Green Options

Condors are native to California, and their numbers there are dropping, but San Diego Zoo is sponsoring a condor reintroduction programme based in Colombia.

Many thousands of Kenyans are enduring a severe drought, caused in part, it is believed, by cutting down ancient forests.

This week’s London Camp for Climate Action is actually a training event, taking place within sight of the City of London and preparing activists for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. It aims to provide volunteers with information on four aspects of Climate Change: education, direct action, sustainable living and building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.

Little thought is generally given to the origin of animal research subjects, whether we accept or abhor their existence. The Mauritian case seems like a solution: find a place where an introduced species causes environmental harm and reduce the effect of the species both by reducing numbers and by using the profit made to repair environmental harm.

Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

Pirates may be figures of romance, like Captain Jack Sparrow, or historical fact, like the Viking raiders, but what they haven’t been, until the last few years, is a statistical risk. And that’s surprising, because piracy has always been with us. However, in the past five years, the ‘menace’ of piracy has begun to have serious impacts on international waters, and the worst peril is the inadvertent one.

‘No single project or human activity has caused depletion of the salmon runs or the near-extinction of the … orca, or the general degradation of the marine environment of Puget Sound. Yet every project has the potential to incrementally increase the burden upon the species and the Sound.’

Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.

The first food security assessment ever carried out by a UK government has been published, and it says that the country needs to change the way food is produced and the way it is processed, to maintain a healthy and affordable food ‘base’ in the future.

Australian protestors are complaining about the failure of the Australian government to take tough enough action on climate change, and in support of Pacific Island groups who have asked for substantial emission cuts from Australia and New Zealand to help protect their land from rising sea levels.