Tag Archive | environment
Too Soon to Tell: Rebecca Solnit’s case for Hope, continued
I thought I’d pass on some inspiring thoughts from a new essay written by writer, environmental campaigner and global justice activist Rbecca Solnit (no stranger to these posts – see the links below). Ten years ago Rebecca Solnit began writing about hope with her online essay Acts of Hope, posted at Tomdispatch in May 2003, that bleak […]
Hope in the Dark
Relentless rain, dark days, bad news all over. Savage spending cuts – with the poorest councils facing the most drastic reductions that foreshadow a wave of library, social services and leisure centre closures. The British economy heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession and the poor bearing the brunt. Climate change taking place before our eyes. The […]
The Meaning of Trees
Who would have thought that the dark grey shapes in a pack of dog biscuits are derived from willow ash, a product which aids digestion and reduces flatulence? This was just one of the fascinating insights offered by Fiona Stafford, Professor of Literature at Somerville College Oxford, in a series of Radio 3 essays last week […]
50 years after ‘Silent Spring’
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, originally published on 27 September 1962. Silent Spring has come to be regarded as an environmental classic which instigated the modern environmental movement. The book’s warning about the dangers of pesticides touched a nerve, but also reflected wider concerns in the emerging […]
The state we’re in: journal entry 1,054
Towards the end of The Four-Gated City, the final volume in Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence sequence, Martha Quest starts to collect newspaper cuttings that reveal what, to her, are signs of an impending apocalypse: local catastrophic occurrences – the poisoning of a country, or of an area; the death of part of the world; […]
Festival: after all these years, a new park for Liverpool
It’s taken a long time, but at last the site of the 1984 International Garden Festival has reopened, giving Liverpool a new, freely accessible park. The site has been derelict since 1997 when Pleasure Island, a rather shoddy theme park that occupied the site following the Garden Festival, finally closed. The other day I took […]
Curtains for Lonesome George – and the rest of us too?
This is the giant tortoise Lonesome George, last survivor of his Galapagos Islands subspecies, at the Darwin research centre on Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador, where he died last weekend, aged 100. George had survived pirates, whalers and goats, which ate their way through his habitat. But his destiny was to be the last of his […]
Ragged Robin: scruffy but unpretentious
I noticed the splash of brilliant colour from a distance: walking with my dog on Childwall Fields this afternoon, I encountered a patch of Ragged Robin, a favourite flower from childhood. It’s a plant that likes damp places like boggy meadows, marshes and ditches, and the reason I was able to get close enough to […]
Magnolia: ‘the whiteness is a gift’
These are the mornings when I pull back the curtains and light floods into the room as if overnight there has been a sudden, heavy fall of snow. It’s the magnolia in the front garden, planted nearly thirty years ago that for a week two in spring is clothed in dazzling splendour, the creamy white […]
Dungeness: strange beauty under threat
A couple of years ago, we visited Dungeness, on the trail of Derek Jarman and wanting to see a place described in today’s Observer as one of ‘strange beauty’. Indeed, this largest expanse of shingle beach in Europe is a landscape that haunts the imagination, the shingle stretching to meet an endless sea and sky, […]
