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Environment

Environment

 

ECO HVAR'S AIMS:

To initiate, organize, promote and encourage projects to preserve and improve the natural environment.

HOW?:

- through projects for education in organic methods of farming

- through projects for education in the use of biodegradable substances for household washing and cleaning

- through projects to reduce the use of poisons and chemicals

- through projects for education in waste and rubbish management

- through projects for education in recycling

- through  projects to clean up the environment

- through projects to establish valid international organic certification for products

- through co-operation with organizations having similar aims in Croatia and abroad

Caring for Hvar's Environment

Published in Environment

What inspired ECO HVAR for the environment

Caring for Hvar's Environment
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Bird Names

Published in Environment

Names in English and Croatian of birds commonly seen on Hvar, together with the scientific names. 

Pied wagtail, December 2015.
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Hvar's Wildflower Treasures

Published in Environment

The wildflowers on Hvar are a year-round joy. Even in the depths of winter, there is hardly a week without colours brightening up the countryside, contrasting with the island's rocks and the variegated dark green of the woodlands. 

Hvar's Wildflower Treasures
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Perilous Pesticides

Published in Environment

Good health depends on clean air, clean water and a clean environment. Hvar Island is perfectly placed to offer all those amenities.

Perilous Pesticides
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Glyphosate - GBH

Published in Environment

GBH is the acronym for Grievous Bodily Harm, a criminal offence in UK law. It also stands for glyphosate-based herbicides...

Glyphosate - GBH
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Orchids, Dalmatia's Secret Treasures

Published in Environment

Wild orchids are a special part of our environment. Are we looking after them?

Orchids, Dalmatia's Secret Treasures
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Diocletian's Palace, A New Look

Published in Environment

The Romans knew how to build, and they knew how to choose the best sites for their building. Diocletian's Palace in Split is a prime and well-preserved example. New discoveries in and around the Palace in recent years have brought about a major revision of the history of this magnificent Late Antique building project.

The Peristyle
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The Organic Alternative

Published in Environment

Organic farming: possible? YES! worthwhile? YES! Mihovil Stipišić from Vrboska is proving the point.

Organic cultivation, Vrboska April 2017
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Plants, crops, soil: Natural Protection

Published in Environment

When soil is contaminated, what ends up on your plate and in your cup or glass is less than healthy. Chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers are causing untold damage. The 'conventional model' of agriculture is exhausting the earth and undermining human health. There are much better methods of protecting soil and plants using natural resources.

Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense)
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Rubbish Management 2018

Published in Environment

Rubbish management is a hot topic, not to say hot potato, around the world at the moment, especially in Croatia, where the European Directives which were laid down some years ago are finally due to come into force on November 1st 2018.

Binning litter, do it right!
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Starigrad Plain: Our Survey

Published in Environment

 

The results from our survey about land usage on the Starigrad Plain (Hora, Ager). The survey was conducted on behalf of LAG Škoji (Local Action Group), Eco Hvar and the Agency for the Management of the Starigrad Plain. The aim was to gain an overview of land usage, and to gather information as to what the landowners think is needed to improve conditions in this historic field layout.

Donkeys grazing on the Plain, 2nd June 2014.
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Eco Environment News feeds

  • Bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure to have major environmental fallout, experts warn

    Monitors admit they are struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from widening war

    Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.

    Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot north-east of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.

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  • Testing the waters: can pumping chemicals into the ocean help stop global heating?

    To some it was a reckless experiment but scientists hope the dispersal of 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine could ease the climate crisis

    For four days last August, a thick slick of maroon bruised the waters of the Gulf of Maine. The scene, not unlike a toxic red tide, was the result of 65,000 litres of an alkaline chemical, tagged with a red dye, that had been deliberately pumped by scientists into the ocean.

    Though it sounds perverse, the event was part of a scientific experiment that could advance a technology to combat both global heating and ocean acidification. Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), as the approach is called, acts like natural weathering, but on human – rather than geological – timescales.

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  • Country diary: Orchids, plums and pine cones – all bursting out of cathedral walls | Nic Wilson

    St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire:The chapel here is a wonderful curiosity, thanks to its restoration by a green-fingered Victorian sculptor

    All’s quiet in the Lady Chapel, sheltered from the bustle of the city by thick limestone walls of Totternhoe clunch, quarried just a few miles north-west in Bedfordshire.

    But though I’m aware of being alone in a vast vaulted space, when I look at the stonework, I feel surrounded by the echoes of women who’ve stood here before me and left their legacy on the chapel walls.

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  • Help a toad across the road – and five more ways to save these endangered amphibians

    Britain’s toads have begun their spring migration, putting them at even greater risk than usual. Here’s how – and why – we should look after them

    There’s a touch of old magic about toads, those shapeshifters of myth, superstition and folklore. Charismatic creatures with the pleasing Latin binomial bufo bufo, common toads have astonishing copper- or gold-coloured eyes and rugged, textured skin. “People say they look warty, which I’ve always thought is a bit unfair,” says Dr Silviu Petrovan, a conservationist and toad population researcher.

    More prosaically, toads are great for your garden. “We say toads are a gardener’s best friend, because they eat all the pests,” says Jenny Tse-Leon, the head of conservation and impact at the British amphibian charity Froglife. Their spring migration is a dramatic event, during which hundreds of thousands of animals travel back to their ancestral breeding ponds. “Like the wildebeest of the Serengeti,” says Tse-Leon. “They’re just a lot smaller than wildebeest.” The males “piggyback” on potential partners: “You see them riding on the female’s back to get a lift to the pond.”

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  • Large tortoiseshell butterfly confirmed no longer extinct in UK

    Early spring sightings show colourful insect is a resident species for first time in decades, says conservation charity

    The large tortoiseshell – an elusive and enigmatic butterfly that became extinct in Britain in the last century – is a UK resident species once again, with a flurry of early spring sightings.

    Britain’s list of native butterflies has increased to 60 with the return of the insect after individuals emerged from hibernation in woodlands in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight.

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  • Countries can rewild borders to deter invasions, says EU environment chief

    Jessika Roswall cites Poland and Finland, which have made border areas near Russia or its allies ‘more hostile’ to cross

    Countries should look to rewild their land borders as a deterrence to invasion and build up other geographical defences to attack, Europe’s environment chief has said.

    Jessika Roswall, the EU’s commissioner for the environment, water resilience and a competitive circular economy, said nature should be used to improve national security. “Investing in nature and using nature as a natural border control is necessary, and actually increases biodiversity. It’s a win-win,” she said.

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  • How the ‘Galápagos of west Africa’ is plundered by floating fish factories

    A Guardian investigation with DeSmog reveals thousands of tonnes of fish are illegally turned into fishmeal and oil off the coast of Guinea-Bissau

    The only ice factory on Bubaque, an island in west Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, is out of service. Local fishers, such as Pedro Luis Pereira, are forced to source ice from factories on the mainland, about 70km away – a six-hour round trip by boat.

    “The machines have been broken for months,” Pereira says, as he pulls in his nets on the shore of the island inside the protected Bijagós archipelago. “We’ve alerted the ministry of fisheries, but so far, no one has come to fix them.”

    Foreign industrial vessels anchored near the port of Bissau. Photograph: Davide Mancini

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  • Pay per view: Victoria wants to charge visitors to see the Twelve Apostles – will it become like Stonehenge?

    Like Stonehenge, the Australian coastal landmark is first seen from a busy highway – and locals warn charging a fee for safe viewing could make existing congestion worse

    How much is a view worth? The Victorian public is asking itself that question after the state government announced on Monday that it would impose visitor fees on one of its most spectacular landmarks, the Twelve Apostles.

    Bookings would be required and a fee payable for parking and access to the $126m Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre, the gateway to the main viewing decks for the famous sea stacks – columns of remnant rock from the eroded Victorian coastline, visible along the winding, 240km-long Great Ocean Road.

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  • ‘The smell wasn’t healthy’: the artist who wore 24 nappies to highlight sewage pollution – and fell ill

    zack mennell made a costume out of nappies and waded into filthy waterways saying: ‘I’m going to be the parasite.’ The performance artist’s project became more literal than originally intended

    On the Deptford foreshore, a ghoulish figure is sinking into the Thames. Performance artist zack mennell (who writes their name in lower case) wades to their belly button as a crowd watches on. As they dip down further, their mutant costume – sewn together from 24 adult nappies – swells with water … and waste.

    mennell’s work smears the personal and political across their body. The Thames performance is the finale of a project called (para)site, made in response to revelations of sewage discharge in our waterways and a reaction to the way benefit claimants are labelled as a drain on society. “OK,” mennell thought, “I’m going to be the parasite.” Their taking on of pollution was more literal than they intended; they contracted Weil’s disease from rat urine in the water.

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  • Sex and the sea snail: how a plucky marine lab brought a mollusk back from the brink

    Once abundant in California, the white abalone had all but vanished. Now, thanks to an innovative breeding program, it’s staged a remarkable comeback

    On a sunny January afternoon in Bodega Bay, some 70 miles north of San Francisco, the White Abalone Culture Lab is humming with activity.

    It’s spawning day. Alyssa Frederick, the lab’s program director, invites me into an industrial room full of troughs and tubs of bubbling seawater. The abalone program is tucked away in the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, a research facility devoted to studying ocean and coastal health. The goal is to bring the endangered sea snails, known for their iridescent shells and delicate meat, back from the brink.

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