Category Archives: environment

Monthly Links

And for the last time in 2019, here’s our monthly round-up of links to items you may have missed.


Science, Technology, Natural World

There are lots of Rose-Ringed Parakeets in London (far from their native home in Northern India). How did they get here? The legend is that they were released by Jimi Hendrix, but they’ve been around a lot longer than that. Two reports on the latest investigation from the BBC and The Oldie.

A fossil forest has been found in New York State, and it is the oldest one known.

Now to one of my favourite subjects: wasps. Just what is the point of wasps?

There’s a new formula for converting your dog’s age into human years. [£££]
But note: it is different for cats.


Health, Medicine

There is a significant resurgence of measles with a number of countries, including the UK, losing their measles-free status.

A very small number of people have a mystery illness which causes a fever every few weeks, but finally the cause has been identified. [£££]

In the stomach, the mind, or the brain? Migraine’s causes and remedies have been debated for 2,000 years. [LONG READ]

Medical science has traditionally neglected women’s health, and still does. Why does medicine have a gender problem?


Environment

Now here’s an idea: reintroduce national service and use the victims to do environmental and conservation work.

How often do you mow your lawn? There’s a good chance the answer is “too often”, because less frequent mowing can help wildlife.


Social Sciences, Business, Law

We’ve heard of environmental rewilding, well now here’s political rewilding: the antidote to our current malaise of the demagogues.


Art, Literature, Language

Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda hand-cuts intricate images from a single sheet of paper.


History, Archaeology, Anthropology

Here are ten English archaeological finds of the last decade.

Archaeologists do keep pushing the boundaries. In Indonesia they’ve now found the earliest known cave art by modern humans.

And in Greece archaeologists have unearthed gold-lined Mycenaean royal tombs.

2020 is the 850th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Becket, and it will be a year of commemorative events, culminating in a major exhibition at the British Museum.

Prince Albert is usually blamed for introducing the Christmas tree, but it is likely to be much older than that. One early instance dates from 1419 in Freiburg.

So, apart from the obvious, what went on in a medieval brothel? Well, it often wasn’t pleasant. [LONG READ]

An academic has discovered annotations by Elizabeth I on a document in Lambeth Palace Library.

Religious and secular celebration of Christmas was forbidden by the English Puritan republic, but not entirely successfully. [LONG READ]


London

There’s a very elderly eagle in Croydon.

The Greek god Priapus, protector of gardens, fruit plants, livestock … and male genitals, is an unlikely subject for a statue in the discrete streets of Pimlico.


Food, Drink

Peru, as we all know, is the home of the potato, and they have a potato museum which conserves well over a thousand varieties and could be important in breeding the plants to handle climate change.

Haggis is a traditional Scots food. Or is it? [LONG READ]


Lifestyle, Personal Development

So how do couples stay together long-term? Understanding the other person is trying to do their best is important.

John Horgan in Scientific American investigates whether mysticism can help us solve the mind-body problem.

Naked therapy is a (non-sexual) treatment to help people become more comfortable with their bodies.

How the tattoo became fashionable in Victorian England. [LONG READ]

And, oh dear, it seems the codpiece is back in fashion.


Shock, Horror, Humour, Wow!

And finally … In Turkey there’s a bee which builds its nests out of flower petals. and they’re stunningly beautiful.


That’s all for now, folks. The Fates permitting, we’ll be back in January. Meanwhile a happy New Year to everyone!

Buggered Britain #26

It’s a long time (like 4 years!!!) since we had an entry in Buggered Britain – my occasional series documenting some of the underbelly of Britain. Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient; but which seem to have got steadily worse over the last few years.

So here are three offerings, all taken in west London on the same day a couple of months ago.

Click the images for larger views

Monthly Links

Here goes then with this month’s selection of links to items you may have missed the first time round, and probably shouldn’t have done!

Science, Technology & Natural World

Cheeky monkeys! Apparently squirrels eavesdrop on birds’ chatter to find out if there’s a security alert.

After which it isn’t surprising that squirrels’ cousins, the rats, love games, giggle and jump for joy.

Insects deserve much more respect than they get; without them we’d not be here! [LONG READ]

One insect group deserving of greater respect, and admiration, are the wasps. Not just the annoying “yellow jackets”, there’s a whole diversity of species and they’re brilliant predators.

On the other hand we all like butterflies, and this has been an especially good year, especially for Painted Ladies.

Health & Medicine

Research has shown definitively that babies born by Caesarean have different gut bacteria compared with vaginal births. Why does this surprise anyone?

Statistical analysis shows that 26 September is the busiest day for births (at least in the UK) at about 10% above the average. Yes, you guessed it: it’s all down to Christmas and New Year shagging.

Sexuality

The world’s first Vagina Museum opens in November at London’s Camden Lock. Aim: to educate and raise awareness of vaginal and vulval health and fight stigmas.

Environment

Apparently the fish stock calculations were way off and North Sea cod should not have been labelled as sustainable.

What practical things can you do to combat climate change? One thing we seldom consider is to plant your own trees.

Art & Literature

After 119 years the Wallace Collection in London is to start lending out its artworks. Under the terms by which they were established they thought they couldn’t do this, but now they think they can.

History, Archaeology & Anthropology

Archaeologists have uncovered over 250 Neanderthal footprints, many of children, in northern France. They promise to throw some light on Neanderthal lifestyle.

Again, I’m not sure why this is surprising, but there is now evidence to suggest that the first people in the Americas came by sea.

Archaeologists are also now suggesting that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk from pottery bottles.

Coming more up to date, English Heritage are concerned that damp is putting many ancient murals, especially church wall paintings, at risk.

A piece of what is thought to be Elizabeth I’s lost dress is to go on display at Hampton Court.

In Scotland there is a plan to establish a national witches’ memorial.

London

While Britain’s parliamentarians are letting off quantities of hot air, the Houses of Parliament are threatening to collapse on their heads. [LONG READ]

One of our favourite London bloggers, Diamond Geezer, takes a random walk from Oxford Circus.

Food & Drink

No part of the pig is ever wasted. Now chefs are beginning to sign up to fin-to-gill eating – cooking fish without discarding anything.

Lifestyle & Personal Development

A pair of (American) researchers are suggesting every couple should have eight intense discussions to cement and develop their relationship. When you read their book, although they are deep discussions, it is the usual structured common sense – but something many will not easily do without a prompt.

It has apparently now been confirmed that there are benefits to being left-handed.

Shock, Horror, Humour

And finally, it’s time for this year’s Ig Nobel prizes. Amongst this year’s winners is a study of French postmen’s testicles.

More next month.

Fukushima Redux

The mess following the meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011 continues – and will do for decades!

The latest concern, see for example the Guardian of 16 September, is that the power company Tepco wants to discharge a million or more tons of contaminated water into the sea.

Currently, just over one million tonnes of contaminated water is held in almost 1,000 tanks at Fukushima Daiichi, but [Tepco] will run out of space by the summer of 2022.
… … …
Tepco … removes highly radioactive substances, such as strontium and caesium, from the water but the system is unable to filter out tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that coastal nuclear plants commonly dump along with water into the ocean … water in [the] tanks still contain[s] contaminants beside tritium.

What the other contaminants are we are not told.

Contaminated water tanks at Fukushima

Having spent the last eight years trying to rebuild their almost destroyed industry, needless to say the Fukushima fishermen are opposed to the idea.

Understandably this is a problem. Tritium does occur naturally, although at incredibly low levels. So given that its half-life is a little over 12 years, depending on the initial concentration of tritium the water will reduce in radioactivity and toxicity relatively quickly (a few decades) and could eventually be discharged safely.

On the other hand contaminated groundwater is still being recovered and stored at the rate of around 100 tonnes a day. And that’s likely faster than water can be released following the tritium decay.

While the decay products of tritium cannot penetrate skin it can be a concern if ingested in the form of tritiated water (water molecules containing a tritium in place of one of the hydrogens). And of course marine life swims in the would be contaminated water.

So no wonder the Fukushima fishing industry is concerned. It’s a circle that is going to be very hard to square.

Can You Grow Your Own Forest?

Earlier this week there was an article in the Guardian Grow your own forest: how to plant trees to help save the planet.

According to some scientists, forest restoration is the number one strategy for stopping global warming. So what should we be doing? Here’s the TL;DR précis:

Tree planting has mind-blowing potential to tackle climate crisis … Billions more trees … could remove two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide created by human activity. Forest restoration is a top climate change solution.

While a global programme might take 100 years to be fully effective, along the way it would reduce the consequences of the climate crisis – protecting soil from erosion, reducing risk of flooding and providing habitat for a vast range of other plants and animals.

UK tree-planting initiatives include the Northern Forest, which will be made up of 25m trees, spanning the north of England from Liverpool to Hull … But we need to do much, much more … While there are more than 3 trillion trees in the world, that number is estimated to have fallen by 46% since the dawn of human civilisation … Amazon rainforest continues to be lost by the equivalent of three football fields every minute.

How many trees should we be planting? UK needs to increase its woodland from 13% of land area to 17% (the European average is around 35%) … planting 30,000 hectares annually … Tree planting rates in the UK in the past decade or so have been the lowest for a generation; we are miles off where we should be.

Can people planting trees in their garden make much of a dent? One individual tree might not make a difference [to climate, though it will to the local wildlife] but if 10m people put one tree in, that would … planting a tree in the right place is a good thing to do.

What should we be planting and where? Species need to be chosen carefully to ensure they grow well … and fit into the existing ecosystem … other landscapes – such as grasslands and peatlands … must be protected and here it might not be appropriate to plant trees.

Can we just plant trees in our gardens? You don’t need permission, but you do need to think about what species will grow where you live, and also how big it could get. It’s no use planting an oak tree two feet outside your back door … Smaller species include apple trees or rowan … and aftercare is absolutely vital for young and newly planted trees.

What if we don’t have gardens? Can we plant trees anywhere? You can’t plant on waste ground or in your local park without permission from the landowner – that could well be the local council … but maybe approach places like school or hospital grounds.

How else can we help? Support international organisations that promote the rights of indigenous people, whose land stores nearly a quarter of the carbon stored in tropical forests, and who are best placed to protect forested areas by monitoring illegal logging.

Many products we wouldn’t even think of contribute to the problem. Ask questions … Ask the supermarkets where the palm oil in their products comes from, or the soya feed used to farm their meat … Ask the person responsible for your pension fund how much deforestation its investments are causing. Even if they don’t know the answer, you’ve put it on their radar.

Support the rewilding forest restoration schemes.

And don’t get complacent. Keep going. One tree at a time if need be.

If you cannot do anything else consider supporting the Woodland Trust (in the UK; I’m sure there’ll be an equivalent organisation in your country); they offer a range of tree donation and sponsorship initiatives as well as tree packs for schools and other organisations.

Oh and there’s a bonus, as I know from experience: planting trees in your garden is a good way to piss off your neighbours, especially if (like mine) they think their garden should be nothing but a barren putting green. When we moved into the house 35+ years ago, there were two trees: a pear and an apple. Since then we have crammed almost 20 trees (plus lots of shrubs) into our suburban garden, and removed only two (the pear which died, and one which was really in a very wrong place). And we keep looking to see how to get more in!

Monthly Links

Time flies, probably like a banana, when you’re too busy to notice. So we’ve suddenly arrived at this month’s collection of links to items you missed the first time round – and considering it’s the “silly season” (aren’t they all nowadays?) we’ve got a well packed, and very varied, bag this month.

Science, Technology & Natural World

A lot of what we now consider normal technology has its origins in the Cold War.

We often forget that there are volcanoes under the sea as well as on land, and they can produce huge rafts of pumice.

The universe is weird, and weirder than we can imagine. Look at the night sky and you’re being blasted by all manner of high energy radiation. Now astronomers have found the Crab Nebula emits incredibly high energy gamma rays.

An infographic about the majesty of trees.

For a long, long time the Japanese have looked upon sightings of rare fish as an omen of earthquakes. Now they are being urged not to as there is no evidence to support the belief.

Well who knew? Apparently black squirrels (yes, they are a thing; they’re in the UK and I’ve seen them in Washington DC; they’re rather handsome!) are the result of an interbreeding between grey squirrels and close relatives fox squirrels which produced a faulty gene now being passed down through grey squirrels.

At least one species of ant keeps its nurseries cleaner than we humans keep ours.

Every ten years Painted Lady butterflies undergo a massive population explosion and there are millions of migrants to the UK.

Health & Medicine

A top epidemiologist takes a look at the nightmare which is infectious disease aboard cruise ships.

Anyone, especially older people, on a medley of medication has an increased risk of unintended harm.

How about instead of women suffering through the menopause because they can’t be open about it, we actually fix society’s attitude so there can be open discussion and greater understanding from employers?

A significant minority of women suffer painful sex due to vulvodynia, and all too often it is not taken seriously.

And why we’re on lady bits, here’s an article explaining why the vagina doesn’t need to smell like a bouquet of flowers. And anyone who says otherwise is either indulging in patriarchy or marketing bollocks.

Oh no! We’re still on the same topic! One young lady, a sexual abuse survivor, was scared of having a smear test, but was helped through it by Twitter.

And still more … An interview with Canadian OB/GYN, Dr Jen Gunter, who is on a crusade to tell the truth about women’s health and expose the purveyors of snake oil. And here’s another interview.

And still with Dr Gunter, here’s a long essay adapted from her new book The Vagina Bible: The vulva and the vagina – separating the myth from the medicine. Buy the book; I’m reading it and it is excellent. [LONG READ]

Sexuality

One lady appreciates her pubic hair.

Well from there the only way is up …

Environment

A report in the RSA Journal argues that we need to be building homes not housing and that property should be on a human scale.

On continental Europe, apparently wild boar are being a problem in cities. This article looks at how Barcelona is fighting back. [LONG READ]

Ungardening … how to make your garden a wildlife haven.

Social Sciences, Business, Law

Ten reasons why you should be worried about facial recognition technology.

So how will the world’s major religions cope with the discovery of alien life?

Do you need to be able to address anywhere on Earth? Even the middle of the ocean? You need What3Words, a brilliantly simple idea with an app that has saved lives.

Language

We keep hearing that the English language is going to the dogs. But language always has changed, and always supposedly for the worse. Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about the English language. [LONG READ]

Wherever there is language, people swear, so trying to ban swearing is pointless. Besides there is some evidence that people who swear are more honest.

Art & Literature

How can medievalists get excited about a scrap of parchment? When it contains a fragment of a “vagina monologue”.

Following on from which there is a new translation of the gleefully indecent poems of medieval welsh feminist poet Gwerful Mechain.

We all know about haiku, but there was a ruder equivalent called Senryu. [LONG READ]

You’ve almost certainly heard of Eric Gill, but did you know he had an equally talented younger brother MacDonald “Max” Gill? This is an old review of a long gone exhibition, but serves as an introduction to his work.

History, Archaeology & Anthropology

So who were the mysterious people who preceded the Ancient Egyptians?

Still with Ancient Egypt, an article of the hugely important role of the scribe. [LONG READ]

Archaeologists have found evidence of early fish tapeworm infection at one of Britain’s most important prehistoric sites.

Coming forward several thousand years, metal detectorists have uncovered a huge hoard of important late Saxon and early Norman coins.

Now we enter the modern era! The Victorian introduction of the penny post revolutionised the way we communicate.

Lifestyle & Personal Development

Our favourite Zen master, Brad Warner, on the meaning of life.

And finally … The Victorians (of course!) apparently convinced married couples to sleep in separate twin beds. So how and why did this change?

Phew! There was a lot of that – hopefully something for everybody. More next month.

Alfred Hitchcock is Missing

The Birds. Or rather the lack of the birds.

There’s something very odd going on near me. Maybe elsewhere too.

In the last couple of weeks almost every bird has disappeared.

We used to have several dozen feral pigeons around – I not infrequently count upwards of 20 at a time sitting on my neighbour’s roof. Yesterday I counted a grand total of four, and that’s the most for several weeks.

Similarly we used to have dozens of house sparrows. A few week ago they were around. In the last couple of weeks no more than a handful. And there isn’t the usual incessant chirping from the hedges.

Starlings? Not one. Wood pigeon? We usually have two pairs around; but at present just a single scruffy bird. And almost nothing else which uses the gardens.

Am I sure? Yes, because I contribute (every week) to the BTO’s Garden BirdWatch project, so I regularly count and log the local birds.

Now we know that the sparrow population crashed a few years ago, but it had generally recovered hereabouts. However I have seen an article from BTO that sparrows are susceptible to a form of malaria (the same genus as the malaria parasite which affects us, just a different species), and that could be one factor in their decline.

Also we know that once the breeding season is over, birds moult and grow new feathers, during which time they’re more vulnerable so they tend to hide up. All of them? And all species? Suddenly? At precisely the same time? That doesn’t make sense to me.

On top of that I haven’t seen a squirrel in weeks, when we normally have one around fairly constantly. And the local cat population (other than ours) are also conspicuously absent.

The cats, I can understand. It’s been either hot or wet recently, so they’ll likely be hiding up somewhere cool, dry and shady. I can’t blame them! But no squirrels? That’s unusual.

Now I have a hunch, which could of course be totally wrong. I just wonder if some id.10.t has been throwing rat poison around? That would take out the rats, and the squirrels. Likely the sparrows and pigeons too as they’re grain eaters and will be attracted to the rat bait. It could also take out the odd cat if it eats a poisoned rat or mouse.

It’s a murder mystery, without any bodies. But then I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find bodies. I’m mystified.

I guess I just have to watch and wait to see if the birds come back in the coming weeks.

It’s a puzzle.

Skyscrapers

It isn’t a commonplace for me to agree with Simon Jenkins, but I’ll make an exception for this in the Guardian a couple of days ago.

Skyscrapers wreck cities – yet still Britain builds them
Around 500 towers are proposed for London. They’re not just ugly:
they symbolise Britain’s greedy pandering to developers

Having said that, I don’t know where he gets his information “towers rarely offer higher densities than traditional Victorian terraces in their neighbourhoods”, which I find inherently unlikely.

In my view, no building should be more than four or five floors above ground, if only from a safety point of view. And let’s use up all the brownfield sites and under-used office blocks before building more; much more environmentally sound than taking out yet more greenfield land.

And while we’re at it, let’s require every developer, large or small, to plant at least one tree for every dwelling, and five (or even ten) for every floor of offices, with 50% of them within a mile of the property. That would be good for both carbon sequestration and for mental health.

Nuclear Power Redux

Back in February (OK, yes, I’m currently in catch-up mode) I read a very interesting article on resurrecting nuclear power (a) in a much safer form and (b) to solve our energy crisis. The article was Nuclear goes retro – with a much greener outlook. It is a very long read, so here is the usual tl;dr summary (edited quotes).

  • If you want poor countries to become richer you need a cheap and abundant power source. But if you want to avoid spewing out enough extra carbon dioxide to fry the planet, you need to provide that power without using coal and gas.
  • The standard alternatives simply wouldn’t be sufficient. Wind and solar power by themselves couldn’t offer nearly enough energy, not with billions of poor people trying to join the global middle class. Yet conventional nuclear reactors – which could meet the need, in principle – are massively expensive, potentially dangerous and anathema to much of the public (not to mention politicians).
  • But, the molten salt reactor (MSR) might just turn nuclear power into the greenest energy source on the planet.
  • They are basically a pot of hot nuclear soup – a mix of salts, heated until they melted, and a salt such as uranium tetrafluoride stirred in.
  • The uranium will undergo nuclear fission in the melt, keeping the salts molten, and providing power generation at the same time.
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee successfully operated a demonstration molten salt reactor back in the 1960s.
  • They demonstrated that molten salt reactors were cheap enough for poor countries to buy and compact enough to deliver on a flatbed truck.
  • They’re also green as they will burn our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste, rather than generatign even more.
  • And they’re safe enough to put in cities and factories.
  • Even better these reactors would be proliferation resistant, because their hot, liquid contents would be very hard for rogue states or terrorists to hijack.
  • Getting there isn’t going to be easy – not least because hot molten salts are just as corrosive as they sound. Every component that comes into contact with the brew will have to be made of specialized, high-tech alloy that can resist that corrosion. While you want to dissolve the uranium in the salt, you do not want to dissolve your rector as well!
  • As one specialist has observed: “It will be exceedingly hard, but that is significantly better than impossible”.
  • The approach that won out for commercial power production – and is still used in almost all of the 454 nuclear plants currently operating globally – is the water-cooled uranium reactor (WCUR).
  • WCUR isn’t the best nuclear design, but it was one of the first. Other designs were left for later (if ever).
  • Oak Ridge successfully demonstrated all this in their MSR, an 8 megawatt prototype that ran from 1965 to 1969.
  • By the early 1970s, the Oak Ridge group was well into developing an even more ambitious prototype that would allow them to test materials as well as demonstrating the use of thorium fuel salts instead of uranium.
  • Officials in the US nuclear program terminated the Oak Ridge programme in early 1973. However MSR started to appear less visionary in 1974, when India tested a nuclear bomb made with plutonium extracted from the spent fuel of a conventional reactor.
  • Governments around the world realised global reprocessing was an invitation to rampant nuclear weapons proliferation. In 1977 US President Jimmy Carter banned commercial reprocessing in the United States; much of the rest of the world followed.
  • This left a nasty disposal problem. Instead of storing spent fuel underwater for a few years, engineers were now supposed to isolate it for something like 240,000 years, thanks to the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239. (The rule of thumb is to wait 10 half-lives, thus reducing radiation levels over 1000-fold.)
  • Developers at Oak Ridge tried to point out that the continuous purification approach could solve both the spent-fuel and proliferation problems at a stroke; but they were ignored by the nuclear planners.
  • Then in 1979 came the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, a conventional nuclear plant. In 1986 another catastrophe hit meltdown at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine.
  • The resulting backlash against nuclear power was so strong that new plant construction effectively ceased, the nuclear industry stagnated and was not in an innovative mood for 30 years.
  • Then in 2011, a tsunami knocked out all the cooling systems and backups at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant causing the 1970s-vintage reactors to meltdown.
  • Seaborg Technologies launched in 2014 to design a molten salt Compact Used fuel BurnEr (CUBE) that would run on a combination of spent nuclear fuel and thorium.
  • CUBE is also so small that it can be transported to site on the back of a truck – a major advantage especially in remote regions.
  • Unfortunately none of this is going to happen tomorrow. The various MSR development companies are still refining their designs and the first prototypes won’t be running until at least the mid-2020s.
  • But perhaps the biggest, and most unpredictable barrier, is the public’s ingrained fear of anything labelled “nuclear”.
  • So developers have to keep stressing the why of nuclear power: to fight climate change, poverty and pollution. As well as the three big advantages of MSR: no meltdown, no proliferation and burning up nuclear waste
  • Apparently people are beginning, slowly, to listen – at least in the USA.

See also Molten Salt Reactors and Wikipedia.

Urban Greening

Some weeks ago I read an article Urban greening can save species, cool warming cities, and make us happy. On an over-hot day in London it seems appropriate to give you the tl;dr version (edited quotes):

The current climate and ecological crisis demands a radical redesign of how we live and organise society. These urgent changes, although complex, are far from impossible.

Some are simple, beautiful, and beneficial to all. By greening our cities with street trees, urban parks, and community and rooftop gardens, we can keep ourselves cool amid rising temperatures, reverse the steady erosion of the rich tapestry of life on Earth, and foster happiness and social connection in the process.

Greenery in urban spaces helps improve city microclimates. While hotter cities compel urbanites to increase air conditioning in order to stay cool, on a sunny day, a single healthy tree can have the cooling power of more than ten air-conditioning units.

Plants also help keep harmful pollutants such as microscopic particulate matter at bay. While some vehicles are needed in city centres, mass greening can help negate their pollution and keep cities cool.

Evidence shows numerous social, psychological, and health benefits of human exposure to green spaces, including: stress and anxiety reduction, improved cognitive functioning, lowered risks of depression, and overall greater mental and physical well-being; involvement in community gardening can increase social cohesion and social bonds.

Human socio-economic activities, especially those of the world’s rich, have destroyed natural habitats, consumed vast tracts of forest, polluted waterways, and disrupted the seasonal rhythms on which life depends. But (re-)establishing wild meadows and native plant and tree communities provides essential pollinators with new spaces to thrive, while creating spaces to reintroduce keystone species.

Mass greening and rewilding of our cities is already happening in many urban spaces around the world. The Mayor of Paris has ambitious plans to “green” 100 hectares of the city by 2020 and London’s Mayor hopes to make London the world’s first “National Park City” through mass tree planting and park restoration.

Urban greening alone will not be enough to meet the daunting challenges ahead; we also need to fundamentally transform our growth-oriented economies and massively reduce global inequality.