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Margot Raggett, whose latest compilation shows animals scrubbed from natural habitats, calls for rethink on UK accelerated housebuilding
Margot Raggett has spent the past decade raising money for conservation efforts around the world but now she feels nervous about the future. “It does feel like we’ve taken a backward step,” she said.
The wildlife photographer has raised £1.2m for the cause in the past 10 years through her Remembering Wildlife series, an annual, not-for-profit picture book featuring images of animals from the world’s top nature photographers. The first edition was published in 2015, when the Paris climate agreement was being drafted but, in the years since, efforts to tackle the climate crisis have been rolled back.
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From Venice to the Iguazu Falls, an exhibition in London illustrates the hidden cost of our gadgets and devices
Artists have created visualisations of the impact of the climate crisis on some of the world’s most recognisable landscapes, in a project to highlight the environmental effects of tech consumption.
Venice in Italy, the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil, and the Seine River in Paris were among the locations used to explore to potential impacts of the climate crisis by the end of the century. The results are on display at an exhibition in London.
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Manningham, Bradford: Twenty-six years after this great industrial hub closed down, it still has resonances with the community via its thrilling wildlife
A peregrine comes bombing down from the ornamented parapet of the 76-metre mill chimney Lister’s Pride, and a hundred pigeons scatter. I’m on Patent Street, Bradford, by the west wall of what was once the biggest silk mill in Europe, called Lister’s Mill, or sometimes Manningham Mills. It was thrown up in the 1870s by Samuel Cunliffe Lister, and for more than a century was one of the great industrial palaces of the north. Since shutting in 1999, about half has been restored as offices and high-end flats; the other half is derelict. Forests of buddleia cover the concrete floors, and fox trails wind through the weeds.
Peer through steel grilles into the basements, and see hart’s-tongue ferns as thick and green as cabbages in a vegetable patch. Rust is everywhere (what John Ruskin called “living” iron: “It is not a fault in the iron, but a virtue, to be so fond of getting rusted”). On the stretch of grass across the street, gulls gather in great numbers. Today they’re mostly black-headed, with one hulking lesser black-back comically conspicuous in the middle of the throng. At the back I spot two first-year common gulls, paddling their feet in a hopeful worm dance.
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Ten platypuses were reintroduced into Sydney’s Royal national park in 2023. This week, two new juveniles were discovered, leading one researcher to cry ‘Oh, give me a hug’
Hunting platypuses takes patience. On Thursday afternoon, I headed into the Royal national park, south of Sydney, with researchers who had reintroduced a small population of the elusive monotremes two years ago.
There was a big net and torches – and our dinner. It could be a long wait.
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Researchers say decline in phytoplankton suggests weakened planetary capacity to absorb carbon dioxide
The world’s oceans are losing their greenness owing to global heating, according to a study that suggests our planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide could be weakening.
The change in the palette of the seas is caused by a decline of phytoplankton, the tiny marine creatures that are responsible for nearly half of the biosphere’s productivity.
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Stoats have been an existential threat to Orkney’s rare birds but technology is helping to eradicate them
At first, the stoat looks like a faint smudge in the distance. But, as it jumps closer, its sleek body is identified by a heat-detecting camera and, with it, an alert goes out to Orkney’s stoat hunters.
Aided by an artificial intelligence programme trained to detect a stoat’s sinuous shape and movement, trapping teams are dispatched with the explicit aim of finding and killing it. It is the most sophisticated technology deployed in one of the world’s largest mammal eradication projects, which has the aim of detecting the few stoats left on Orkney.
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In this week’s newsletter: from Google to Amazon to OpenAI, the economic and climate cost of datacenters continues to grow
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The headlong rush to build huge new datacenters, in order to support the growth of AI, is raising a number of concerns in the US – around the impact upon the climate crisis, water use and electricity bills. It’s also set to reshape American politics in potentially unusual ways.
Companies such as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters that will form the backbone to the surging use of AI by businesses and the public.
Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised
Towns may have to be abandoned due to floods with millions more homes in Great Britain at risk
The plastic inside us: how microplastics may be reshaping our bodies and minds
Datacenter emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? | Isabel O’Brien
Power struggle: will Brazil’s booming datacentre industry leave ordinary people in the dark?
Revealed: Trump’s fossil-fuel donors to profit from datacenter boom and green rollbacks
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‘We’ve worked out that no matter how hard you engineer something, nature filters everything much better than anything else’, says academic
As the plants are pulled out of one of the cells of their floating pod, the long and thin roots are covered with slime.
“This is what you want,” says Chris Walker, an environmental engineer who is struggling to keep hold of the weight of the clump of reeds.
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An upside-down mindset is emerging around the world. We have to rethink our relationship with the environment and the technology that’s caused it harm
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a society in thrall to the values of science and technology. It is set in the futuristic World State, whose citizens are scientifically engineered to fit into a hierarchy. Eugenics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals and classical conditioning are employed to maximise stability and happiness. Huxley’s novel does not describe a conventionally authoritarian system, but one in which the desire for freedom and dignity has simply been eliminated. The World State is a radical technocracy.
It’s a satire on the consequences of importing scientific thinking into the realm of social policy. The Controllers of the World State preside over a society that has rationality and efficiency as its guiding principles, and when those principles conflict with human nature, it is human nature that is required to give way. Rather than building a society that engenders happy human beings, the Controllers seek to design human beings that can function in the society into which they are “hatched”.
The idea that we would invert our relationship with the world in this way strikes us as sinister, as antithetical to what it means to be human.
And yet something resembling this upside-down mindset is now emerging across the globe, particularly in the debate around climate change.
Having built a system that is destructive of the environment that surrounds and sustains us, we are now proposing to change … the environment! In his dystopia Huxley imagined a society that only worked when the humans within it were made into something not quite human. Today, many scientists and engineers imagine a planet that has been similarly transformed: nature itself must yield to the system. We need a technological fix.
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With AI datacenters soaring power bills for households, a policy called ‘demand flexibility’ could help ease grid strain
A cheap, bipartisan tool could help the US meet increasing energy demand from AI datacenters while also easing soaring power bills for households, preventing deadly blackouts and helping the climate.
The policy solution, called “demand flexibility”, can be quickly deployed across the US. Demand flexibility essentially means rewarding customers for using less power during times of high demand, reducing strain on the grid or in some cases, selling energy they have captured by solar panels on their homes.
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