If you wanted to kill as many people as possible, deniably and with no criminal consequences, what would you do? You’d do well to start with a bird flu. Bird flus are responsible for all the known flu pandemics: the great influenza that started more than a century ago, “Asian flu”, “Hong Kong flu” and […]
Tag: George Monbiot
A murder of crows: Chris Packham and the countryside war over bird killings
To a surprising extent, to know the crow is to know ourselves,” says John Marzluff in the preface to In the Company of Crows and Ravens. After all, “crows and people share similar traits and social strategies”. Crows and their relatives have captured human imaginations since the paleolithic period, when they were depicted in cave […]
POLL: Would you support the reintroduction of the wolf in the UK?
For anyone raised on Grimms’ fairytales – or wary of cows, hostile-looking geese – there have always been certain obvious difficulties with ambitious rewilding campaigns. Reintroducing beavers is one thing. Boars: maybe. But among the more appealing aspects of life in Britain, for the nervous, is the relative certainty of never encountering a wolf pack. […]
Can Rewilding Bring Nature Back to Modern Britain?
Britain’s most endangered animals and plants have declined by 58 percent since the 1970s, and one in ten is threatened with extinction, according to a recent report. The U.K. has lost 44 million birds since 1966 and, historically, more large mammals—including wolves, lynx, bears, beavers, boars, moose, bison, and wolverines—than any other European country except […]
How Wolves Change Rivers
There are “elk” pictured in this video when the narrator is referring to “deer.” This is because the narrator is British and the British word for “elk” is “red deer” or “deer” for short. The scientific report this is based on refers to elk so we wanted to be accurate with the truth of the […]
POLL: Should Britain be “rewilded” with wolves, bears and beavers?
A pair of highland ponies nibble grass as two kestrels swoop across the path. Up a rock face across this windswept valley deep in the Scottish highlands, a golden eagle is hunting for prey, its movements tracked by a GPS tag. Nearby are Scottish wildcats among the bracken – Europe’s rarest cat, with fewer than […]
Stop the control freaks who want to capture England’s wild beavers
British people love wildlife, but the government, yet again, seems determined to show that it hates it. An opinion poll in Scotland found that 86% of respondents were in favour of reintroducing the beaver. As most people seem to understand, it’s a magnificent animal which can enrich our lives and our countryside. It was once […]
Neonicotinoids are the new DDT killing the natural world
It’s the new DDT: a class of poisons licensed for widespread use before they had been properly tested, which are now ripping the natural world apart. And it’s another demonstration of the old truth that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. It is only now, when neonicotinoids are already […]