Over 40 years we have worked with our local Wildlife Trust to plant trees in various areas.
We have also watched the removal of apple orchards and hedgerows in our area.
We had the opportunity 6 years ago to buy a small part of the field next to our property.
We have turned this into an orchard with a wildflower meadow.
Up the road they are building a new estate and the first thing they did was to cut down all the trees and remove the hedges (in case the birds nested in them!).
When developers plant trees they are then forgotten about and never develop as they should.
We do what we can by planting trees in our garden and encouraging others to do what they can....but we do feel as though we do one thing and the government and developers (with Council agreements) do the opposite.
All green plants are vital for life and those that aren't green continue to add to the life cycle.
When we lived in Belgium I'd regularly see signs next to sugar beet fields explaining how much carbon the crop absorbed - as much as trees - but they conveniently didn't mention the environmental costs of planting, harvesting and processing the crop to make refined sugar.
The UK is renowned for having a low forestry acreage - just 13% of the land surface compared with an average of 38% in Europe and 31% worldwide so yes, plant trees where and when you can. It all helps. Shrubs too if you haven't room for trees.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
I'm sorry to disagree, but even the website linked to disagrees with the statement above:
"in the UK, for instance, each individual produces 70 times more carbon dioxide emissions than someone from Niger."
70 times very little isn't a lot though (well it is a lot but bear with me). The average person in the USA 'only' produces 3 times the CO2 of the average UK person but that's significantly more than the difference between Niger and the UK. You can't just pick one of the least developed countries in the world, ignore their foreign aid income and how that money is made, and then compare it to one of the most developed countries with a totally different climate and expect the comparison to stand up. North Africa is rapidly overtaking the UK now and UK emissions are dropping rapidly.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
This isn't aimed at Dove, but I like this quote from Monbiot. In media and social media terms, I think it's very true.
"Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down." George Monbiot
In my book, population discussion is always kicking the problem away. It's always a personal shrug. "Nothing we can do".
This isn't aimed at Dove, but I like this quote from Monbiot. In media and social media terms, I think it's very true.
"Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down." George Monbiot
In my book, population discussion is always kicking the problem away. It's always a personal shrug. "Nothing we can do".
George Monbiot, writer (born 1963)
“(Population is) an important issue…most greens will not discuss. Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both.”
“…if we accept the UN’s projection that global population will grow by roughly 50 per cent and then stop. This means it will become 50 per cent harder to stop runaway climate change, 50 per cent harder to feed the world, 50 per cent harder to prevent the overuse of resources.”
“Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts.”
@Fire , while I agree wholeheartedly with you that it can be all too easy to blame population increase for too many of the world's ills without looking at the distribution of resources within that overall population , in my view it is equally incomplete an analysis to presume that the exponential rate of population growth since the 1800s is not a factor at all regarding climate emissions. No intent to belittle your or anyone else's views, just my own opinion.
Be interesting to see if the likes of HS2 pop up at COP won't it ? Personally, I won't be holding my breath.
How Johnson and this govt would even have the brass neck to show up at a COP, let alone host one, is quite beyond me.
"By their own confession, water companies say they dumped untreated sewage into English water bodies more than 400,000 times last year, for a total of about 3.1m hours." And that's only the tiny fraction of dumping that gets officially report. And the govt officially shrug and say the water companies are not responsible for fixing the problem.
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Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
The UK is renowned for having a low forestry acreage - just 13% of the land surface compared with an average of 38% in Europe and 31% worldwide so yes, plant trees where and when you can. It all helps. Shrubs too if you haven't room for trees.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
70 times very little isn't a lot though (well it is a lot but bear with me). The average person in the USA 'only' produces 3 times the CO2 of the average UK person but that's significantly more than the difference between Niger and the UK. You can't just pick one of the least developed countries in the world, ignore their foreign aid income and how that money is made, and then compare it to one of the most developed countries with a totally different climate and expect the comparison to stand up. North Africa is rapidly overtaking the UK now and UK emissions are dropping rapidly.
George Monbiot, writer (born 1963)
“(Population is) an important issue…most greens will not discuss. Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both.”
“…if we accept the UN’s projection that global population will grow by roughly 50 per cent and then stop. This means it will become 50 per cent harder to stop runaway climate change, 50 per cent harder to feed the world, 50 per cent harder to prevent the overuse of resources.”
“Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts.”
https://populationmatters.org/quotes (You'll have to scroll down a bit for it)
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
2015: “global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation”.