Environment news

• Sowing doubt: people around world receive mystery seed parcels

  01-08-2020 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Packages marked as ‘earrings’ spark biosecurity concerns and global investigations into origins
  There is not much that Jan Goward does not grow in her small Eastbourne garden. “I grow everything,” she says. “I’ve got the exotics: the aubergines, the chillies …”But some mystery seeds she received in the post this week – ostensibly from Singapore, and marked as stud earrings – will not be joining them. Continue reading...
  
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• Residents of England's most polluted spot divided over solution

  01-08-2020 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  In summer, 20,000 vehicles a day pass through Chideock village in Dorset, flooding the air with toxic nitrogen dioxideWith the title of England’s worst road pollution hotspot this week being placed on a small village on the Jurassic Coast, the problem of toxic NO2 fumes is in the spotlight – not just as a public hazard for big cities but for countryside residents too.And it’s expected to get worse. While Friends of the Earth this week revealed the latest figures showing 1,360 s
  
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• Plan to curb England's most polluted spot divides residents

  01-08-2020 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Plight of Chideock village in Dorset puts problem of toxic traffic fumes under spotlightWith the title of England’s worst road pollution hotspot this week being placed on a small village on the Jurassic Coast, the problem of toxic NO2 fumes is in the spotlight – not just as a public hazard for big cities but for countryside residents too.And it’s expected to get worse. While Friends of the Earth this week revealed the latest figures showing 1,360 sites across England were breac
  
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• Developers v Durrell: the battle over Corfu's 'jewel of nature'

  01-08-2020 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Super-rich join naturalists in fight to halt building of luxury resort on biodiverse headland
  Usually, at this time of year, Corfu would have submitted to the soporific rhythms of the relentless summer heat. Instead, anger is in the air and battle lines have been drawn, none more so than in the minds of those determined to protect the island’s last piece of virgin territory – a place of unique biodiversity – from being developed into an “ultra luxury” resort.The sta
  
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• Country diary: chicken-of-the-woods is tasty – and not just to us

  01-08-2020 06:30 via theguardian.com
  
  Backstone Bank Wood, Weardale, Country Durham: Gastronomes relish this dinner-plate-sized fungus, but so too do insect larvaeWoodland fungi are a furtive bunch, living mostly unseen under the soil or inside other organisms, digesting whatever their creeping threads can find: nature’s recyclers. Their appearances are often fleeting, limited to a dusting of rust spores on the underside of a yellowing leaf or overnight eruptions of toadstools in autumn. But bracket fungi are a class apart: bi
  
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• South African rhino poaching halves in six months thanks to Covid-19 lockdown

  01-08-2020 03:13 via theguardian.com
  
  Killings fell by 53% in the first six months of 2020 as restrictions and disruption to international flights hinder poachers Coronavirus latest updatesThe number of South African rhinos killed by poachers fell by half in the first six months of the year, partly helped by the nationwide coronavirus lockdown and disruption to international smuggling rings.During the first six months of the year, 166 rhino were poached in South Africa, compared with 316 in the first half of 2019, Barbara Creecy, th
  
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• Phyllis Omido: The woman who won $12m fighting lead battery poisoners

  01-08-2020 02:33 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Kenyan activist Phyllis Omido has been ignored, harassed and arrested, but she never gave up.
  
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