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A TALE OF TWO WORLD ORDERS- One where members of the Ruling Order preserved Nature and the Current Situation where the Ruling Order is Killing all Life) Rude magnificence’ restored: following in the footsteps of pioneering naturalist Gilbert White. More than 230 years ago the country parson celebrated the small but vital elements that gave the English landscape its ‘wild majesty’. Today, Hampshire’s farmers and volunteers are honouring his legacy by Phoebe Weston Photographs by Jill Meadt It was more than 230 years ago that the Rev Gilbert White became the first person to identify the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler as three distinct species. The Hampshire county parson was also the first to describe the harvest mouse and the noctule bat, and to tell of swifts mating in flight, something not recorded again until the 1930s. He was fascinated by his pet tortoise, Timothy, and why he needed so much sleep. White’s careful, vivid and seemingly trivial descriptions of the wildlife he encountered around the village of Selborne as he walked between parishes made him a pioneering naturalist. His Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in 1789, has never been out of print. Many generations later, a group of farmers and volunteers has spent five years walking the same land and discovered 88 of the 120 bird species spotted by White as well as a number of new species, taking the total to 114. This has resulted in Farming in Partnership With Nature – a New Natural History of Selborne, the most comprehensive survey of the landscape since White carried out his own work. Its authors say it shows the value of wildlife-friendly farming and White’s approach to “watching narrowly”, by observing local wildlife in detail – however trivial it might seem. Fifteen years ago, Blackmoor estate, a few miles from Gilbert White’s house, was arable land, but the estate’s managing director, William Selborne (whose great-great-great-grandfather took the name Selborne in the 19th century) decided he wanted to return it to chalk grassland and link up two nature reserves – Noar Hill and Selborne Common. In the years that followed, and with the help of a government grant, wildlife poured out of the reserves and into the farmland. Today, the fields are alive with movement and sound – skylarks trill, quaking-grass shakes in the breeze, oxeye daisies and patches of pyramidal and spotted orchid flourish. There are so many wildflowers that a pastel-pink hue hangs above the field. Beyond are scruffy field margins made for hunting barn owls. There are four owlets being raised in the oak tree in the valley. But from the beginning, Selborne realised that “however good your farm is, you’re only as good as your neighbours. The experience made me realise that the whole could be more than the sum of its parts.”
He got in touch with one of his neighbours, Kate Faulkner, a partner in her family’s business at Norton farm, where her father-in-law, Derick Faulkner, had been an early adopter of this way of farming. Kate and Selborne started thinking about how other farmers could give over patches of land for wildlife and set about forming a “farming cluster” – one of more than 100 across England – according to the survey. Since then, they have been leading a farming network called the Selborne Landscape Partnership (SLP), which covers 5,600 hectares (14,000 acres), much of which is within the South Downs national park. It is a well-watered landscape, looking green and youthful as summer starts.LP started nearly 10 years ago and includes 30 farmers and land managers and a band of volunteers. They meet regularly to share information and ideas on a range of subjects from grassland and woodland management to articles for the parish magazine. They have been looking at old maps, finding ghost hedges and ghost ponds and putting them back in the landscape. Selborne says: “We don’t want to have a narrative of loss. You can look down the telescope a different way. You can have positive change in a landscape.” They have also been working on restoring some of the 100 ponds in the area, as well as 15 miles of hedgerows and 74 hectares (180 acr Ies) of flower-rich habitats. Some of this has been funded by government grants, including theFarming in Protected Landscapes program....
George MonbiotCan you see it yet? The Earth systems horizon – the point at which our planetary systems tip into a new equilibrium, hostile to most life forms? I think we can. The sudden acceleration of environmental crises we have seen this year, coupled with the strategic uselessness of powerful governments, rushes us towards the point of no return. We’re told we are living through the sixth mass extinction. But even this is a euphemism. We call such events mass extinctions because the most visible sign of the five previous catastrophes of the Phanerozoic era (since animals with hard body parts evolved) is the disappearance of fossils from the rocks. But their vanishing was a result of something even bigger. Mass extinction is a symptom of Earth systems collapse. In the most extreme case, the Permo-Triassic event, 252m years ago – when 90% of species were snuffed out – planetary temperatures spiked, the circulation of water around the globe more or less stopped, the soil was stripped from the land, deserts spread across much of the planet’s surface and the oceans drastically deoxygenated and acidified. In other words, Earth systems tipped into a new state that was uninhabitable for most of the species they had sustained. What we are living through today, unless sudden and drastic action is taken by us and our governments, is the sixth great Earth systems collapse. One possible outcome of the rising carbon dioxide concentrations this century is the sudden loss of stratocumulus cloud decks, causing about 8°C of extra surface heating. As in previous great Earth systems collapses, we see these impacts reflected in the loss of species. A recent paper reveals that 48% of the world’s species are declining in population size, while only 3% are rising. Far more wildlife could be heading towards extinction than previously estimated. If species loss is a symptom of systemic collapse, we might already be living on borrowed time. None of this is certain, unless we make it so. But far from stepping up to confront the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced, our governments accelerate towards the horizon. https://www.theguardian.com/
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A Wildlife Sanctuary holds up a Mirror to the Climate Crisis, War and Dispossession.BY DAVID SASSOON
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A Walk in the Woods with My Brain on Fire: Autumn. A wildlife sanctuary holds up a mirror to the climate crisis, war and dispossession.BY DAVID SASSOON One of our readers recently asked us if we might write something about war and climate. Many thoughts came to mind. The first: that the biggest wars are fought over the geopolitics of fossil energy, often in disguise. There’s also the Paris climate accord, whichfails to require the reporting of military emissions in national greenhouse gas inventories: The rain of exploding bombs and missiles, the tanks and trucks that guzzle diesel, the fighter planes that burn jet fuel, the forward bases and supply lines that swallow gasoline by the tanker. As if they don’t count. It’s permission to continue waging war on the natural world, turning a blind eye to all the casualties of the future. My mind was filled with these thoughts—and the constant news of unspeakable violence and human loss—when taking a day of rest, I had the privilege of going for a peaceful walk on the flank of Lenox Mountain in western Massachusetts. I went to a wildlife sanctuary, a place reserved for animals to be safe from humans. It was named Pleasant Valley of all things, and was tucked inside a wormhole, out of Internet range and all its amplified hatreds. The dull roar of distant roads, the numbing hum of human proximity—they do not invade the ether here either. With ears wide open, I could suddenly see the place alive, its architecture of growth and decay constantly at play. Life emphatically itself, its many fallen trees the fertile ground of new beginnings.Homer tells us that peace comes after a decade of war, when everyone we care about is dead and Troy has been destroyed. The Norse myths, India’s Panchatantra, even the film Oppenheimer carry the same lesson. War is an uncontrolled wildfire that stops when it burns out. Peace is a hard thing to make, he said. And yet we yearn for it, not only the great peace that comes at the end of war but also the little peace of our private lives. This day of sensory awakening in a quiet refuge, a little peace. It gave me to consider the Indigenous people who lived here for 10,000 years without waging war on the natural world. William Cronon, whose seminal scholarship helped to launch the field of environmental history, explains that the Indians of New England, as he called them, did not stay put: When fish were spawning many Indian families might gather at a single waterfall to create a dense temporary settlement in which feasting and celebration were the order of the day; when it was time to hunt in the fall, the same families might be found scattered over many square miles of land. All aspects of Indian life hinged on this mobility.
Once or twice a year they would burn the understory of their forests to keep them open and park-like, facilitating hunting and travel, speeding nutrient uptake of the soil, encouraging berries to proliferate. They created a patchwork of woodlands in different phases of succession, increasing the supply of herbivorous food which supported an even larger number of animals.When the colonists arrived to find the forests teeming with game, the waters thick with fish, the sky dark with flocks of birds, they believed they had discovered a virgin land of plenty. They did not understand that for thousands of years Indigenous peoples had been carefully tending to the land and its trees, on close terms with the elk and the deer, the beaver, the hare and the porcupine, the turkey, the quail and the grouse, the bear and the moose, the eagle and the hawk, the lynx, the fox and the wolf. Though their tenure on this land was long, Indigenous people kept their own populations in balance—at most 100,000 men, women and children lived across all of New England at any one time......read on https://insideclimatenews.
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How Climate Change Drives Conflict and War Crimes Around the Globe. Human rights advocates want the International Criminal Court to begin gathering evidence on the way climate-amplified extreme weather, heat, drought and flooding are driving armed conflict, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Katie Surma October 26, 2023 This story has been updated.
Drought, flooding and extreme weather are driving and amplifying violent conflict around the world. At the same time, warfare has devastated ecosystems, imperiled access to vital resources and left behind toxic legacies that sicken civilian populations. On Thursday, a coalition of human rights organizations and lawyers published an open letter urging the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan, to begin assessing the links between climate change and crimes in the court’s remit. The letter also calls on Khan to prioritize the prosecution of crimes that cause environmental destruction, citing a host of examples: In the Lake Chad basin, drought and extreme weather have put agriculture-dependent communities in precarious economic situations, increasing the likelihood that young men will be recruited into militant groups like Boko Haram. In Ukraine, Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded and forced downstream communities from their homes, caused mass fish die-offs and affected communities’ access to fresh water. And in Afghanistan, four decades of near constant war have decimated the country’s landscape and sparked conflict over land rights, water and other natural resources while pollution caused by military operations has sickened war-torn civilian populations. “Climate change and ecological degradation must be given due legal consideration as the threat multipliers to international peace and security that they are,” said Richard J. Rogers, the executive director of the Netherlands-based Climate Counsel and a signatory of the open letter. Kahn’s office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Kahn’s office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague declined to directly respond to the open letter, but in a written statement said the office was preparing a new policy on environmental crimes. “This policy will elaborate on how the Office will use its jurisdiction to address environmental damage that occurs in the context of Rome Statute crimes,” the statement said, referring to the treaty that enumerates the crimes the court has jurisdiction over. The statement also said the new policy will not be limited to environmental damage committed as a war crime, which is already itemized in the Rome Statute, but will also “explore how other Rome Statute crimes may be committed by means of or resulting in environmental damage.” In recent years, the Office of the Prosecutor has received at least five requests urging the prosecutor to investigate alleged crimes against humanity involving environmental damage.....read on https://insideclimatenews.
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On Thursday, a coalition of human rights organizations and lawyers published an open letter urging the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim A. A. Khan, to begin assessing the links between climate change and crimes in the court’s remit. The letter also calls on Khan to prioritize the prosecution of crimes that cause environmental destruction, citing a host of examples: In the Lake Chad basin, drought and extreme weather have put agriculture-dependent communities in precarious economic situations, increasing the likelihood that young men will be recruited into militant groups like Boko Haram. In Ukraine, Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded and forced downstream communities from their homes, caused mass fish die-offs and affected communities’ access to fresh water. And in Afghanistan, four decades of near constant war have decimated the country’s landscape and sparked conflict over land rights, water and other natural resources while zsaid Richard J. Rogers, the executive director of the Netherlands-based Climate Counsel and a signatory of the open letter. Kahn’s office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague declined to directly respond to the open letter, but in a written statement said the office was preparing a new policy on environmental crimes.The statement also said the new policy will not be limited to environmental damage committed as a war crime, which is already itemized in the Rome Statute, but will also “explore how other Rome Statute crimes may be committed by means of or resulting in environmental damage.” https://insideclimatenews.
More Articles …
- Poor Countries- Severe Debt Burdens Thwarting Progress on Climate and Poverty
- The Biggest Predator of All Time: Us- Humans Push Many Species to Extinction.
- The US is a Rogue State Leading the World towards Ecological Collapse.
- A Meeting of Minds of the Clan- Climate Deniers and Far Right Politicians
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