Environment news

• Wild plants of Barbados illustrated on plantation ledgers – in pictures

  19-09-2020 18:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages. Colonialism wiped out Barbados’s biodiversity in the 17th century by replacing local
  
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• The tipping points at the heart of the climate crisis

  19-09-2020 18:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Many parts of the Earth’s climate system have been destabilised by warming, from ice sheets and ocean currents to the Amazon rainforest – and scientists believe that if one collapses others could followThe warning signs are flashing red. The California wildfires were surely made worse by the impacts of global heating. A study published in July warned that the Arctic is undergoing “an abrupt climate change event” that will probably lead to dramatic changes. As if to underl
  
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• Greener BP must do more than talk tough on the climate crisis

  19-09-2020 17:00 via theguardian.com
  
  A company steeped in oil and gas production may not find it easy to convince investors of its environmental credentials‘This is serious stuff,” said BP’s Bernard Looney. The chief executive, speaking last week at the oil giant’s three-day investor event, was talking tough on the need to tackle the climate crisis. He could just as easily have been referring to the existential tightrope that BP, and others in the fossil fuel industry, will need to walk between investor conf
  
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• America is at war with wildfires. Yet Trump is on the side of the inferno | David Sirota

  19-09-2020 12:45 via theguardian.com
  
  Trump long ago made clear that in the with-us-or-against-us climate war, he is against us and has enthusiastically joined the side of the infernoThe fires that continue to incinerate the west coast, pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and blanket the country in smoke are the latest sign that the climate crisis has made landfall in America and is torching its way inward like an occupying army overwhelming battle-weary fortifications. Only, that military metaphor seems a bit off, because if yo
  
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• Climate change, Covid – our hearts ache. But a new era is possible. We can do it | Rebecca Solnit

  19-09-2020 12:16 via theguardian.com
  
  I understand the temptation to feel that what is wrong now will be wrong forever. But anguish and hope can coexistIf you’re heartsore at the quadruple crisis of the mismanaged pandemic, the resultant financial catastrophe grinding down so many people, the climate chaos dramatically evident in unprecedented fires in the west, hurricanes in the southeast, and melting ice in Greenland and the poles, and the corruption, human rights abuses, and creeping authoritarianism of the current regime,
  
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• Country diary: an ancient forest offers protection from the elements

  19-09-2020 06:30 via theguardian.com
  
  Glen Feshie, Cairngorms: These trees are the remnants of a coniferous rainforest that spread across Britain after the last ice ageLight brightens the tent and nudges me out of sleep. Dawn must have arrived. I open my eyes, expecting morning light, but instead see soft silver shapes flickering across the tent fabric – moonbeams, diffused through the swaying limbs of the huge Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) under which my tent is pitched.My watch says 3.34am. I unzip the door of the tent and l
  
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