The EU helped shape the UK landscape with both money and a swath of rules and directives. In places like Crediton, a picture-perfect corner of rural Devon, locals fear the change to come – but also smell opportunity
The landscape around Crediton in Devon is picture-postcard perfect – a patchwork of fields, thick hedges, woods, rolling hills with rivers, streams and deep lanes meandering through.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Airedale, West Yorkshire We have kestrel and sparrowhawk here, buzzard and kite, but nothing quite matches the peregrine for dramatic oomph
I’ve spent a lot of time lately staring up at the electricity pylon across the river. Hawks, wrote JA Baker in his 1967 classic book The Peregrine, grow out of dead trees, like branches; I’ve learned that peregrines can also sprout from steel lattice and aluminium alloy.
David, a local birder, pointed out the peregrine on the pylon one morning in late September; it was mantling over a wood pigeon on the lowest crossarm, 15 metres up. Since then, on every visit to the riverside, my gaze has been drawn insistently upward, checking for the falcon’s return.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Fruit was grown in Chelmsford from world’s most expensive pumpkin seed and has circumference of 4.5 metres
A giant pumpkin grown in Chelmsford could set a new record on Saturday when it is weighed at a festival in Southampton.
The fruit was grown from the world’s most expensive pumpkin seed at RHS Garden Hyde Hall in Essex by gardener Matthew Oliver.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Harry Kunz’s search for a successor willing to continue his legacy of caring for injured creatures has been met by an avalanche of calls, emails and visits
For Harry Kunz, the wildlife rescuer who joked he worked with animals because “humans I can’t understand anymore”, it’s been the kind of week that just might have restored some faith in his own species.
The Austrian-born Kunz has been overwhelmed by the global response to his offer to give away his north Queensland wildlife sanctuary to someone willing to carry on his legacy caring for injured and orphaned native Australian creatures.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Environmentalists plan sustained campaign against Cuadrilla after government gave it green light for drilling
Hundreds of people are expected to protest near a fracking site in Lancashire that was given the green light by the government this week.
The Lancashire Responds rally on Saturday is the first shot across the bows of Cuadrilla, in what anti-fracking groups and local residents say will be a sustained campaign of action to stop the company fracking next year.
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Source: Guardian Environment
The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox
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Source: Guardian Environment
Kite Power Solutions plans to open UK’s first kite power plant and predicts the technology could global ease energy costs
Giant kites could supply green energy without the need for taxpayer-funded subsidies within years, according to one of the firms developing the technology.
Kite Power Solutions expects to open the UK’s first kite power plant in March 2017 at the Ministry of Defence’s West Freugh site in Stranraer, Scotland.
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Source: Guardian Environment
Sound the klaxon! It’s Circulate on Fridays time. Stories about the power of networks, nodes and connections provide a (tenuous) theme for this batch of circular economy links. Assimilate this information and join the hivemind…
News this week from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, as the organisation announces the launch of the Circular Cities network, “a global network of city leaders who are pioneering the application of circular economy approaches to address today’s urban challenges”. First nine cities involved are Austin, Boulder, Copenhagen, London, Ljubljana, New York City, Peterborough, Phoenix and Rio de Janeiro, with representatives meeting this week to discuss their view on challenges and opportunities in the process of embedding circular economy principles in their planning and operations.
Smartphones keep getting more powerful, with faster processors, better cameras, taking us to other worlds through VR, and speaking to devices around us to organise our life. But don’t we all just want better battery life? Researchers at UC Irvine reckon they’ve cracked it, creating a nanowire-based battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times. UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai ran the prototype through 200,000 cycles over three months without detecting any loss of capacity, whereas previous nanowire batteries have died after around 7,000 cycles. This clever chemistry could have big impacts for battery use in electronics like phones and computers, but also at larger scales in cars and spacecraft.
If you live in the US, UK, Australia, or New Zealand and updated your Facebook app this week, you might have noticed a new icon. The tech giant just rolled out Facebook Marketplace, a formalisation of the thousands of local buying and selling groups that have emerged over the years, as users leverage the social network to trade used and unwanted stuff. The new functionality means that Facebook Marketplace occupies a similar space as eBay, Gumtree or Craigslist, and despite being late to the party, could nudge its 1.7 billion users towards sharing and redistributing their idle assets. In the meantime, early adopters have been using the platform to peddle some more unusual items, such as baby hedgehogs, drugs and “what appeared to be prostitution”, according to the BBC.
BNP Paribas share advice on how financial institutions can take action to support the shift to a circular economy. Whilst the piece downplays the economic opportunities of the new framework, the key points on how banks should help finance initiatives in the circular economy and facilitate innovative business models are a good sign that circular economy activities could receive more backing from the financial sector in the future.
Andy Artz has an excellent long-ish read on Hackernoon about how the hive is the new network. It’s about social networks and software, but the significance goes well beyond, to how we can employ the hivemind to overcome complex challenges facing our economy.
– Andy Artz
While we’re on the subject of complexity, check out this piece from OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría on why we need to stop pretending an economy can be controlled. It signals the launch of an initiative called New Approaches to Economic Challenges, which will be right up your street if you’re a circular economy enthusiast.
The post Circulate on Fridays: Facebook Marketplace, everlasting batteries & circular cities appeared first on Circulate.
Source: Circulate News RSS
Sajid Javid has overturned my county council’s decision to stop drilling. So much for talk of devolution to communities
Last year a committee of county councillors from Lancashire dealt with one of the biggest planning applications ever put before any council, as they considered Cuadrilla’s applications to drill and frack for shale gas in two rural locations between Preston and Blackpool. Anyone in any doubt about the depth of feeling generated by fracking need only have seen and heard the hundreds of protesters who gathered outside county hall in Preston over the four days of that committee meeting, expressing their views as the committee listened to days of evidence from both sides.
Related: Fracking given UK go-ahead as Lancashire council rejection overturned
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Source: Guardian Environment
Unpublished study warns of the global health consequences of delaying by five years a cap on the sulphur content of shipping fuels
A push by the shipping and oil industries for a five-year delay to curbs on toxic sulphur emissions would cause an extra 200,000 premature deaths from lung cancer and heart disease, according to an unpublished International Maritime Organisation (IMO) study.
Fatalities from illnesses such as asthma were not covered by the leaked paper, which was based on shipping satellite data and modelling work.
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Source: Guardian Environment