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A total of six people apprehended as clean-up of rubbish stacked 10 metres high cost about £6m
Two men have been arrested after fly-tippers dumped a “mountain of illegal waste”, stacked 10 metres high, in Oxfordshire.
Hundreds of tonnes of rubbish appeared in a field between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington in November last year. The waste tip was so large that removing it could cost more than the local council’s annual budget, the area’s MP said.
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In the first project of its kind, scientists are trying to answer if the future of Alaska’s streams and tundra may depend not on survival of the fittest but on how species adapttogether
On Alaska’s North Slope, scientists tread carefully across clumps of tussock grasses toward a fast-flowing stream draining the imposing Brooks Range of ice and snow. Near Galbraith Creek, they string out a mist net for white-crowned sparrows. The birds have recently arrived from southerly latitudes, intent on feasting on the insects that will soon descend on the tundra like storm clouds.
The Arctic summer is short-lived, and sparrows have only a few weeks to establish territories, find mates, lay eggs and raise their chicks on a steady diet of bugs. From every ensnared bird, the scientists collect blood, feather and faecal samples to see what they are eating and how that changes over the summer.
Galbraith Creek on Alaska’s North Slope
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Green leader says ministers must stop ‘hiding the truth’ about threat to UK security from climate and nature crisis
Zack Polanski will challenge Andy Burnham’s government to publish an unredacted version of an explosive report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of overseas ecosystems would have catastrophic consequences for the UK’s national security.
The Green party leader in England will demand that the prime minister come clean about the scale and impact of the climate and nature crisis and call on the government to publish in full the report that warns the UK faces devastating security consequences.
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Numbers of the exquisitely graceful species are falling amid loss of food supply and habitat
Few birds are quite as elegant as the blue crane. As I watched a pair feeding alongside a busy road in South Africa, against the rather incongruous backdrop of a herd of cows, I was struck by their sheer beauty. With a slender body, curved neck, long legs, elongated tail plumes and a subtle, dove-grey plumage, this bird really is the avian equivalent of a catwalk model.
But not all is well for the blue crane. It has the smallest global range of any of the world’s 15 crane species: apart from an isolated population in Namibia, almost all are found in South Africa, where it is celebrated as the national bird.
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Appeals court dismisses lawsuit from Jackson residents claiming that tainted drinking water violated their rights
A US appellate court has decided that the federal constitution does not guarantee a right to clean water.
That legal opinion came in the form of a decision on Friday from the fifth circuit court of appeals to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of a 2022 lawsuit from several Jackson, Mississippi, residents claiming that tainted drinking water violated their constitutional rights.
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Ailsworth, Cambridgeshire: Trifid bur-marigold is struggling nationally, but thanks to a little ‘Goldilocks’ land management, it has the perfect conditions here
After a night of storms, the air feels freshly washed. I breathe in delicious scents of damp grass, earth, and sweet, winey blackberry from hedges weighed down with a bumper harvest. Once again, I’m drawn to the River Nene, a ribbon of blue and green that snakes lazily through the valley. I stand for a while on the bridge over Ailsworth weir, where water spills and chatters over bright green swathes of river water-crowfoot. For a moment its steady white noise overpowers the nearby A1.
The main river is slow and silent, yet its margins are bright with flowers: purple loosestrife, marsh woundwort, water mint, water forget-me-not and celery-leaved buttercup. Together they make a loose embroidery of mauve, blue and yellow among the green – quite the contrast from the scorched gold fields I’ve become used to. But the plant that catches my eye is trifid bur-marigold, with its understated, button-like golden flowers. Its name comes from its mostly three-part leaves and fruits that are tipped with barbed bristles, ready to hitch a lift on passing cattle, dogs, maybe an otter, or even humans.
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More than 140 clubs breached licences, with a third caught taking water illegally, analysis shows – but no fines issued
More than 140 golf clubs in England have breached their water extraction licences in the past five years, according to data analysis by the Guardian.
More than a third of these clubs were caught taking water illegally from the environment, either by taking more than permitted or by removing it outside the permitted period.
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The European Prize for Urban Public Space’s shortlist highlights projects helping people cope with climate crisis
In the words of Joni Mitchell, the planners of many urban centres around the world “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. The European Prize for Urban Public Space tries to show that cities don’t have to be locked in the automotive age for ever.
The prize’s latest shortlist, announced on Wednesday, highlights architectural projects that convert infrastructure for cars into spaces that help urban dwellers cope with the soaring temperatures of the climate crisis: roundabouts that have become splash pools, thoroughfares turned into green havens, and car parks into gardens.
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Anglers will help scientists investigate the porbeagle, tope and blue shark to boost knowledge and conservation
‘We have really cool sharks,” says Dr Lucy Hawkes. She is not referring to animals in the rich coastal waters of South Africa or Mexico, but instead talking about the species that live around Britain. Hawkes, an associate professor at the University of Exeter, is co-leading a new three-year project to investigate the lives of three of England’s most vulnerable shark species.
“I like the porbeagle, which looks like a baby great white shark,” she says. “Surfers could see one and absolutely poop their pants, but they’re not dangerous. It’s amazing that we share the water with some pretty exciting animals.”
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The Californian once cultivated petri dishes breathed on by artists that turned ‘murky and scary’. But now, in our dystopian age of space technocrats, she’s taking inspiration from Nasa shots of asteroids
‘I had artists from all over the world breathe over petri dishes,” says Liz Larner. “It was a piece of international art made from breath bacteria.” The American sculptor is reminiscing about her 1988 work Every Artist Gave a Breath, a fragile and strangely evolving work of art grown on agar. Exhibited in a 2022 show, it has since transformed in various ways: some bacteria has morphed into “beautiful, dried wafers in colour”, while other dishes “turned into a really weird blackish-green, really murky and a little scary”.
Larner is no stranger to making alluring work out of strange materials, from human hair and false eyelashes to leather and surgical gauze. For her first major exhibition in the UK – A Hard Line to Bend at Camden Arts Centre in London – the sculptor has been transforming single-use plastic into pieces that bristle with seductiveness and menace. “I was living in LA at the time when China stopped accepting American plastic, which was where we were sending it all to be recycled,” she says. “I started taking it to my studio – it got so huge, I had to hang it from my ceiling.”
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