Fantastic article by @guyshrubsole about restoring the UK's most neglected, forgotten and depleted habitat: rainforest.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
When I first started writing about the UK's rainforests, the overwhelming response was disbelief. Because we have lost all but a few tiny fragments, and because of our deeply weird conservation priorities, this rich and wonderful habitat had been almost completely forgotten.
But I've never seen social attitudes change faster than our approach to ecology in the UK. In just a few years, we have started to shed our strange obsession with degraded habitats, to understand ecological history and to embrace #rewilding. It's an astonishing turnaround.
Rainforest would naturally be the dominant ecosystem in the western uplands. Overwhelmingly it's missing due to grazing: tree seedlings are highly nutritious, so sheep selectively browse them out. Old forests die in their boots. New ones can't establish.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
In many places, especially in Wales, where livestock are supposed to be excluded, the woods are swarming with sheep. Commonly, the entire understorey has been eliminated. As the old trees die, there's nothing to replace them.
What makes this infuriating is that farmers receive public money on the grounds that livestock are kept out of the woods. But when they blatantly break the rules - as I see again and again - they still get the money. Monitoring and enforcement are a dead letter.
A friend of mine was a woodlands officer in Wales. He took his job seriously. When he reported breaches, his bosses simply refused to act. He later discovered they were friends with the farmers who were breaking the rules. It was one big cosy club.
(Reminds me of something🤔)

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

28 Apr
This is such a fascinating paper. Since 1868, the population of Ethiopia has risen from 7m to 112m.
An environmental disaster? No.
In the study area, land degradation has DECREASED with population growth. More trees, more vegetation, less erosion. Why? sciencedirect.com/science/articl…🧵
Because the overriding issue, as some of us have been trying to point out for a while, is not population but *policy*.
In 1868, land tenure was feudal, and people and their livestock were driven onto steep slopes and into destructive forms of land use. But …
… since then, there's been land reform, giving people equal shares, followed by policies to exclude livestock from much of the land, replant trees, stop indiscriminate felling and protect soil. The result has been a major improvement in people’s livelihoods AND in land quality.
Read 8 tweets
28 Apr
There's a far bigger cronyism scandal than Cameron's lobbying or Johnson's flat. But the media - in particular the BBC - has disgracefully failed to hold the government to account for it.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
What is so frustrating about this is that the @GoodLawProject, which arguably now does the best investigative journalism of any organisation in the UK, handed these massive stories on a plate to the media. But most of the media, most of the time, turned up their noses.
The work had already been done, so the old excuse - "it's too complicated, too expensive, too risky" - simply didn't wash. The GLP had the government bang to rights. But it got away with gross corruption, because the media, as a whole, wasn't interested.
Read 8 tweets
26 Apr
This is not to downplay the horror of the Chernobyl disaster, but we now have powerful evidence that it didn't cause germline mutations in survivors' children. The rate was no higher than average even among the children of the heroic liquidators.
Thread/
science.sciencemag.org/content/early/…
This is not surprising – it was the same for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: horrendous as the immediate and ongoing harms to survivors were, there were no detectable transgenerational effects.
nap.edu/catalog/11340/…
Children are born with disabilities all over the world. But in the regions close to Chernobyl, children with visible disabilities were sought out by journalists as if at a mediaevel circus. It was grossly unethical and unscientific.
Read 10 tweets
23 Apr
I've just spent a couple of hours at the local foodbank, meeting people who, in some cases, would literally starve without it. On the other side of the recreation ground, 200 metres and an entire world away, is a row of £3m homes.
England in microcosm.
Once again I'm reminded of who holds society together. It's the workers putting in unpaid overtime every week, and the team of volunteers, working their arses off to meet people's desperate needs, while the government rips up public services and hands our money to its chums.
For Johnson and his cabinet, government is just a big game. They can play King of the World for a while, dispense public largesse to their mates and make grand generalisations about the poor. But for the people at the bottom, and those working with them, it's deadly serious.
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
Here's a small, cheap and simple #EarthDay proposal:
Beside every urban roadworks causing traffic delays, councils should erect signs saying "You'd get there quicker on a bicycle".
Every roadworks is an opportunity for change.
People should be constantly challenged to wonder why they're travelling through a city in a tonne of metal, when a vehicle you can lift with one hand is faster.
Or 2 tonnes in some cases. I would like to see every last one of these sent to be crushed. Image
Read 4 tweets
19 Apr
Mother of God. Starmer celebrates flying, then uses air travel as an example of how he wants to put recovery "above all else", presumably including the survival of life on Earth.
Where has he been these past few years?
He might as well just tell young voters to eff off.
In combination with Labour's rejection of proportional representation again today, it seems as if it's trying to burrow back into the 20th Century. Perhaps it feels safer there.
Then there are the optics. Starmer steps down from the plane like some visiting dignitary with a remind-me-which-country-this-is-again expression, meets some people in the airport then presumably flies out.
It might as well be an ad for Scottish independence.
Read 7 tweets

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