Environment Ideas, Tips & Guides

Ryan and I are big fans of Who Gives a Crap, the certified B Corp that supplies our eco-friendly toilet roll. So I was thrilled this morning to discover that they’re setting their sights a lot higher, and developing a mission to send toilet paper to Uranus!*

Casey Bryce, University of Bristol

Botany should feature more heavily in the school curriculum, and be a greater focus of educational policy, a new study in the Journal of Biological Education says.

Jose Yong, Northumbria University, Newcastle

Header image: <a href=«https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pink-water-lily-lake-goldfish-142067443?src=» http:>NagyDodo/Shutterstock

Paula Cocozza had an article published in the Guardian yesterday, which was titled “No plastic please, Mum: my quest to make waste-free packed lunches“. In it she reported on a week where she and her 8 year old son Gabriel set out to fill his lunchbox with packaging-free food. It’s an article that will – I am sure – resonate with plenty of people who are juggling time and money constraints with food preferences and a desire to be a bit more eco-friendly.

Ryan and I watched the first episode of Blue Planet 2 yesterday. David Attenborough is at the helm for another series showing the awe and wonder of the natural world, using clever camera work, an intrepid crew and the occasional parlour trick to show us things we would never normally see, and – for the most part – could never imagine. Dolphins and false killer whales meeting up as old friends. A fish that carries a clam from the edge of the reef to its own personal anvil to crack it open. Fish that change sex. Marine plants (seaweed and phytoplankton) that produce at least as much oxygen as land plants, and probably much more.

Helen Anne Curry, University of Cambridge

The UK has been battered by storms over the last few weeks, and the weather has been very mild – if not warm – for the time of year. It seems ludicrous to deny the fact that the climate is changing, and that this wilder weather is the result. We’ve been lucky, but gardeners elsewhere in the country have suffered storm damage and flooding. The long-range forecast threatened a cold, hard winter for the UK, but there’s no indication of when, or if, that will arrive.

Earth Day seems to be an auspicious day on which to being a new blog series. ‘The Hive’ is going to be a collection of positive news stories about the environment, with a solarpunk vibe – demonstrating that those of us who care about the environment are not alone, and that in fact there are legions of people around the world who are actively making a difference, and who share a positive vision of how the future could look, rather than the gloom and doom of a dystopia forced on us by a broken climate.

This morning I have finished reading the Introduction of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, a call to arms to everyone on the planet to prevent climate change becoming a human-extinction event. A week ago, the Guardian published an article suggesting that using the narrative of war for environmental purposes may not be a good idea. The author thought that it may be deepening the divisions between us, making it harder to get our message across. It didn’t suggest any alternative wordings, except:

The surprising thing about the new chicken industry scandal is that anyone is surprised. In its quest to feed people as cheaply as possible, industrial farming has cut profit margins to the bone, providing plenty of motivation for cost-cutting measures, even those that risk lives.

We see a lot of articles about how you can save money by growing your own food. And it’s true, it’s absolutely true, you can. A packet of salad seeds is roughly the same price as a bagged salad, and will keep you in salads all summer (and probably beyond). You can save money by picking up seeds at seed swaps, saving your own seeds, sharing with friends and neighbours, making your own compost and plant feeds and recycling household items into pots, etc. But there’s an elephant in the room – a factor that’s often left out.

A few weeks ago, Brain remembered something. Brain wasn’t quite sure what it was remembering, but Brain was sure that – at some point during recent years – it had read something about an eco village in the heart of London. Brain wanted to know more; Brain was quite insistent. A search ensued, and it transpired that what Brain was remembering was Kew Bridge Eco Village.

Header image: Nematodes play an important role in all biological systems. Shutterstock

One of the great joys of spring is seeing trees leaf out and bloom. They bring so much joy, and do so much for us, and yet are rarely valued as they should be. In particular, ancient trees are wondrous, magical things. Impressive and complex structures, they have lots of nooks and crannies in which wildlife can find a home. As fungi feed on the tree they provide food for woodland creatures, and a hollowed out trunk provides shelter. Although ancient trees are in the final stage of their life, and technically in decline, they have a lot to give, and can go on living for a long time, depending on the species.

This post contains referral links. If you click through and place an order, I’ll receive a small reward. It doesn’t cost you anything.

Header image: The future of agriculture? Nick Dragotta

If we look out of our patio windows at dusk, we are sometimes lucky enough to spot a bat zooming around above the houses. We call it Cricket, although – to be fair – Cricket could be multiple individuals. It flies so fast it’s hard to keep track. In Feral, George Monbiot talks about the wonder we feel when we come face to face with wildlife like this. He feels it’s a transformative experience, and one that is now sadly lacking from our daily lives.

COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change, has ended with a ‘landmark’ agreement that climate change is something we all need to tackle together. Last week I was talking about what gardeners can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of it is about being thrifty with resources – something that tends to come naturally to us! Over the weekend, Ryan has done his bit by recycling plastic plant pots in my direction. He came across a newly landscaped commercial building, where the unwanted plant pots were being discarded.

If your recycling bin is anything like mine, then it’s overflowing with plastic packaging. The rubbish bin is even worse – filled with plastic wrap and other bits and pieces that can’t currently be recycled and have to be sent off to landfill. We’re drowning in plastic, and although there are people trying to live a plastic-free life, it feels as though that could be a full time job. Plastic has become the material of choice since the 1950s, since it is cheap and lightweight and can be fashioned into all kinds of things. The problem is that most of the 8.3bn tonnes of plastic we’ve made still exist, either in landfills across the world, or the oceans. It’s going to last hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and is causing damage to our environmental life support system.

Last week, Ryan and I watched a marvellous mobile machine that turned chunks of ripped up concrete into gravel. We assumed it would then be used for hardcore – the bottom layer of roads and paving – and it’s a nifty way of locally recycling a material that might otherwise go to landfill. But it’s also an example of downcycling, turning a waste product into a new material, but one of lower quality than the original. Recycling office paper into toilet paper is a good (hypothetical, I don’t know if it happens) example of downcycling.

My mission is to grow new things, in new ways.

Fifty years ago today, at 13:32 UTC, Apollo 11 launched on its mission to drop off the first humans to set foot on the Moon. It’s something that hasn’t been achieved again since the Apollo program ended, although interest in going back to the Moon has been rekindled somewhat of late. While we remember it as one of the crowning moments of the 20th century, it’s worth noting that the Apollo program wasn’t without its critics. In an interview in 1961, Norbert Wiener, a professor and legendary mathematician at MIT, dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle”!

Adrienne Macartney, University of Glasgow

Crew at the International Space Station capture Typhoon Noru [Image credit: NASA]

If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing. 

Philip Donkersley, Lancaster University

For the last couple of years, two dwarf buddleja ‘Buzz’ bushes have been attracting butterflies into my front garden. This year, they’re gone. Removing them was not a decision I took lightly, but I wanted that space for fruit. However, insect populations are crashing, and since we and the rest of the ecosystem rely on them, it’s time to take their welfare seriously. Creating a butterfly garden is easier than you think, and even a kitchen garden can attract butterflies and other insects. The best place to start is with the way you garden – ditch the pesticides and start growing organically (when you poison ‘bad’ insects you wipe out the good guys, too) and leave the peat in the ground where it is a valuable wildlife habitat. Peat-free composts have improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and there’s no reason to use peat in a garden.

I have pretty much always lived in areas with hard water, and with its knock-on effects – scale in the kettle, dried out skin and soap scum on everything. Using detergent-based toiletries has always made sense to me, because (with our water) they’re easier on the skin and they make less mess to clean up. I also have a bit of a thing about sharing soap bars with strangers; I think pump dispensers are more hygienic. (I haven’t investigated, I’m just happier with pump soap for guests!)

National Nest Box Week starts tomorrow. This annual event encourages us to head out and hang up a new nest box, so that our favourite garden birds have somewhere to raise a family. It’s one thing that may help slow their decline.

World Bee Day seems like a good day to have a bee-related edition of The Hive, my round-up of positive (solarpunk) eco news stories. The UN designated 20 May as World Bee Day in 2017, to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face and their contribution to sustainable development.

Apparently a No Deal Brexit could threaten our water supplies, as the chemicals used for water treatment are imported from the EU and can’t be stockpiled in any quantity. Even if we dodge that bullet, climate change and population increases mean England could run out of water in the next 25 years. The chief executive of the Environment Agency wants wasting water to become socially unacceptable, and it’s a good bet that garden sprinklers – which in one hour use as much water as the average person does in a week – will become as frowned upon as smoking indoors.

Most of the time, I feel like a misfit. Once I developed an interest in the environment, I stepped away from mainstream culture – the culture that’s constantly trying to sell us something, with businesses that don’t care who or what they destroy in their pursuit of profit. Even before that I was geeky, and I just seem to feel more different with every passing year. I love the internet, and its ability to bring likeminded people together; all of the gardeners I have encountered online have been lovely people, but because I focus on growing edibles in an organic, peat-free and wildlife-friendly way, I still don’t feel part of the mainstream.

Header image: Artist impression of a solar disk in space. Credit: NASA

A standard mission to the International Space Station is six months long. About nine months before launch, each astronaut tastes the 200 or so items on NASA’s space menu and chooses what they want to be sent into space for them. Nutritionists weigh in to make sure they get the nutrients they need, and astronauts can take some ‘bonus’ treats with them. These can be off-the-shelf foods, and astronauts from different nationalities often have special space meals prepared for them. (Tim Peake got a bacon sandwich, beef stew with truffles and sausages and mash, courtesy of Heston Blumenthal.)