Info, news & debate
Nature
How to fit a new axe handle
This blog post shows how to fit a new axe handle, it could be a new store bought handle or one you made yourself – more on this soon.
Do you know which of these wild berries you can eat?
At Our Edible Landscape, the most recent School of the Wild event, facilitator Milly set us the Wild Berry Challenge, so we’re putting the challenge to you. Identify the berries below, and decide if you’d eat them.
What are we supposed to teach children about nature nowadays, without frightening them?
My little boy Alfred, just turned 6, pays close attention to what he hears. Sometimes this means that we need to be very careful in case he remembers something and then blurts it out in front of just the wrong person. It’s already clear that he’d make an awful spy.
Why does our list of topics include vegetarianism, veganism AND keeping animals?
Isn’t that a bit inconsistent? If we think that vegetarianism or veganism is a good idea, how can we also think that keeping animals – most of which are kept for meat – is a good idea too?
Autumn foraging season soon – here’s some inspiration
Arriving at the beautiful setting of WOWO, I immediately knew I’d done the right thing ignoring cold-weather challenges to get myself to this workshop. Given the warmest of welcomes, we were invited to form a circle and take a moment to think about what plant we felt like in that moment. We were to bear …
What were your ‘light bulb moments’ in understanding the way the world works? Here are mine
Here’s a rash statement, but I believe it to be true. Most people these days know, either rationally or intuitively, that humanity is heading in the wrong direction. If you ask people whether we’ve seen the back of ecological calamaties, financial collapses, corruption, poverty or war
10 reasons we need a non-corporate system as well as a sustainable one (and there are many more)
Like all environmental / social change organisations, we’d like humans to live in a sustainable system. But unlike many other organisations, we clearly state that we’d like that system to be non-corporate. What do we mean?
Low-impact & the city 1: introduction – how possible is it to live in a sustainable, non-corporate way in a city?
I lived at Redfield Community for 13 years – it’s where Lowimpact.org was born – but now I live in London, and so I’m assessing my options for living as low-impact a life as I can.
Fermi’s paradox: does the lack of contact from extraterrestrials have implications for human survival?
“Where is everybody?” Enrico Fermi is supposed to have asked in 1950 of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Working from first principles, Fermi calculated that extraterrestrials should have visited the Earth long ago, and many times over
Will nature deal with our crop and garden pests if we don’t intervene or use poisons?
It’s been cold, really cold. For a while I thought it was just that my new garden is on a very exposed site, and until the windbreaks really get going I’m going to have to put up with a late start to the season.
3 million front gardens have been completely paved since 2005. Let’s try to reverse this trend.
The RHS 2015 Greening Grey Britain Report reveals that three times as many front gardens are paved over compared to ten years ago, a total increase of 15 square miles of ‘grey’, and that plant cover in front gardens has decreased by as much as 15%.
Do you understand the term ‘exponential function’ and how dangerous it is? We think everyone should
The exponential function is a very surprising (and potentially dangerous) thing. An exponential growth curve looks like this:
Invitation to join us at Breaking the Frame gathering in Derbyshire in July
NB: Dave from Lowimpact.org will be giving a talk about the Ujamaa2 idea on the Saturday afternoon, and the whole event will bring together people from various parts of the ‘alternative technology’ field
Is there a correlation between opinions on ecology and opinions on ethnicity?
The reason you’re on this website, I guess, is that you believe that there’s something wrong in terms of ecology, or nature. You may not know the details, but you have a strong feeling (or even quite a precise understanding) that we’re not living in harmony with nature, and that’s going to cause us more …
Should we be planning to ‘drought-proof’ our food production for a warmer climate?
The weather is not the climate. Nonetheless, over the last few years I have noticed that I have developed a slightly panicky fear of the weather; I can’t notice the weather I suppose, without it triggering all sorts of associations in my mind to the myriad articles I’ve read, and conversations I’ve had, about Anthropogenic Climate …
Is hanging out in nature therapeutic?
As the founder of Nature Therapy CIC I am often asked ‘exactly what is nature therapy?’ Having studied the subject for a Doctorate and travelled extensively across the UK, Europe and the USA to research how nature is used to improve human wellbeing, I am sometimes at a loss to give a short answer.
Art and the apocalypse: do artists and writers have a duty to raise the alarm?
Sometime last year I took my youngest son for a walk along the beach. I’d been reading an article about climate change and the acidification of the oceans. Bad timing you might call it.
Can degrowth help stop the slide towards ecological collapse?
Climate justice. A global basic income. Equitable distribution of wealth. Do these seem like wild utopian ideas? A growing body of research suggests that not only are such ideas possible, they may actually be necessary to prevent us falling off any environmental, social or economic cliffs.
Health warning about breathing on Friday
It’s becoming quite a regular thing, this health warning on breathing. Friday this week, in large parts of the east and south-east of England, air pollution is forecast to rise to dangerous levels. You can check these air quality forecasts out here.
Are we forgetting what pristine nature looks like?
Singing about the environment, Joni Mitchell reminded us “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”; maybe the truth is that very quickly after things are gone they are forgotten, not only lost, but unmissed