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The Silent Decline of Insects If Insects Disappear, Almost Everything Else Follows

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  The Silent Decline of Insects If Insects Disappear, Almost Everything Else Follows When I was a child, one of my jobs on a Sunday afternoon drive was to clean the insects off the windscreen. It sounds like a small memory, almost comic now. A bucket of water, a cloth, and the front of the car covered with the remains of flies, moths, beetles and other flying insects collected during an ordinary journey through the countryside. Today, that job has almost disappeared. Many people have noticed the same thing. Long journeys that once left the windscreen speckled with insects now often leave it almost clean. It is easy to dismiss this as nostalgia, or to suggest that cars are more aerodynamic, roads are different, or we simply notice less. Some of that may be true. But the wider evidence points in a much more worrying direction. There are fewer insects around us. And that matters far more than most people realise. Insects are not just background noise. They are not just things that buz...
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The Lost Art of Making Things Last

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  The Lost Art of Making Things Last The most sustainable purchase is often the one you only have to make once. There was a time when buying something good meant expecting it to last. A tool was not bought for one job. A camera was not expected to be replaced the moment a newer model appeared. A boat was not abandoned because the varnish had failed or a fitting had worked loose. Science apparatus, if looked after, could serve generations of students. Previous generations did not always have a choice. Products were expensive, wages were lower, and replacing things casually was not an option. But there was also a different attitude. Things were repaired, sharpened, polished, serviced, protected and passed on. Today, we live in a world where replacement often feels easier than maintenance. A phone battery weakens and the whole device is replaced. A printer refuses to cooperate and ends up at the recycling centre. A cheap tool breaks and another cheap tool is bought. A perfectly usable...
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The World Is Getting Warmer — And We Need to Stop Pretending It Is Still a Debate

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  The World Is Getting Warmer — And We Need to Stop Pretending It Is Still a Debate There are some subjects where pretending to be balanced becomes a problem. If someone says it is raining and someone else says the sky is bone dry, the sensible response is not to stand in the garden with one hand out saying, “Well, both sides have a point.” You look at the evidence. You check the ground. You notice whether your socks are wet. Climate change is now rather like that. The world is getting warmer. The records are not vague. They are not hidden in a dusty filing cabinet guarded by a suspicious scientist in a white coat. They are measured by meteorological organisations, satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations, climate centres and independent scientific teams across the world. And the pattern is painfully clear. The warmest years on record are not scattered randomly across history. They are clustered in the very recent past. We are no longer talking about some distant theoretical probl...
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The UK Was Not Designed for Hot Summers: How Do We Keep Cool Without Air Conditioning?

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  The UK Was Not Designed for Hot Summers: How Do We Keep Cool Without Air Conditioning? There is something rather British about being surprised by summer. We spend most of the year complaining about rain, grey skies, damp shoes, cold hands, and weather forecasts that seem to be written by someone shaking dice in a dark room. Then, suddenly, the temperature climbs into the thirties and we discover that the average UK house has been designed beautifully for holding warmth in February and rather less successfully for surviving a heatwave in June. Most British homes do not have air conditioning. We may have it in the car, where we use it for a ten-minute drive to the supermarket, but not in the bedroom where we are expected to sleep through a hot, humid night under a roof that has been absorbing sunshine all day. At the moment, my back garden is reading 37.5°C. That is not because I have accidentally moved to the Sahara. It is because paving slabs are very good at absorbing heat durin...
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“A Teaspoon of Healthy Soil Contains More Living Organisms Than There Are People on Earth”

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  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...
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