Rabbits are not native in the UK. They were introduced about 1000 years ago. the first Myxomatosis outbreak in the uk was in 1953. There have been various foolish uses of this disease (the Iberian Lynx is largely only threatened with extinction because it relied heavily on rabbits for food, and these disappeared when myxomatosis was introduced.
Hares are a native species, so it is of greater concern if they are being eradicated. More than 1100 hares have been identified as having died from this, over the last 4 years. Now, as they currently have a population of more than 800,000 individuals, this is not currently a big concern. However if the outbreak has a similar impact to rabbits, then hares could disappear from parts of the UK.
It is already thought to have lost 80% of its population over the last 100 years.
Unfortunately, with our modern habit of farming breeds of wild species, we are giving perfect conditions for new viruses to appear.
Single use plastic plates and cutlery are very damaging to the natural world. They are unnecessary as equivalents can be made from renewable resources at similar prices.
So why, when Europe has banned these items now does our ban get delayed?
This is foolish, and the opposite of other government policies – We can only hope that they change their mind again
The UK is known as a democracy around the world. This is why there is increasingly alarmed commentary on a new bill working its way through parliament. The Police and crime bill like many bills is a large complicated piece of work. I am sure that it has some positive things inside it, but there are significant numbers of negative ones which will cause issues for many of the subjects that this website addresses.
On new years day Priti Patel announced that she was going to concentrate on cracking down on Eco protestors during 2022. The bill contains all sorts of astounding bits. Police will be able to stop or constrain protest – they will even be able to fine protesters for inadvertent breaches of restrictions that the “ought” to know.
Why is this a problem? Well, because as a world we are facing joint problems with the climate crisis, and the extinction crisis.
In neither field is the government pulling its weight! We are a wealthy country, yet we are doing little to help in either respect.
It is particularly concerning, that this law is being pushed through on the understanding that police need to be protected from violence – even though in most instances, the violence is both started by and mostly done by the police to the protesters. Upping stress levels in the protestors is also a regular method, which often naturally leads to violence -then blamed on the protestors. One such method is kettling where large numbers of people are forced into a small area and then not let out.
Delegitimising protest at this time is an afront to British freedoms. If the police (and the law) start viewing all protest as illegitimate it changes how they police it.
Currently, there are two substantial threats to a healthy planet earth. The first is climate change and the second is extinction rebellion. Extinction rebellion has on many occasions done things that are extremely disruptive, however, to basically give the police the power to delegitimize protest is far to large a step in the other direction for a free country.
What has the UK done to fight climate change?
Now we may well have done better than some other countries, however, look at the increase in emissions from imports. Last March it was announced that we had reduced our carbon footprint by 51% excluding aviation and the carbon footprint of our imports. We live in a global world- if we cut our emissions in the UK, but increase them abroad by getting other countries to make what we use, the impact is identical.
As you can see, this graph does not show the whole story
This strikes me as a perfect example of a government which needs to be challenged. Yet protests against the governments inaction will become illegal without approval – by definition not freedom.
Extinction rebellion has likewise caused many problems. Now like many of you, I have been inconvenienced by their actions in the past however they are raise an important issue. The more of the natural world we loose the worse it is for us. The natural world should be valued far more simply for being wild, yet there are huge services that the natural world supplies for us anyway. Rainforest loss will likely turn vast areas to desert, and cause large areas to be come incapable of growing crops. What untold medicines lie undiscovered in the last great rainforests -destined to be cut down before they unveil their secrets.
With politics as it is, it is often not in the interests of an elected government to do things that will only come to fruition in decades time, they need to be re-elected every 5 years. A democracy, particularly at times like this, must allow demonstrators. On these two issues the government is not acting with enough urgency
We must not be silenced! Now, I say this writing in a blog. The last time I looked, this blog is usually read at least a few thousand times. It is unfortunately far easier for the government to ignore these sorts of media.
Will Boris Johnson survive? Who knows, though it is clear that he should not. Labour is currently far ahead in the polls. However, as the Conservatives do not need to face the public in an election for another 3 years, it is not something that they need to worry about at the moment. For my British readers, do write to you MP! it is an alarmingly authoritarian step, and it must be stopped if we are to be able to pressure our government to act to save our planet from the worst of the potential damage.
Apologies for the pause, holidays are increasingly busy.
Happy new year! I hope that everyone had a relaxed and healthy Christmas. It was wonderful to have a Christmas where I saw all my siblings and sat down to a large gathering for food. I just hope that the price we pay for relaxing the rules is not too high.
There are many new things in the pipeline.
We are close to unveiling our members areas. One will be for those who are listed on the website as one of our wildlife destinations – there are many positives to sharing your vicinity with wildlife but there are also plenty of problems. The other will be for those who regularly visit the site and are keen to support our work.
The other will be for readers such as yourself. This area will cost a small amount to join (£5 per month at the lowest level) and will allow you to interact with other members, bring wild news of interest to you to the attention of the website, and join us in our quest to save the natural world – there will be a way for you to submit wilderness destinations (obviously this will be helpful to the site, but you will also be recognized for this and I hope that you will be keen to join our effort.
We are also close to adding the ability for people to build their own page to list wild places. The aim is for this process to be incredibly simple, however as you can imagine, if this site is to reach its potential I cannot write all the pages. My hope is that as we leave the strange world of COVID, people will start to find this and add destinations across the world.
On a personal note, my family will be travelling to South Africa this summer (so long as COVID does not cancel plans) to visit the Kruger for 2 weeks. There are a variety of reasons for this trip. Firstly, we intended to visit regularly but due to life, have not been there for 15 years. Secondly, we are keen to show our children the place. Thirdly, we want to add all the public rests stops to our site and need to visit to be able to do this. Fourthly, we are keen to test the live sightings board that we created and is listed on this site – check that it is working and make sure that it does prove useful, and finally fifthly, I am hoping to go on one of the wilderness trails. We hope to return with many wonderful stories to write up and videos to add to our youtube channel.
I am hoping that our tickets have not been booked too early – they are fully refundable or delayable if COVID makes travel impossible this year. However, I hope that I am not the only one who is keen to start travelling again. If you are looking at doing some wild travel this year, do consider some of our locations. While many of them are quite pricey they can all be combined with some self driving safari, which brings down the price dramatically.
Anyway, do keep reading our news, I hope that it is of interest, and have a great year
There is lots going on at the website behind the scenes. Hopefully, this will be able to go live over the next few months, but is absorbing some of my time – hence the gaps in posts.
We are creating several members areas. These will be called “members” for those who are listing some form of wild experience or are examining the idea (wild places, in the shadow of mankind or hides). I hope that over time this will develop into a community which can support each other. It will have a range of useful resources and will facilitate other people joining our mission. This website is meant to be a resource – to help those hands on in conservation.
Another is “Supporters”. This is open to anyone, with a monthly cost of probably £5. This will also have a series of discussion forums and other ways for you to engage – including the ability to interact with the blog staff. As you can imagine (if you have read our mission statement) the task we have set ourselves is very large. I know that I am not the only person concerned about the natural world, but at the moment few seem to be trying to simplify and help it in a way like us. I hope that supporters are going to be able to help in various ways – there will be ways for you to send us articles that you have written, as well as a way for you to submit places to be added to our various lists (there is no way for me to visit all wild places on the planet -even if I travelled non-stop).
We are also in the process of redoing our forms for adding wildernesses to our lists.
I enjoy writing the blog, and I hope that you enjoy reading it, however the work of the website runs beyond this. I value every one of you which drops in from time to time. Unfortunately, the natural world is under threat, so I feel that merely writing about it is not enough.
I hope that many of you will join me in this enormous task and between us we can make big differences to the health of the natural world
We are hoping to return to normal services in the near future. Unfortunately, when the website returned, it had a real problem with using far more computing power than it needed before the hack.
There are no viruses, and it works fine until it hits its maximum, which forces it offline. We are hoping to fix this in the next few days.
So, the website was hacked. Nothing was stolen, from what I was told they were just able to delete the website. Thankfully we back up, so we have survived.
We have added a significant extra layer of protection which should make it impossible for the same problem to arise (it had nothing to do with the attack on Facebook and WhatsApp). While we do on occasion have sharing buttons, that is the extent of our link so we were safe.
Bigger news, many red list countries have been upgraded allowing travel. These countries include
While the Chinese government does many good things, they often work in underhand ways that would be considered unacceptable in the West.
Recently one of the Chinese Communist Party run media organisations put out an article questioning Greta thunberg’s vegetarianism, on the basis that they thought she looked overweight, and calling her an environmental princess.
You would think it would be too pathetic for a country to try to fat-shame an environmental campaigner. China is determined to continue to live as they are now. The problem is that there emissions are so high, even if the rest of the world went to zero emissions China would still push us into acceptable levels of global warming.
It is a fact that 17.9% of the world’s population live in China. All countries around the world both with emerging economies and those more mature must cut their carbon emissions. This sort of behaviour may play well within China, however it does not reduce the need for China to cut its emissions, and it makes the rest of the world look at them as rather pathetic.
Derogatory names for clean economies are often use by all sorts of leaders. Boris Johnson told Joe Biden the president of the USA that there was nothing wrong with bunny hugging – it would appear that Boris Johnson was rather clumsily making the point that moving in a green direction is good for the world’s economy and is not merely good for the natural world. Forget bunny hugging, it is illogical to poison the world if in the long run it is cheaper to do it cleanly anyway.
A change of direction is clearly needed. The costs china will suffer due to runaway global warming will also be huge, they will not be suffered only by other people.
National parks vary in size greatly across the world. Many national parks in Africa can cover thousands of square miles, unfortunately this is not the case in match of Asia.
Small reserves are not capable of sustaining as a significant population of large predators or large herbivores. In countries like India and Sri Lanka, therefore, migration corridors between protected zones are left free allowing animals to transverse the gap between them and to operate as one mega population.
Many of these reserves are so small that without these migration corridors the populations would likely die out in a relatively short period of time.
Migration corridors between small reserves make the reserves viable. Therefore, invasion of these corridors threaten the future of the whole reserve
This is why the current invasion of the Dahaiyagala Wildlife Sanctuary in Sri Lanka can be so damaging. This wild Life sanctuary links and number of essential areas of elephant habitat, but without the connection all these populations are at severe risk of disappearing.
Udawalawe national park is the country second most visited, so is essential for the tourism revenue that comes into the country. Yet this is the the elephant population that is put it risk buy this invasion. Of course the other problem with this invasion, is that it greatly increases the likelihood of substantial conflict between elephants and humans as they will continue to try to take the same route despite the blockage now in the way.
About 300 farmers had invaded, after rumours had circulated that the area was about to get delisted. Although they were successfully removed, some of the land was cleared first.
The migration corridor is also essential for the long-term survival of the areas leopards and samber deer.
The park generates millions of dollars of revenue each year and so is an essential economic revenue stream in the area.
Estimates are that least 10,000 local people rely on the park as their primary source of income. As such it seems quite astounding me selfish that the desire 300 people to steal this land might threaten the incomes of such a large group.
Given the issue is so clear-cut you would hope the authorities will stop this happening again but it does not seem that they are willing to take strong actions to stop this group from damaging the environment, and destroying the livelihoods of many of their neighbours.
The world is warming. This is something that is now essentially settled. Despite fossil fuel companies arguing the reverse, it was their research 40 years ago (and more) that brought the concerns of global warming first to the attention of humans (though initially they kept these discoveries quiet, and it has only come to light in recent years).
This new research shows that the world is now trapping twice as much energy as it was just 15 years ago.
As around 90% of this energy ends up in the oceans, this is a big problem. While the southern ice cap sits largely on land, the Northern icecap floats on the oceans. This is unfortunately one of the feedback loops that we know about. Ice reflects sunlight (and therefore heat) back into space. As the oceans warm this ice melts, replacing white reflective surface with deep blue absorbing surface – meaning that the oceans then absorb still more heat.
The unfortunate conclusion of the study was that unless this uptake of heat slows fast bigger shifts in climate should be expected.
