Environment news

• Rewilding our cities: beauty, biodiversity and the biophilic cities movement

  04-04-2021 22:00
  
  Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate changeOur cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool down. Instead, we could have buildings that are intimately connected to the living systems that have evolved with us, that celebrate the human-nature connection that is central to our wellbeing.As more of us in Australia live in urban areas and o
  
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• Re-wilding our cities: beauty, biodiversity and the biophilic cities movement

  04-04-2021 22:00
  
  Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing, biodiversity, and action on climate changeOur cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool down. Instead, we could have buildings that are intimately connected to the living systems that have evolved with us, that celebrate the human-nature connection that is central to our wellbeing.As more of us in Australia live in ur
  
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• Community batteries: what are they, and how could they help Australian energy consumers?

  04-04-2021 22:00
  
  Labor proposes funding batteries to allow households with solar power to pool excess electricity. Here’s what you need to knowIn what might be the most attention the battery world has had since Elon Musk built South Australia’s giant battery, Labor has announced that if they win the next election they will front up the cash to install hundreds of “community batteries” across the country.But what is a “community battery” and how do they work? Continue reading..
  
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• If you like salmon, don't read this: the art duo exposing a booming £1bn market

  04-04-2021 16:00
  
  Farmed salmon can end up deformed, blind, riddled with sea lice and driven to eat each other. Eco art activists Cooking Sections are highlighting their plight – and getting Tate to change its menusA few months back, a book arrived in the post – tiny, not much larger than a bank card. Though the cover was grey, its pages were a riot of pinks, from deepest persimmon to pale rose. Printed on them were dense, technical essays referencing everything from fish farming to Adam Smith’s
  
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• Across the UK, environmental protest is surging. So why don't we hear about it? | Ros Coward

  04-04-2021 15:00
  
  There are hundreds of local uprisings against developers – and it’s starting to become a national issueHow many local environment campaigns does it take for the issues they raise to be recognised as part of a national problem? Ten? Twenty, maybe? What about 100? Surely national media and politicians would have taken up the issues by then. As it turns out, there’s far more than 100 local environmental campaigns going on right now. In just two weeks, more than 280 different group
  
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• 'No one explained': fracking brings pollution, not wealth, to Navajo land

  04-04-2021 11:00
  
  Navajo Nation members received ‘a pittance’ for access to their land. Then came the spills and firesIt’s not clear why the water line broke on a Sunday in February 2019, but by the time someone noticed and stopped the leak, more than 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry mixed with crude oil had drained off the wellsite owned by Enduring Resources and into a snow-filled wash. From there, that slurry – nearly 59,000 gallons – flowed more than a mile downstream toward Chac
  
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• If your dog goes for my sheep, then I will shoot, UK farmers warn walkers

  04-04-2021 10:30
  
  Inexperienced owners who acquired dogs during lockdown are blamed for rise in livestock deathsFarmers are warning that attacks on livestock by dogs are reaching “epidemic proportions” as they brace themselves for a surge in dog attacks heading into peak lambing season.An increase in dog ownership during the pandemic, especially among inexperienced dog owners, saw the cost of dog attacks on livestock rise 10% last year to £1.3m, according to research published by NFU Mutual. Con
  
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• Do you fancy taking an alpaca for a walk? Then join the queue…

  04-04-2021 10:30
  
  With summer round the corner and lockdown easing, trekking companies are reporting record bookingsWhen Chris and Vicki Agar bought three pregnant alpacas in 2000 they had no idea that years later they would have more than 100 animals and be running hugely popular alpaca walks five times a week.“If you turn the clock back to 2019, for weekends we were booked up three months in advance and for weekdays a month in advance, with people clamouring, trying to get in on walks,” said Chris,
  
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• Below the surface: reports of rising shark attacks don't tell the whole story

  04-04-2021 10:00
  
  Fatal shark encounters in Australia are higher than ever. But does that mean the seas are no longer safe?Call it pessimism or a remarkable sixth sense, but Chantelle Doyle always had a feeling that a shark was going to bite her one day – and she was proved right.One morning in August 2020, while surfing off Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Australia, the 35-year-old was paddling out when a 2.5m juvenile great white shark launched itself at her. It knocked her off her board and clamped on
  
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• Underwater cables: where the ocean meets the internet – in pictures

  04-04-2021 09:00
  
  The British photographer Andy Sewell’s latest project, Known and Strange Things Pass, looks at what lies beneath our online life. Mixing images of the internet’s underwater infrastructure with daily life, it explores the physical and metaphorical entanglement of the ocean and the internet. The V&A museum will exhibit the project this summer Continue reading...
  
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• Grovelling apologies fail to get Rio Tinto out of a hole

  04-04-2021 01:05
  
  The destruction of an ancient site, and the pay of a departed boss, will be hot topics with the miner’s investors this weekAs acts of corporate vandalism go, Rio Tinto’s obliteration of a sacred site in Western Australia is right up there. The expansion of an iron ore mine knowingly destroyed a cave containing 46,000 years of human history. It had yielded a 4,000-year-old hair plait that showed a direct genetic link with living descendants.The scandal has already cost Rio Tinto a chi
  
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• Companies back moratorium on deep sea mining

  04-04-2021 00:44 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A long-running dispute over plans to start mining the ocean floor has suddenly flared up.
  
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