At the beginning of the year the UK Treasury commissioned and published for the very first time a full assessment of the economic importance of nature. Professor Dasgupta, the Cambridge University economist who carried out the assessment, concluded that our prosperity has come at “devastating cost” to the ecosystems that support us. “Nature is our home,” he said, “good economics demands we manage it better.”
Continue reading ““Nature is our home””
This Bank Holiday Monday, how many of you will have a plastic bottle of water somewhere in your back pack? I know I will: a well-used plastic water bottle, refilled from the tap many times but, nevertheless, a plastic bottle made originally to serve the bottled water industry.
Continue reading “Bottled water”
The Friends have planted hundreds of trees in the reserve over the years but a new study has concluded that we should be planting our trees without plastic tree guards. Research has shown that there are significant carbon emissions from the manufacture of plastic guards, they are not always collected after use and, left in the environment, they break down into damaging microplastics.
Continue reading “Plastic free park”
One of the reasons we are being overwhelmed by plastic pollution is that plastic offers us cheap and easy solutions to problems that sometimes we didn’t even know we had. It’s Plastic Free July: time, perhaps, we dog owners contemplated some changes.
Continue reading “Plastic free dog ownership”
Half of the world’s annual 381 million tonnes of plastic waste is single-use. Join Plastic Free July, a global movement that is challenging hundreds of millions of people to find their own solutions to plastic pollution.
Continue reading “Plastic Free July”
Here’s a terrifying fact culled from Scientific American this week: human-made stuff now outweighs all the Earth’s biomass. This is a new and significant milestone in humanity’s dominance of the planet.
Continue reading “Anthropocene”
We pick up plastic trash around the park almost every day. Plastic is an environmental problem that we must take seriously; here is a video made by the UN that clearly explains the extent of the problem.
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 