Going Green Podcast, Video blog and Daily News

  Why Soil Is More Important Than We Think “A Teaspoon of Healthy Soil Contains More Living Organisms Than There Are People on Earth” That sentence ought to stop us in our tracks. Most of us walk over soil every day without giving it much thought. We call it mud when it is wet, dust when it is dry, and dirt when it appears on the kitchen floor. Yet soil is not just the brown stuff under the lawn. It is a living system, a food factory, a water filter, a carbon store, a wildlife habitat and one of the most important natural resources we have. Without healthy soil, our gardens struggle, our farms become less productive, our rivers become muddier, our wildlife loses habitat and our ability to store carbon is reduced. For something so essential, soil has a remarkably poor public relations department. We admire trees, birds, wildflowers, rivers and hedgerows. Soil tends to get noticed only when it sticks to our boots. Yet almost everything green and growing begins there. Soil Is Not Dirt...

  Learning to Identify Trees: A Green Skill Everyone Should Have Could You Identify Ten British Trees Without Using an App? Most of us can recognise dozens of company logos at a glance. We can spot a supermarket, a fast-food chain, a car badge or a technology brand from half a symbol glimpsed across a road. But could we identify ten British trees without reaching for an app? That question is slightly uncomfortable, because trees are not rare objects hidden away in specialist nature reserves. They are outside our houses, beside our roads, along the river, in parks, churchyards, school grounds, gardens and sailing clubs. They shape the character of the places where we live, yet many of us walk past them as if they were simply green background scenery. Learning to identify trees is not just a nice countryside hobby. It is a green skill. It improves observation, builds environmental awareness, connects us with the seasons and helps us understand the wildlife around us. It is also wonde...

  Nature’s Engineers: What We Can Learn From Beavers A Small Animal With a Very Large Toolkit “A beaver can achieve in a few months what costs humans millions of pounds in civil engineering.” That sounds like an exaggeration, but only until you look at what beavers actually do. They do not arrive with hard hats, clipboards, traffic cones, planning notices, diggers, cement mixers or twelve consultants arguing about drainage modelling. They arrive with teeth, paws, mud, sticks and a very clear idea of what they want. They want water deep enough to feel safe. In making that happen, they create ponds, wetlands, channels, dams, pools, deadwood habitat, muddy edges, slow-flowing streams and wildlife corridors. In human terms, that is flood management, water storage, habitat creation, drought resilience, landscape engineering and biodiversity recovery. In beaver terms, it is just Tuesday. Beavers are now returning to parts of Britain, and their comeback raises a fascinating question. Are ...

The Environmental Cost of Convenience Convenience Saves Us Minutes but Often Costs the Environment Years Modern life has become wonderfully convenient. We can order almost anything from a phone while sitting on the sofa. We can have coffee handed to us in a cup we never have to wash. We can buy fruit already sliced, sandwiches already wrapped, meals already portioned, and products delivered to the doorstep before we have even had time to wonder whether we really needed them. Convenience is not automatically bad. For many people it is essential. A busy parent, an elderly person, someone with a disability, a carer, a student working long hours, or a small business trying to get through the day may all depend on convenient services. The problem is not convenience itself. The problem is when convenience becomes the default setting for everything, even when the environmental cost is hidden from view. The real danger is that convenience often separates us from consequences. When we throw awa...