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Campaigners accuse Yorkshire Water of negligence and say plan to top up reservoirs will kill the river’s fish
With its pebble beach and shallow areas for paddling, the River Wharfe at Ilkley has long been a popular swimming location in the pretty Yorkshire town. But plagued by sewage and agricultural runoff, the river has been designated as “poor” quality, and a sign has been put up warning people against bathing in it. And now, the health of the river has been put further at risk with emergency drought plans by Yorkshire Water to suck water from it to top up its reservoirs.
A drive by campaigners and wild swimmers led it in 2021 to be the first in the country to get designated bathing status – meaning the government tests it for the harmful E coli and intestinal enterococci bacteria.
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Across the globe, oil, gas and coal companies use an ever-widening set of tactics to crush competition and opposition. With the world’s most powerful man helping them at every turn, it’s critical we reveal their full impact
Today the Guardian launches its annual environment support campaign. To back our vital climate journalism, please click here
Why does capital love fossil fuels? It’s not hard to explain. They exist in a small number of discrete locations, where the right to exploit them can be owned and monopolised. Most can be extracted commercially only at scale, excluding small competitors. They can be stored and traded all over the world, allowing prices to be optimised across time and space. Renewable energy, by contrast, can be generated almost anywhere, by almost anyone with a small amount of money to invest.
Renewables might now be cheaper than fossil fuel in the vast majority of cases, but this makes them less attractive to capital, not more. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and highly profitable. Renewables are highly competitive and not very profitable.
Join George Monbiot and special guests on 16 September for a special climate assembly to discuss the growing and dramatic political and corporate threats to the planet. Book tickets – in person or livestream
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Report finds regenerative approach could yield economic benefits while helping to meet environmental targets
The degradation of nature in the UK will lop nearly 5% off the country’s GDP if the private sector does not make a greater effort to halt the decline, experts have warned.
Conversely, investing in nature can produce economic returns for companies in a range of sectors, from manufacturing and construction to food, according to a report from the Green Finance Institute (GFI) and WWF.
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Before Peter Betts died in 2023, he wanted to pass on what he had learned over many years of negotiating at Cops – including how Paris 2015 was saved at the last bell
On 15 March 2022, I was on a video call with a dear friend when I experienced a twitching on the left-hand side of my face and a slurring of my speech. My wife, Fiona, took me to hospital because we both thought I was having a stroke, and I spent the journey in the car adjusting to my probable death. Interestingly, I did not feel fear or anger; only sadness and disappointment that it was all going to end sooner than I had expected. I survived: but six days later, we learned that the cause of my condition was a particularly aggressive form of brain tumour called a glioblastoma.
Since then I have read a number of accounts written by cancer sufferers. Many of them start with an uncertain diagnosis, often with a reasonable percentage chance of survival. But unlike these accounts it was absolutely clear that the tumour would kill me: there was no cure and I was given a median life expectancy of 15 to 18 months. Of course, I hoped to do better than the median, but the medical team said that clinging to that possibility would probably be a mistake because it would distract me from enjoying the time I had left. My immediate reaction was genuinely to recognise that in some respects I was lucky. Some people drop dead with no warning, whereas I would perhaps have a year to come to terms with and make sense of my life. This enabled me from the beginning to take a positive approach to my situation and determined me to make the most of the little time I had.
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Nämdö, Stockholm archipelago: A holiday to the Baltic has forced me to undergo a perspective shift to appreciate its scale and intricate wateriness
By the third week in August, Swedish school terms have restarted and the thousands who make the Stockholm archipelago their summer home have returned to the city. Ferries have switched to winter timetables and people are outnumbered by fallow deer.
I try to get my bearings using the chart hanging in my cousin’s summerhouse, but the white-tailed eagle view of 30,000 islands, islets and skerries is baffling. A boat is essential, and my son makes the necessary perspective shift before I do. “It’s like the Lake District in reverse,” he says. “The land is water and the lakes are islands.” I see what he means. There is something about the ice-worn geology and the vegetation dominated by pines, alder and birch that feels familiar, but the scale and intricate wateriness of the place is as confusing as it is beguiling.
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For more than a decade, scientists have been puzzling over what was causing billions of starfish to dissolve into piles of white goo. Sea star wasting disease has ravaged starfish populations, wiping out 90% of the once common sunflower sea star. Now, researchers have finally identified the culprit. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Melanie Prentice, one of the team to crack the case. She explains the impact the disease has had on the marine environment, how they found the pathogen responsible, and what it means for sea stars’ recovery
Scientists identify bacterium behind devastating wasting disease in starfish
Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod
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Views of forward-thinking artist and writer who lived off land in national park celebrated at museum in Glastonbury
She was considered an eccentric by some, eking out a frugal existence on a wild English moor, surviving off the land and exchanging her sketches of the countryside for meals.
But the first museum exhibition on the life and work of the largely forgotten nature writer and artist Hope Bourne highlights that her views on the environment, recycling, access to the countryside – even rewilding – were ahead of her time.
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Warm weather has created strong flavours that some say means fruit that’s ripe enough for still wine
UK vineyards are getting ready for a vintage year – and a very early harvest – with the warm, sunny weather caused by the heating climate delivering strong flavours in their grapes.
Across the UK the total amount of wine produced is likely to be up on last year. English growers alone added more than 1,000 hectares of vines in 2024, taking the total to 4,841, of which 3,763 was in active production in 2024, according to the industry body Wine GB.
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As survivors and experts reflect on the storm 20 years on, fear is growing that the US is just as unprepared to take on extreme weather amid cuts to Fema
Darren McKinney grew up in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. When Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago this week, he watched his neighborhood wash away. From his second floor apartment, he saw flood waters rise up to his window.
“I had no food at all, no water, no electricity,” he recounted one rainy day this month, while taking a break from his job leading home restoration in the neighborhood as field operations director of the non-profit lowernine.org.
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After a wrecked ship spewed oil into the pristine waters off Pointe d’Esny, destroying sea life and livelihoods, a group of women turned to the land to change their fortunes
Sandy Monrose never imagined herself as a farmer. Descended from generations of fishers on the breezy south-eastern tip of Mauritius, she has the Indian Ocean running through her veins. But when a merchant ship slammed into the coral reef, turning the sea inky black with toxic fuel and sinking the local economy, she and a group of local women turned to the land to feed their families.
Five years after the Japanese-owned MV Wakashio ran aground off the white sands of Pointe d’Esny, her “model farm” in the nearby nature reserve of La Vallée de Ferney is flourishing. Sitting under a metal-roofed gazebo, she surveys the formerly tired plot she secured from landowner Ferney Ltd, now a joyous riot of greens, bursting with papaya and banana trees, and patches of onions, potatoes, taros, manioc, bok choi, winged beans and lots more besides.
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