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The Economist: The environment
- Pocket World in Figures: Clean energy
This ranking is taken from the 2009 edition of The Economist’s “Pocket World in Figures”. This hardback book contains rankings on over 200 topics that take into account over 180 countries. It also has statistical profiles of more than 65 of the world’s major economies, together with profiles of the world and the euro area. The “Pocket World in Figures” is available from our online shop. Buy it today ...
- Climate change diplomacy: Fiddling with words as the world melts
Global consensus on cooling the planet looks maddeningly elusive—but individual states and regional blocks may be stepping into the breach
IMAGINE that some huge rocky projectile, big enough to destroy most forms of life, was hurtling towards the earth, and it seemed that deep international co-operation offered the only hope of deflecting the lethal object. Presumably, the nations of the world would set aside all jealousies and ideological hangups, knowing that failure to act together meant doom for all.
At least in theory, most of the world’s governments now accept that climate change, if left unchecked, could become the equivalent of a deadly asteroid. But to judge by the latest, tortuous moves in climate-change diplomacy—at a two-week gathering in western Poland, which ended on December 13th—there is little sign of any mind-concentrating effect. ...
- Nature writing: An English scribbly bark
Six years of Roger Deakin's diaries from East Anglia
ROGER DEAKIN, who died in 2006, played a large part in the current revival of writing about nature and landscape in Britain. He did not publish much during his life—a book about trees and their spiritual significance called “Wildwood”, and another about swimming in rivers and ponds, “Waterlog”. Yet those two slim books managed to draw the attention of readers towards things that were either new or neglected: the spell that the natural world can cast on the urban imagination; the teeming variety of the modest English countryside and the oddly unexplored landscape of Deakin’s home territory, that part of England known as East Anglia.
“Notes From Walnut Tree Farm” is presented as an account of a single rural year, but was actually assembled from six years’ worth of diaries. It begins as it goes on: Deakin lying full length on the ground in the fields and meadows around his ancient oak-framed farmhouse. He cuts away at troublesome roots, investigating and naming tiny insects. He records the shapes and behaviour of the unregarded plants that other people might call weeds and he traces the ecology of a village green dating back to the tenth century. ...
- Birds in China: The loneliness of the Chinese birdwatcher
A personal account of an exhilarating hunt for the Chinese crested tern, possibly the world’s rarest bird
THEY are there as night falls, and your car lights pick them up as you speed along the coast on a new and excitingly empty motorway: clusters of ragged people who have clambered up through the barriers from the patchwork of ancient paddy fields which this new road paved with glorious intentions has sundered. This is Hainan, an island nearly the size of Sri Lanka which for centuries the Chinese considered to be a place of exile and disease but which the Communist state and its construction mafia is rebranding as a tropical paradise. The people are not ethnic Chinese at all, but from the Li minority—the original settlers of Hainan.
The early Chinese conquerors called them barbarians, for they drilled their teeth and went barefoot; a poet, despising their sharp voices, dubbed them shrike-tongued. Today the Chinese still look down on the Li but esteem them as hunters. “Bow and knife never leave their hands,” wrote a Song dynasty chronicler; or mist nets, a modern chronicler might add. By the side of the road, Li men, young and old, hold clusters of wild birds by the legs, waving them as we roar past. We skid to a halt and I get out for a closer look. ...
- Oysters: Gem of the ocean
A dozen ocean-cleaners and a pint of Guinness, please
JUST as household trash tells you a lot about a family, so mankind’s rubbish heaps reveal much about the species. One of the best lies in the waters around Manhattan. There, archaeologists have found mounds of oyster shells, known as middens, dating back to 6950BC.
People have fed on oysters so long that the man whom Jonathan Swift called brave for first eating one is quite out of range of history’s eye. Sergius Orata, a Roman engineer who lived in the first century BC, cultivated oysters in southern Italian lakes by bringing them to spawn on rock piles that he surrounded with twigs. Larval oysters settled on the twigs, which the cultivator could monitor easily; when the oysters grew to marketable size, they were plucked off and sold. ...
- Art.view: That sort of bear
A fine collection of British storybook treasures up for sale
CHRISTMAS is the season of great gifts for little people. Last year J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, raised GBP1.96m ($2.9m) for a children’s charity when she auctioned off a single copy of her hand-written, silver-bound limited edition “Tales of Beedle the Bard”. This year it is the turn of another fairytale character, Winnie-the-Pooh.
A.A. Milne and his illustrator, E.H. Shepard, were the J.K. Rowlings of their time. Between 1926 and 1928, the three small books they published about the fat little bear introduced not just a fresh cast of characters, but a whole new world still beloved by children today. ...
- The EU summit: Keeping it clean
The EU sticks to its plans to battle climate change
OVER to you, President Obama. That was the message from European Union leaders at a summit on Friday December 12th, as they agreed that Europe would take a global lead in fighting climate change. But they also agreed to protect local heavy industry if the world’s biggest polluters did not follow suit, starting with America.
In theory, the Brussels summit for government chiefs from the 27 EU states was merely a tidying-up exercise. It was intended to spell out how Europe will fulfil promises already made back in March 2007 to make deep cuts in EU carbon emissions, to use energy more efficiently, and increase the use of energy from renewable sources, like wind, wave power and the burning of plant waste. Those promises—inelegantly dubbed the 20-20-20 plan—would involve cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% over 1990 levels, obtaining 20% of energy from renewables and making 20% savings in energy use over forecast levels, all by the year 2020. ...
- The Everglades: Sugar and grass
A plan to save a national treasure
FLORIDA’S politicians have debated for years with environmentalists over how to restore the Everglades wetlands to their natural state. The obstacles are huge, principally because a large swathe of valuable sugar-cane farmland, belonging to powerful companies, lies slap in the middle of the proposed conservation area.
But now, to the surprise of many, Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, has come up with a bold plan to buy 180,000 acres of land from one of the two main producers, US Sugar Corp. The idea is to use this land to restore the natural flow of water from Lake Okeechobee into the marshy Everglades—the “river of grass”, as a leading environmentalist once called them. ...
- Barack Obama's BlackBerry: Subject: The environment
Another e-mail from the president-elect’s inbox
“WHEN you secured the nomination, you said that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. Now you have to decide how much you want to deliver on those words.
You have promised to institute a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. You have also pledged to push for a new climate-change treaty, to replace Kyoto which expires in 2012. And you have helped to spread the notion that greening America through investments in energy efficiency and clean technology might actually help revive the economy. The big question is whether (A) to try to make good on all these promises through one big but risky legislative package early on, or (B) to start with a few symbolic steps—requiring 15% of America’s power to come from renewables, say, or a big hike in spending on energy efficiency—and defer the trickier bits until late