Tag: Nature
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2020 Birding Highlights
Quite predictably, birding in 2020 was considerably inhibited. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of interesting birds in the UK – there most definitely was. They just managed to get a little more peace and quiet in 2020. Which, let’s be honest, they probably benefitted from hugely! Despite what few outings…
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2019 Birding Highlights
For me, going out and exploring is absolutely essential. Getting lost provides me with an escapism incomparable to anything else. It enables me to pause, mull and re-calibrate, helps me to reflect and re-connect with myself and permits me occasionally to witness the natural world as independent of humanity. When I get lost enough, sometimes…
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The Overpopulation Myth
Just because Thanos erased half of all life in order to bring balance to the universe it doesn’t mean that everyone who is concerned about overpopulation is also an eco-fascist beset on subjugation and murder. It is quite probable that they’re simply anxious about the climate and ecological breakdown and see overpopulation as a legitimate…
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Climate Change: The Elephant in the Room
The elephant in the room is trampling all over us. Yet we’re still living, thinking and talking as though it were not there. Climate change is so inescapable, so entangled within the definition of our politico-economic system, that to explore it, to educate about it, is to create a wide-spread existential crisis wherein the persistence…
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Look Zoos Talking
Blackfish stirred up a storm. The documentary exposed Sea World for the mistreatment of its captive orcas, its inhumane and sometimes fatal capture, breeding and training methods, its coercive staffing procedures, and the comprehensive duplicity of its senior management and public relations teams. In August 2015, almost two years after its release, Sea World reported an 84% drop in second-quarter profits.…
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Vertical Farming: A Huge Piece to a Gigantic Puzzle
Our beloved British landscape is withering. It’s on its knees, begging for relief. It’s pleading for freedom, longing to be rewilded. The countryside is dying. With less than 3% of Britain built upon, this is a difficult truth to accept. But our country, celebrated for its ostensible natural beauty, is almost entirely engineered. It is, quite paradoxically, exceptionally unnatural. The farmlands, which constitute a…
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Why Ethics Should Centralise Around Nature
Call me a misanthrope, but there isn’t one ethics that is universally valid. The Golden Rule, in all its forms, has proven time and time again to be problematic. Even the principles laid down by Kant are tenuously justified, as he puts the cart before the horses at the earliest stages of his Groundworks in order to give…
A.C. Stark 