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Lawyers call for clarity over law as six are found guilty while being stopped from using defence used by fellow activists
Six environmental protesters were convicted after they were denied the ability to put a “reasonable excuse” defence or climate facts before the jury, despite these being afforded to other activists acquitted for taking part in the same demonstration.
After an eight-day trial at Southwark crown court in London, the six Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists were found guilty of public nuisance, which carries a maximum 10-year sentence, for climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022 to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects. They will be sentenced next month.
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Exclusive: Experts say impact on people of colour and those who do not drive is ‘grave environmental injustice’
Air pollution in England and Wales has fallen, but the poorest neighbourhoods are still exposed to the most extreme levels of toxins, new analysis has found.
Experts have called this a “grave environmental injustice” as the inequality around who is exposed to air pollution has dramatically grown in the last decade.
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Indigenous leaders, environmental activists and forest defenders are determined to make this a summit like no other
A day into a river voyage between Santarém and Belém, a dozen or so passengers on the Karolina do Norte move excitedly to the port side of the boat to see the cafe au lait-coloured waters of the Amazon river mix with the darker, clearer currents of the Xingu.
“That confluence is like the people on this boat,” said Thais Santi. “All from different river basins, but coming together for this journey.”
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Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and major supermarkets want to double amount of beans Britons eat
Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are among a group of celebrity chefs and supermarkets spearheading a new campaign to double UK bean consumption by 2028.
There has been a long push for people to include more legumes in their diets – they are climate friendly and healthy. As the UK faces increasing disease related to poor diets as well as increasing food prices, and the campaigners argue that it is the correct time to launch a drive to “bang in some beans” to the nation’s meals.
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Communities in the middle of new national forest to show how housebuilding can be delivered alongside nature
A new set of forest towns will be built in the area between Oxford and Cambridge, nestled in the middle of a new national forest.
After facing anger from nature groups over the deregulation in the upcoming planning bill, ministers are trying to demonstrate that mass housebuilding can be delivered in conjunction with new nature. The government has promised to plant millions of trees to boost England’s nature.
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Though intensive farming has ravaged its habitat, could sensitive planting at energy sites aid the species’ revival?
November is when bumblebees disappear for the winter. One of the most common of the UK’s 24 species is the red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). These social insects live in burrows, breed in colonies and forage all summer.
At this time of year, the workers and male bumblebees, having mated, die off and next year’s generation of queens burrow into holes in the bottom of hedges and old walls to hibernate until the warmth of spring.
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Towering above Delhi’s skyline, emitting an inescapable stench of rotting flesh, are giant mountains of rubbish. Several miles wide and more than 200ft (60 metres) high, they are visible from across the city and stand as symbols of Delhi’s inability to deal with its trash.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen visited communities living in the shadow of Bhalswa’s overfilled landfill heaps, to see how they have become reliant on the mountain that is simultaneously poisoning them
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We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2022: Kenya’s great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people
By Carey Baraka. Read by Reice Weathers
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In The White House Effect, now available on Netflix, archival footage is used to show how the US right moved from believing to disputing the climate crisis
In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage ($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.
Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves – the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of the future”.
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The climate crisis is causing the permafrost to melt in Alaska, forcing the village of Nunapitchuk to relocate
Children splash gleefully in the river as adults cast fishing lines or head into the Alaska tundra to hunt. It’s a scene that has characterized summer days for centuries among the Yup’ik people who have long lived in south-western Alaska, where the village of Nunapitchuk stands. But, with temperatures in Alaska warming nearly four times faster than most parts of the globe, that way of life is about to change.
Homes in Nunapitchuk have been sinking into the permafrost, and residents have decided their only choice is to move the entire village to higher ground.
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