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Furnace Brook in East Sussex was home to carp, tench, bream, roach and trout – and 15 trailer-loads had to be buried. The mystery led to a neighbouring farm, and a story of waste, pollution and dirty rivers that reveals a lot about Britain today
When Alistair and Diane Gould bought Furnace Brook in 2013, they had big plans. It was an idyllic spot: a stream-fed fishing lake nestled in a secluded valley in the High Weald, East Sussex, surrounded by woodland and fields. “People loved to come fishing here because it’s so beautiful,” says Diane. “Some of them had been coming for so many years that they got to know the individual fish.”
Diane moved here from Kent in 2000, when Furnace Brook was owned by a distant relative. Her two younger sons, then 10 and 14, flourished. They would chat to the anglers about the fish they were catching and throwing back in, and sell them bacon sandwiches. Her elder son, Simon, moved from London to join them in 2006 and became a keen angler himself, and then the fishing manager, or bailiff, looking after the fish and the landscape around the lake.
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Exclusive: Levy that allows almost 16,000 houses to be built on Norfolk Broads will not cover cost of mitigating environmental damage, critics say
A new levy on developers to allow almost 16,000 homes to be built in the environmentally protected Norfolk Broads has been cut by tens of thousands of pounds per house, the Guardian can reveal.
Ministers say the government’s environmental delivery plans (EDPs) were created to unblock housing growth across the country and are a “win-win” for development and nature.
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Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire: So much to admire in these creatures, from their resilience over summer, to the detailed pattern of their trails
Here’s a lovely word: aestivate. It’s what my garden snails did through the parched weeks of our summer drought, pulling their bodies high up into their shells and closing the door. Here’s another: epiphragm – the pearl-like door they make to keep moisture in as they slow their hearts and their breathing, until just a thread of life remains.
Pretty words, but such power in them. Over the summer I’d find these snails, dry and still, and hold them in my hands before tucking them back behind my garden pots. This is it, I’d think, the irony of our times: there’s us humans, all-powerful and cruelly dismissive of everything that is not us, hurtling towards changes in our climate that our bodies are entirely unequipped to deal with. And then here are snails, not invulnerable either, but with more forbearance than we could ever dream of.
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New report predicts a heavy toll from Nigeria to the US – and comes on top of existing impacts of the climate crisis
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.
The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the US. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires and flooding that El Niños bring.
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New York event hears about the red Muppet’s fears during a recent storm as climate crisis increasingly affects children
A generation of political leaders has failed to galvanize sufficient action on the climate crisis for so long now that it was perhaps little surprise that an audience in New York City turned to a three-and-a-half-year-old red furry monster for inspiration on Tuesday.
Elmo, the Sesame Street denizen, made a starry appearance at a Climate Week event that highlighted how the impacts of global heating affect children. The red creature, who frequently refers to himself in the third person, recounted to the audience his fear when a storm hit Sesame Street, an event depicted in a recent episode that featured the singer Post Malone.
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Prime ministers of Australia and Iceland discuss effects on their countries even as some shy away in face of war and inflation
World political leaders are descending on New York for the UN general assembly and some of them are putting the climate crisis on the agenda as they spoke on Monday at the start of the city’s annual Climate Week.
This year’s Climate Week – which runs alongside UNGA – comes after months of extreme heat in large parts of the world including Europe and the US, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.
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Scientists found unequal impact of the climate crisis would not be reversed even if implicit goal of the 2015 Paris agreement is achieved
The unequal impact of the climate crisis on the world’s poorest people, including those in tropical areas, has been highlighted by new research that finds they will be among the last to feel the benefits if global greenhouse gas emissions are cut to net zero.
Temperatures have risen more significantly in tropical areas relative to their historic range than at higher latitudes, including in wealthier countries in Europe and North America.
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The weather pattern is associated with extreme, stormy weather, but authorities predict a quiet year in one ocean at least
One significant effect of the stronger El Niño is fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic. In the 30 years to 2020, on average the first hurricane arrived by 11 August, the second by 26 August and the third by 7 September. This year the total so far has been zero.
At the start of the season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted a quiet year, anticipating between three and six hurricanes, well below the average of seven. The August forecast cut the expected number to between two and six. Until this year, the latest date for the first Atlantic hurricane was 11 September, in 2002 and 2013.
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Former US vice-president still has optimism for climate advocacy two decades after groundbreaking documentary
Two decades after the release of his groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has admitted he was surprised by the ferocious, ongoing backlash from the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. But the former US vice-president insists he still has optimism the world will confront the climate crisis.
At a New York event to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of the film and his subsequent climate advocacy work, Gore, now 78, joked: “I always say if it hadn’t been for me, we might have a big problem right now” when asked about the progress made over the past two decades.
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Author Russell Warfield argues the Green leader’s brand of politics is not new but has evolved in the party over time
Watermelons: the term used to describe the members of the Green party of England and Wales who are green on the outside and red on the inside. People in this faction are environmentalists but bleed socialist ideologies.
Of the roughly 160,000 people who have flocked to the party since Zack Polanski became leader last year, most are thought to be in this camp, drawn to a political space on the left that they see as vacated by the Labour party.
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