Posts filed under 'environment'
There is something magical about a visit from redwings. I saw them arrive at the bottom of our garden when I was clutching my first cup of tea of the day for warmth at the crack of dawn, around 8am. They had come such a long way I wished I could give them something to make their journey worth while. This misty picture shows only six – a few hours later there must have been at least 100 redwings flying back and forward between the few trees left standing in our back lane.
According to our bird book redwings are winter visitors. They migrate south from Scandinavia every year but they only appear in town gardens in the coldest winters when the fields are covered with snow. This year city gardens are covered with snow too and I can’t imagine the birds found enough berries in our holly tree (and Rita’s next door) to feed so many of them.
The redwings arrived early on the 23rd December and stayed until late on Christmas Eve. To be honest, at first we didn’t know what they were – except that they clearly weren’t blackbirds, robins or chaffinches. With the help of our cheapo binoculars (and a flash of sunlight) we saw the pinkish blush and speckled marks on the breast of what our bird book describes as the smallest thrush visiting the UK from Scandinavia.
A bit of Googling reveals that they are one of the many bird species threatened by climate change. Rising temperatures are reducing their habitat. There’s even a story in the Daily Mail which (given my last blog) is a surprise but I wasn’t going to pay to read the rest of it particularly since you can read the original source, a report by Dr Richard Gregory on the RSPB website, for free. According to Barford Community website redwings are less robust than other thrushes and very vulnerable in cold spells if holly trees have been stripped by blackbirds and mistle thrushes (not to mention holly wreath makers).
The RSPB says redwings eat worms, snails and berries. Worms and snails were under a thick blanket of snow and I couldn’t see many berries on our holly tree so I put out a tray of dried cranberries and raisins which was the best I could find in our Christmas larder. But I have just found this fantastic picture by Duncan Brown on Flickr which shows at least one redwing enjoying a real feast at Cradlehall in Inverness. Enough, as one of the Flickr commentators says, to feed a whole flock. Hope our redwings find it.
Here’s a redwing having one of his “five a day”.
Photo taken by Duncan Brown at Cradlehall, Inverness.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cradlehall/
December 26th, 2009
On the kitchen window ledge there are geraniums and cyclamen in bloom at the same time and it doesn’t feel quite right. After hearing Melanie Phillips denying the fact of climate change on Question Time it occurred to me that she cannot possibly be a gardener. But then the Daily Mail is more green ink than greenfingers.
There’s ice on the bird bath and frost on the ground and I would be almost glad to welcome the cold if only our central heating was working properly. Years and years ago I read an essay by D.H. Lawrence who said that winter was the time of year when people from the northern hemisphere feel most at home. It goes with our gloomy outlook on life. At least I think that is what he said. It is a long time since I read it and I have never been able to find that book of essays again. But maybe that’s why this time of year feels so familiar, so reassuringly right, despite the long dark nights. Or at least it used to.
Over the past seven years early spring has been getting warmer and some spring-flowering plants flower more than two weeks earlier. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh study of phenology (flowering times)
In some ways the reliability of winter is easier to take than the uncertainty of summer. And there is nothing quite like the Edinburgh skyline on a clear winter evening.
The northern light hasn’t changed – though you do need cold, clear air for a sunset to catch your breath – but there is nothing certain about winter any more. The leaves have hardly fallen before spring bulbs start to appear, the pond is full of frogspawn far too early for tadpoles to survive. However the green ink brigade might deny it, human beings have made a real mess of the natural order of things. Here’s what the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh has to say about the impact of climate change on plants.
Human-induced global warming will significantly threaten levels of biodiversity, potentially leading to loss of biological resources, environmental services and ecosystem function…Biodiversity science provides a fundamental link between the physical process of climate change and the subsequent impacts on social and economic well-being.
No need for ‘tricks’ or manipulating statistics. This kind of information is freely available to anyone who can be bothered to look for it – along with all the other IPCC statistics about melting glaciers, rising sea levels, rising temperatures and rising CO2 emissions. Surely the real trick in the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia was leaking them just before the Copenhagen Climate Change summit? Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. The science may be beyond Melanie Phillips but the impact of man-made change is all around us: ferociously flooding Cockermouth; quietly flowering in the garden.
December 13th, 2009
“I suggest taking a couple of deep breaths, putting your head down and going like hell.”
Many happy returns. I’m opening my blog for the first time this year to find an old story has come back to life. Very nearly two years ago I posted a picture sent to me by my cousin Beryl in Vancouver. To my surprise the image of elk apparently crossing the Trans-Canada Highway generated a debate between people I had never met about whether the photo was a fake or real. Weirder still: people are picking up the story again.
Thanks to Tommy I have the fancy updated version of WordPress which shows what people are reading on my website. (I know, very self-indulgent but fascinating). The elk began to flicker across the screen before Christmas. A quick Google turned up my old story along with a link to a site selling jokey road signs warning drivers to look out for stray elk, moose, or any other unfortunate wildlife on the road.
Over New Year the elk returned in force. Now Google shows the jokey road signs have disappeared and it looks to me as if it could be that picture of elk on the bridge that is causing the interest. (The picture Beryl sent me crops up on at least one other website I have found ).
So is it true or false? To my mind the argument was clinched by Dave Poulton, who sent a link to a video about safe crossings for elk and other animals dicing with death on the Trans Canada Highway which cuts through Banff National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. At the end of his comment, almost in passing, he adds.
BTW, the photo of the elk on the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge (beside, but not on the highway) is generally accepted to be real in these parts where it was taken.
At that time Dave was executive director of CPAWS ( Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society). If you have a few minutes to spare watch Shooting the Gap, the video CPAWS produced to show how wildlife can regain access to the wild without impeding the ceaseless flow of traffic on the highway. It is hard to decide which is more wonderful: the intelligence of animals in working out how to use an ingenious range of safe crossing places; or the efforts of humans in designing them.
Footnote: I see Dave Poulton left CPAWS last year. I hope he has found a good new job, he sounds like a robust and passionate environmentalist. Here is his advice to his successor: “I suggest taking a couple of deep breaths, putting your head down and going like hell.” The elk would probably agree.
And just for the record: here’s another picture from Beryl of a baby moose born in a housing estate somewhere in Alaska. Unless of course anyone knows any different…
January 4th, 2009
They ate all the fish in the sea and all the birds in the sky. They cut down all the trees and when there was nothing left growing they possibly started eating each other. At any rate pretty soon they disappeared off the face of the earth. There is something eerie about reading Collapse by Jared Diamond as banks implode across the planet. Societies fail when they consume more than the environment can supply. Sound familiar at all?
I couldn’t face watching another episode of financial disaster last night so I went to bed before Newsnight and tucked up with a comforting tale of social catastrophes through the ages. So far I am only a third of the way through this remarkable chronicle of human folly, mismanagement and sheer bad luck but although different societies fail in their own ways they all seem to share common causes. Environmental damage resulting from over-consumption is the strongest link in the chain.
Easter Island is the most dramatic: those huge stone statues built at such great cost to the environment are all that is left of a complex society. The weaker the social structure became, the bigger the statues grew, the more the people consumed of the world around them.
As Diamond says: “The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans…..if mere thousands of Easter Islanders with just stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their environment and thereby destroyed their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power now fail to do worse?”
The morning paper brings more echoes and ironies. Is the banking crisis the edge of the abyss or the jolt we need to start living within our means? The front pages are devoted to tumbling share prices. Inside there is a small story about the threatened extinction of the UK’s fish and fishing industry. We have pretty much eaten all the fish in the sea. What next?
The sub-title to Diamond’s book is How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. It’s up to us.
I’m off to cheer myself up watching Question Time.
October 16th, 2008
I have been wanting to see what is on the other side of this gate for almost 20 years. It seems almost magical to find a walled garden here on the island of Canna, a long and often bumpy boat journey from mainland sources of vegetable seeds and flowering plants. For two weeks one summer, we passed the gate every day walking from the holiday house high on the hillside down to the shore and every day I tried to peek through the gaps but it wasn’t until this year that I finally got into the secret garden.
On the other side
Well, that’s not strictly true. In the 1980s on our way down the woodland path we caught glimpses of old fruit trees and chickens scratching in the vegetable patch on the other side of the wall. In those days the Campbells still lived in the house though they had already bequeathed the island to the National Trust for Scotland.
By last year, on our first visit for many years, they had both died and the garden was so overgrown that a party of NTS volunteers was hacking through brambles and raspberry canes, uncovering the ghost of a pebble path while bonfires burned on the lawn in front of Canna House.
But last week, Ray and I saw the garden returning to life. Neil Baker is on a two year contract to restore the garden and his plan is to grow fruit and vegetables for islanders and visitors as Margaret Fay Shaw used to do – and flowers and berries for birds, bees and butterflies just like John Lorne Campbell.
You can tell a lot about people from the plants they grow. The garden was already here when Margaret and John bought Canna in 1938. Margaret’s first order, sent in
February 1939, was for a fairly modest batch of alyssum and lobelia bedding plants, but very soon there were more ambitious orders for vegetables (artichokes and squashes as well as peas and beans), espalier fruit trees, all kinds of herbs (including basil for goodness sake), shrubs, herbaceous plants and many roses. “I have just found Canna on the map,” one supplier scrawled on the invoice, “I am afraid the roses are unlikely to thrive.”
That was a long time ago. Last week, Neil took a break from cutting grass in the shelter belt to walk us round the garden that he is reviving with great care and sensitivity. In just six months he has reclaimed lawns, uncovered the drying green, cleared paths, coaxed an impressive harvest of veg from the newly weeded kitchen garden (unlike the rest of Scotland Canna has had a summer!) and unearthed a hoard of old ceramic rope tiles which he has been told would fetch a fortune on eBay.
Next year he will tackle the old trees in the orchard and bring back colour to herbaceous borders on either side of the drive from the front gate. He also has an eye on reviving the rose bed stocked by Margaret over the course of more than 40 years. I expect Margaret (she died in 2004) got a lot of satisfaction out of proving that first nursery wrong.
It’s a fantastic project and I hope we get the chance to go back again next year to see how Neil is getting on. I like the feeling that in his care the garden gate still promises something magical on the other side.
There’s a glimpse of Margaret’s rose bed to the right of the path.
September 23rd, 2008
“Many of the smaller ones perched on my hat, and when I carried my gun on my shoulder would sit on the muzzle. During my stay I killed forty-five all of which I skinned carefully.”
I really wish I hadn’t read that extract from David Douglas’s diary describing the birds he killed during his few days on the Galapagos Islands in 1824. Douglas happens to be a bit of a hero of mine. I get a powerful kick looking up into the huge trees he brought back from his travels in what was then the wild woods of the Pacific North West. He went to such trouble to collect seed without destroying the forest it is sad to discover he was blasting eagles and owls and other grand feathered things off the face of the mountain. But I guess no-one is perfect.
Re-reading two biographies of this strange Scot, I feel there is a lot more digging to be done into the psyche of the man who seemed to burn himself out in his relentless search for new plants. Seeds he could pack in tin trunks. Shooting was the best way he could find to collect birds for research back home. Oh, and yes of course, he had to eat as he was climbing the mountains through warring tribes. Roast eagle anyone?
But when you compare Douglas with the rest of the guys he met on his travels, he seems far ahead of his time. He was critical of the Hudson’s Bay Company for its scorched earth approach to hunting: they trapped beavers to extinction and ruthlessly secured the dependence of native Americans by trading in alcohol. Douglas preferred to trade in tobacco, learned the languages of different tribes and seemed to get on well with quite a few chiefs.
The first time I read the story I saw some black humour in his bizarre death in a pit dug to trap wild bulls on Hawaii. This time it seems simply tragic – his eyes were so badly
damaged by snow blindness they bled when he was climbing volcanoes on the island but he still kept going. He was 35 when he died and he left only a brother. And thousands of trees and garden plants.
I have all this in mind because I’m working with Anna on a new guide book for Dawyck Botanic Garden, a wonderful place full of plants grown from seed collected in the (fast disappearing) wild including the stuff Douglas sent back from his travels up the Columbia River. Hard not to get a thrill looking at the old Douglas firs at Dawyck and maybe there is some poetic justice in the fact that the garden is full of birds. Even the odd eagle.
Read more: David Douglas Explorer and Botanist and All for a handful of seed
March 18th, 2008
Good for Hugh and Jamie for putting their celebrity to such good use. It is brave of them to challenge the supermarkets for promoting cheap chicken produced in ways any civilised society should be ashamed of. And with RSPCA running a chicken welfare campaign at the same time online petitions are gathering strength at a phenomenal rate. I couldn’t work out how to upload the Chicken Out petition on to my blog (and the sound of the bell supposedly clocking up each new name might have driven me mad) but I added my name to the campaign. For once celebrity seems worth while.
Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s television programme set out to show that people would not buy the stuff if they knew how it was reared. That turned out to be only partly true. For a depressing number of people a chicken costing £2.50 proved too much of a temptation and even one of Hugh’s supporters was caught in Tesco loading 2 for a fiver into her trolley despite the visible burns factory birds get on their legs from lying around in each others shit.
I was with the chef all the way and really applaud his courage, brass neck even, in taking on such a huge challenge. But I just wished he could have demolished that point about price. It is not value for money to produce inferior protein at give away prices when the moral cost is so high and damage to human health and the environment is so great. It is not necessary to buy cheap chicken with translucent tasteless flesh. We can make much more nutritious low cost meals by eating less meat and more vegetables.
And when we fancy chicken, why not buy a better, more expensive, free range chicken and make several meals out of it (Hugh’s converts were astonished to see him make risotto and a fantastic soup out of the leftovers – you actually don’t get much of a stock from a poor old battery broiler because their bones are so insubstantial). The problem is that we have come to think of chicken as an everyday meal when it used to be a Sunday treat. We don’t need to – indeed we shouldn’t – eat meat every day anyway. And for £2.50 you can make good rich vegetable stews and spicy sauces for meals based on pulses, pasta and potatoes.
The question is not ‘Can they reason? nor ‘Can they talk? but ‘Can they suffer?’ Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832.
This all rings a bell. I have just dug into my old newspaper cuttings to find a book review I wrote for the Scotsman nearly 32 years ago when Peter Singer, then a newly graduated young philosopher, lifted the lid on some of the more unsavoury aspects of mass produced food, including intensively reared pigs and battery hens. In Animal Liberation he made with passion the moral case for treating all life with equal respect because all animals (including humans) have equal capacity for pain and pleasure. Looking at it now I am struck by the force of Jeremy Bentham’s question (not can they talk or reason but can they suffer?) which Singer quotes to clinch his argument. He said we should be planting more efficiently, using land to produce grain for direct human consumption. The depressing reality is that this argument, more urgent than ever, has still to be won.
But how many have heard of Peter Singer? Hugh and Jamie have names and reputations people understand. And it looks as if Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s television programme is making quite an impact already. Click on his website to join the campaign and then sign the RSPCA petition also making use of both Hugh and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners. It will take more than celebrity muscle to beat Tesco and all the other supermarket bogoffs.
January 10th, 2008
Here’s some Global Gossip with a difference. Yesterday, on another unnaturally warm winter morning, I opened my email to find an amazing early spring scene from my cousin Beryl in Vancouver, a photo so surreal I thought at first that Beryl had been busy with PhotoShop. But on further reading I discover that there are indeed parts of the Trans-Canada Highway where not only elk may safely pass, but bears, moose, cougar, wolves, and bighorn sheep are also all invited to go over, under or along their own private lane to avoid fatal contact with the horseless carriage.
“For all of you that may not know it,” says Beryl, “this is the actual turnoff from Banff to the [Trans-Canada] # 1 highway to Calgary”
I was so intrigued by Beryl’s picture I spent some time Googling random searches such as ‘elk crossing Banff highway.’ A strange story of human perversity emerges in the development of the Trans-Canada Highway which goes bang smack through the most ecologically wild and wonderful part of Banff National Park. With no hint of irony the Parks Canada website acknowledges that during the 1980s people were concerned by the increasing numbers of collisions between vehicles and large mammals (no doubt the elk, moose, bears etc weren’t all that chuffed either).
The solution, accepted by the Canada Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), is to make more room for both cars and wildlife. ‘Twinning the Trans Canada Highway’ means doubling the road from two lanes to four lanes but alongside that goes fencing to keep unfortunate animals from straying on to the ribbon of death bisecting their territory, and what CPAWS calls “one of the best testing sites of innovative wildlife roadway crossings in the world”.
It seems to be working though ecologists are not completely satisfied. While ‘twinning’ makes slow progress (because it costs a hell of a lot of money), CPAWs are carrying out research to find out how many and what kind of animals actually use these extraordinary imaginative feats of engineering(just take a look on the Parks Canada website at the variety of wildlife crossing over and under TCH). So far, a length of string interwoven with barbed wire has picked up encouraging evidence of black and grizzly bears and the search goes on.
But here’s to the elk. And thanks to Beryl for a strangely heart warming insight into human nature. What an odd species we are.
[PS, 22 March 2009, nearly two years later the story continues to fire the imagination. See also Elk Ride Again and Again. ]
February 2nd, 2007
It feels strange when your life becomes part of the news. The day after the flood I drove up to Pond Cottage to check for damage. As Ray and I had expected the cottage got off lightly but the landscape looked like a jigsaw puzzle that hadn’t been put together properly. Some familiar pieces were in the wrong place – Ray’s boat had been lifted out of the pond and dumped on the bank – and a few strange landmarks had been jammed in willy nilly. So there was a brand new lake in the neighbouring field and several tons of hardcore on the front lawn which is why I drove straight into a crater where the road used to be.
Waiting to be rescued by Jimmy, the local JCB driver, who built the road for us in the first place I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid. (The hole is bigger and deeper than you can see from the photo.) But I guess it was like getting up in the morning expecting your feet will find the floorboards where they left them the night before.
We were lucky. Some people in the village lost their floors and furniture as well. One young couple were faced with the prospect of having to rebuild the house they had only just finished in time for the arrival of their new baby.
I was very pleased to see Jimmy. He is a kind man and as he lay in water hooking a steel rope to my tow bar he even managed to make me feel that anyone could drive into a hole in the road. Then we stood and marvelled at the even bigger holes the flood had gouged out of the pond bank. Jimmy, who is built like a mountain, said almost admiringly, “Amazing, the power of water.”
Our cottage was saved by the wetland that allowed flood waters to spread and a deep channel that carries the stream away from the sluice. Even so the water must have risen five feet creating a forceful new river that overflowed the bridge and ripped through the garden before ploughing on through the field.
BBC and newspaper reports made much of the fact that a new flood prevention scheme had only just been put in place in Milnathort at a cost of £500,000. I did not hear one report mention the new Scottish law that now requires local authorities to promote sustainable flood management (SFM in the trade) which very broadly speaking means restoring natural defences of wetlands and floodplains instead of building concrete walls.
With nice timing, news of the Milnathort flood broke just as I was doing some new work with WWF Scotland on sustainable flood management. It is a fascinating and frustrating story. Scotland is leading the way in trying to implement a European directive which requires all member states to look at rivers as dynamic ecosystems (rather than inconvenient channels running through the floodplain developments we have become so good at building). In fact Scotland is the first UK country to turn the Water Framework Directive into law (see more about that here) with an act requiring local authorities to promote sustainable alternatives to concrete floodwalls which tend to push the problem downstream. With climate change concrete is likely to become an increasingly costly and pointless defence – as Milnathort shows. But policy and practice have yet to catch up with the law. (Look out for WWF Scotland’s two new publications early in the new year).
December 27th, 2006
“Ours is the last generation with the opportunity to tackle our over dependency on fossil fuels if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” Professor Stephen Blackmore…
A fresh lemon was a source of wonder to the space crew. When the shuttle brought new food supplies from earth, US astronauts on the 1997 Mir space mission looked first for the fruit. But they did not eat it straight away. For quite a long time, according to one crew member, they passed a lemon from one to another simply holding it, enjoying the way it felt in their hands and breathing in the familiar smell. “The smell of earth.”
A television documentary about our quest to conquer the heavens raised occasional glimpses of hell. Separated from the grounding force of earth’s gravity, the weightless human body begins to wither. Muscles shrink, bones crumble and something similar seems to happen to the soul.
So began a feature article I wrote five years ago about wildlife in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. I was searching for a powerful metaphor to bring home why we need plants and gardens instead of covering the surface of the UK with so much concrete: many of us never need to set foot on the natural earth on our way from home to work to shop – to drop. In those days, as contributing editor to the Botanics magazine, my journalistic language tended to be punchier than the more measured sentences of the botanists.
Not any more.
I recently returned to the Botanics to help write the new guidebook to the Edinburgh garden. This time my colleague, editor Anna Levin, and I did not need to punch up the story. In meeting after meeting with heads of department in horticulture, science and education we faced the same facts. Planet Earth is in trouble and not just from climate change. Within 50 years we stand to lose up to a third of all plants which is seriously bad news for all wildlife including the human kind.
What exactly does that mean and why does it matter? After all, quite a few of us will be dead by then anyway. But unless we start to change what we are doing to the planet, our children and grandchildren will certainly discover what it means when climate change combines with a mass extinction of species hardwired into the human DNA.
In our meetings, Anna and I listened to respected and respectable scientists (the kind that used to begin every sentence with cautious phrases like ‘the evidence suggests’) outlining worst-case scenarios with no prevarication.
What happens when rising sea levels flood Fife? What will life in Scotland be like when temperatures rise by 5 degrees? Already, the Botanics has started to move plants which are no longer happy in the changing climate of Edinburgh – the Garden is lucky to have other sites across Scotland better suited to rhododendrons. So far birds and butterflies have similar options to move further north or higher up the mountain.
But in other places climate change is already destroying the ability of species to reproduce themselves. “It is no longer enough simply to stop cutting down the rainforest,” we were told, “In certain places seeds are no longer germinating because of climate change.” The forests of the future may not grow at all unless we take action to slow the pace and cut the impact of climate change.
This is not easy stuff to include in a guide designed to welcome people to a place of tranquillity. We can’t simply say, “enjoy your view from the Garden bench, it won’t last long” but we have tried to get across the message that gardens and plants matter much more than many of us realise.
There are good physical reasons for keeping our environment alive.
As Steve Blackmore, Regius Keeper of RBGE, puts it in one of the latest issues of the Botanics magazine: “Ours is the last generation with the opportunity to tackle our over dependency on fossil fuels…if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
But there may be a more fundamental reason why we need plants and gardens. Ian Edwards, the head of RBGE’s public programme, believes that our fundamental need for contact with natural elements is not fully recognised. We need to be among ‘plants, rocks, water, sunshine, shade… the rustling of leaves, the fluttering of birds’. To Ian it is one of the reasons humans have always sought to create gardens.
In other words, we all need to rediscover the smell of the earth.
I will tell you when the new guide book is out!
September 5th, 2006
