Every day is Earth Day
I’ve been torn about writing something for Earth Day. Earth day should be every single day, and I am so very wary of tokenism. However I rarely make my beliefs explicit here and I have so much stuff to get off my chest, so where do I begin? This blog usually takes a diary form, with me describing something I’ve seen or experienced of the natural world in a narrative of some kind, and though I do try to infuse it with passion or meaning however slight, so often it just reads like a damn travelogue. Maybe it’s time for once to ditch the pretty narratives and get on with writing about why these places, these animals and plants matter. Not just why they matter to me personally, (although they do and I’m not intending to scrub the personal from my writing as if it were dirty, quite the opposite) but why they matter to us all.
No matter how little we do to stop global warming, habitat destruction and pollution in general, I don’t (perhaps foolishly) believe we have the capacity to completely destroy life. But if we carry on dirtying up the nest, Gaia will eventually shuck us off with one elegant shrug; us and all that we live beside in lovestruck familiarity – whales, tigers, all that charismatic fauna we love to watch on tv and all your favourite wild flowers too, we’ll all go together when we go. When a report is published describing a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s, as top banana in the food chain we need to be worried. If we want a world fit for cockroaches to live in, we are currently going the right way about it.
We all depend on our biosphere. Once that’s screwed so are we all, and oh, let’s not forget just how extremely screwed our children will be. There is no way off this planet; some day we will realise that there is no-where left to run. Global warming, habitat destruction and all that these entail make for a crisis far bigger than any other that humanity has had to face, yet we keep our heads down, sweat the small things and do nothing about the big fat gas guzzling elephant in the room.
We can ALL make a difference, by using less energy, lobbying for more clean renewable energy sources and not least protesting the lack of change from on high. Don’t wait for Government or big business to make changes, be the change yourself! Whatever your political or environmental beliefs, who wouldn’t want clean fresh air and a safe place to live, given the alternative?
Get Busy… click the links and find something positive to do on Earth Day!
Greenpeace UK Climate Change Page
Friends Of The Earth International
Centre For Alternative Technology
Typical British summer weather
May 15, 2008 by Bird
Filed under Blog, Navel Gazing, Summer, Wild London
It’s a stereotype that we Brits (and the English in particular) are prone to 
banging on about the weather in minute detail; I’m here to tell you that not only is this stereotype an accurate one, but that as I am nothing if not a product of the country I live in I feel compelled to join in.
The recent weather in London (and much of the British Isles) has been unusually worthy of comment – it’s been a late, cold and stormy spring with fearsome, sudden thunderstorms, flooding, blustery winds and barely a sunny day to leaven the gloom. This was followed by an unexpectedly glorious week of May sunshine, balmy enough to make “flaming June” fling down her parasol in a jealous sulk. Well now it’s all back to normal – colourless skies and a light, relentless drizzle. I love it.
The extremes we’ve been experiencing lately are not how I remember our spring or summer weather. Forgive the nostalgia, but the weather of my childhood was, on the whole, gentle and uneventful – some would say dull and mediocre. The picture to your left, taken today, sums up the typical quality of light as I remember it. Sun was fleeting and pleasant, occasionally hot enough to burn; rain was gentle and always to be expected. Breezes would spring up in Autumn – but gales? Once a decade perhaps, and never forgotten. We are the country famous for trains that stop running when autumn leaves fall, despite our having seen leaves falling every year at approximately the same time for thousands of years, and where heavy snow sees the country grind to a somewhat festive halt as everybody takes the day off to go tobogganing. What people in other countries would take for granted as good weather is enough of a novelty for us that we become notoriously skittish should the sun appear for more than an hour; we shed our clothes, inhibitions and dignity with heady abandon. Our weather is like pick-n-mix; you get a tiny little bit of everything and very, very occasionally something exciting. We don’t do extreme weather.
Except that more often these days, we are having to. We are left bewildered in the aftermath of mini hurricanes, dramatic, almost biblical floods followed by drought, crop failures, sun fierce enough to burn our pasty British skins within the hour. At last, thanks to global warming, we have weather worth gossiping about. Areas of land are to be given up to the sea, like pagan sacrifice, in the hopes of better flood defences. There are places where you might not get insurance on your home, because of the threat of flooding. More subtle but just as telling is the creep of malarial and other disease harbouring insects into southern Britain, and the slow inevitable drift of cold loving species forced further and further north, until what – they just fall off the map? I know that we are the lucky ones here on our temperate little islands – we have had no earthquake or cyclone to fell us in our thousands – and I am fervently greatful at times like this to live in such a kindly, comparatively stable climate. That is why I love our gently miserable summer drizzle. It is home, it is what I’m used to. Freakish weather – you can keep it.
What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s a classic image of springtime, delicate apple blossom unfurling on the branches of an orchard tree. What could possibly be wrong here? The problem with this image lies in the date it was taken. It was taken this year on the 16th September; apple blossom is supposed to emerge around about April time. If this is not eerie enough, the same tree was sporting a heavy crop of apples alongside it’s unseasonable flowers.
Similar phenomena have been observed in recent years. This article written in October 2006 describes unseasonal blooms and other signs that plants and animals are becoming increasingly confused as to the season, probably due to global warming. In 2005 there was a “phantom spring” in November, including sightings of red admiral butterflies, trees in blossom and flowering violets.
Allotment holders and other small growers that I know have reported that crops like cabbages and lettuces benefited this year from a very late emergence of butterflies, which in some places only started to fly in August this year. The dull rainy summer kept them grounded; does this mean that they will be breeding late and therefore risking their caterpillars to the onset of winter?
Perhaps apple trees use light and day length to gauge when the seasons change – if this is so, then it may explain the freak blooms. This summer was possibly one of the dreariest ever, and lack of light for a couple of months may have fooled these trees into thinking that winter has already occurred. I’m going to be watching out for other peculiar effects of our cold, dark rainy summer.
