The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), which allowed UK fruit and vegetable growers to employ migrant workers from Bulgaria and Romania as seasonal workers for up to six months at a time, was closed under the last government – a knee-jerk response to British media hype about immigration levels. Ironically, SAWS had a 98.4 per cent returnee rate, so was never actually an immigration issue despite being presented as one. […]
Regular readers of this blog will have come to realise by now that I regard the UK’s Brexit vote as an act of national self-harm. That is also pretty much how I view the election of Donald Trump to the office of president by the voters in the United States of America. Since his inauguration, climate change denier Trump has set about undoing much of the environmental protection that had […]
Today marks Earth Overshoot Day, the day in the calendar when humankind has used up the equivalent of a whole year’s worth of the Earth’s natural resources. When I began writing this blog five years ago, Earth Overshoot day fell on 20 August. Each year since then it has moved to an earlier date in the calendar, marking our continued failure to live a sustainable existence on this planet. The […]
Fewer and fewer of us are cooking our food from scratch. In some cases this may be due to a lack of skills or confidence. In many cases, however, it is down to a distorted attitude to time. We are in the grip of the “convenience” food industry, which encourages us to regard any time we spend preparing and cooking food as time wasted. Anything, it seems, which short-circuits time […]
The late American cosmologist Carl Sagan once observed that “national boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.” How wise a race we might be if we all […]
Humankind’s relatively recent obsession with the beef burger and with fried chicken has had a huge impact on the world around us. This extent of that impact has been laid bare by a recently published study by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. The study, uniquely, set out to look at the distribution of all living things on Earth – plants and animals – by mass rather than population. Using this […]
This recipe has been published to mark the start of national vegetarian week. If you’re not already vegetarian, why not give it a try by going meat-free for the next seven days and see how you get along? For those who follow this blog on Facebook or Instagram I will be posting a vegetarian recipe suggestion each day during this week to give you some inspiration. There is a lot […]
I recently read an article about a small group of Canadian beekeepers who were refusing to loan out their bee colonies to blueberry farmers in British Columbia. The reason, they explained, was that they were concerned about the impact on the health of their bees of pollinating only one single crop. This news article struck me on two fronts. Firstly, the very fact that bees need to be transported to […]
Following on from the shocking study into insect population decline published by German scientists earlier this year, a newly published study from France has shown a similarly massive fall in bird numbers. The French survey, which looked at data spanning 15 years, found that bird numbers had fallen by a third in that time. Some species, such as the once-common meadow pipit have seen their numbers decline by up to […]
The proposed merger between US chemical giant and its German counterpart Bayer, otherwise known as the “marriage made in hell”, is slowly but inexorably heading towards completion. It has not, however, been without its problems. The proposed merger has had to negotiate several anti-trust and anti-monopoly regulations in various global markets before it can proceed. Last month, for example, the European Union only gave the $62.5 billion deal its final […]