse shooting interests point out that the industry supports 1500 full time jobs. This is good, but the 23 large scale rewilding sites in the UK have increased employment by 47% in the areas that they operate, which suggests that 1500 is probably a very low number of jobs to what could be supported.
Tuna are struggling in the wild. As a predator high on the food chain, they do not breed very fast. Added to this, we have been catching them in completely unsustainable numbers.
Perhaps lab grown tuna will arrive first? I know a great number of vegetarians are there because for some reason they do not think that it is right (either because they do not think we should be killing animals, or more recently because they believe that we shouldn’t eat it because it has a high carbon footprint.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for both views.
However, with tuna, even those who pay little attention to what is going on in the world around them are likely to have noticed the many adverts about sustainable tuna and the like.
Lab grown tuna could be truly sustainable. Once some cells are harvested, you should not need to touch the animal again.
BlueNalu is a start-up cell-based sea food aiming to provide the fish without the negative environmental issues.
His company was aiming to capitalize on two moves that have been under way in the public. There has been a rapid move from red meat to meats such as fish as these are more healthy for people. The other thing he noticed was that while there was much innovation in making plant foods taste like meat, the process of growing actual meat from cells were doing far better.
BlueNalu will be producing the high value fillets rather than something you might find in fishcakes, and it will start in restaurants as at the beginning quantities will be so small and here can support more expensive ingredients.
This like many other moves, will be one to watch.
Norway is a large country with only 5.4 million population. One would think therefore, that there would be plenty of space for healthy populations of wildlife. Indeed, one would be correct.
However, they draw the line at wolves.
At the start of the year, there was roughly 80 wolves in Norway. It seems foolish to need to say this, but this is not many for a country of this size. Similarly bears only number around 14, and lynx 350. With huge populations of musk ox deer elk and many other herbivores. This is clearly not enough predators.
Unfortunately this is not a view held by Norway.
51 wolves out of the population of 80 were due to be killed. This is clearly not a scientific cull, but one to placate hunters and farmers.
25 of the animals were due to be killed within four packs that live in the “Wolf zone” an area specifically set aside to protect predators. It is these wolves who have been given a stay of execution – conservationists argued that it is absurd to have an area set aside for nature, and to kill such a large proportion of a species that lives within it.
Conservation groups are taking the Nordic countries to court over their extreme hostile environment that they have for wolves. On Friday, Finland suspended licences to kill 3 packs of wolves specifically because of EU legistlation.
It is not wise to cull entire populations. Importantly, significant numbers of tourists visiting the Nordic region come for the wildlife. In other words, these animals are worth far more alive than dead.
At the moment, red squirrels still survive in reasonable numbers up in Scotland. It is not that grey squirrels out compete red ones, but that they carry an illness which kills red squirrels very fast.
Continue reading “Maybe the British red squirrel is not doomed on mainland britain?”There are countries on earth where eating insects has been a common practice for millennia. Unfortunately, elsewhere it is seen as disgusting.
This is unfortunate as it is a far environmentally cheaper way of making protein for human consumption. Indeed where as a beef burger such as a big mac cheese burger can have a carbon footprint of between 3.4 and 4.8kg, vastly more than the weight of itself; in fact insect burgers have lower carbon footprints than many of the current possibilities such as airy, gluten and mycoprotein.
However, given the fact that the consumers at least at the moment will not be willing to eat it, how about feeding the cattle with insects. This would be dramatically more efficient than feeding the cattle soy, not least because much of the soy is grown on land that has rainforest removed for this purpose.
£145 million was earmarked in the March 2021 British budget for environmental spending. Let almost 40 billion is spent on polluting ones. Tax breaks to companies, to encourage investment in projects (that will damage the environment ) along with £4.5 billion lost from the fuel duty freeze (it has been frozen for 11 years).
Continue reading “UK makes a lot of noise about its green spending, unfortunately we are spending more on polluting ones”It is thought that at least 100,000 flights with empty planes have been flown during the epidemic. These are referred to as ghost flights.
These flights have had to go ahead for airlines to retain their landing slots in major airports. The issue, is that these empty flights are thought to have emitted at least 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. These rules by the EU commission must change. It is absurd to suggest that this emissions could not have been avoided.
Continue reading “Use it or lose it rules on airport slots are requiring hundreds of thousands of empty planes to fly around Europe”There has been much conversation about how to power the world on green electricity.
One suggestion would be to fill the Sahara with solar panels. This would allow us to generate all the worlds power in a sustainable way (of course the world would need a significant amount of batteries as well for when the sun isn’t shining in the Sahara – it may be one of the sunniest places, but it is still night half the time.
