#519: Beanz meanz

This BBC News story from 2023 talks about a successful haricot bean harvest in Lincolnshire.

Baked Beans from companies such as Heinz are generally imported as the beans haven't traditionally done well in the UK.

In 2025 we also had rice successfully grown...

In the future we may see a very different English countryside to the one we have become used to seeing.

#381: Broads Society Lecture - October 24th

If and when we are able to move to the next phase of this qualification, teachers will need training and will need to look for national and local organisations offering events which will be suitable for developing our skills in the field of Natural History.

The Broads Society calls itself "the voice for the Broads". 

It is a Society local to where I live in Norfolk, and to a landscape which I am sure I will be using to develop some resources when we get to that stage.

They also offer a series of events... and one sounds useful which is coming up in a few weeks' time.

One for Norfolk and similar folks really due to the location...

The Broads Society has a lecture which soulds like it will be useful.

24^th October  2024

‘Innovative Management of the Broads Landscape’

7.30 at Blake Studio, Norwich School.

If interested, please book through Broads Society website.  

This will be an important event looking at mitigation measures for the Broads in the face of the potentially dramatic changes ahead.

Image: On the Broads, by Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license

#276: James Bradley on our collective futures

 

A powerful piece by James Bradley.

The storm that is upon us will leave nobody untouched. Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody — human and non-human — as worthy of life and possibility.

"The anthropologist and philosopher Deborah Bird Rose, who died in 2018, wrote of the impossibility of bridging the gap between our limited ability to affect what is taking place around ourselves and the cost of facing it.

Yet she also recognised that to turn our backs to it was also to turn our backs on ourselves. “To face others is to become a witness, and to experience our incapacity in this position.” It is also an ethical imperative, a way to “remain true to the lives within which ours are entangled, whether or not we can effect great change”."

#154: Natural History Reading List: #12: Professor Mark Maslin's guide to saving the world

One of the aspects of the blog will be to showcase people whose work should form part of any lesson thinking, or whose books should be on a reading list. The creation of that reading list will also be part of the work I will do, along with others.

Mark Maslin writes regular pieces for newspapers and works for UCL.

He is well worth following on Twitter.

His book here is of particular value as it is very easy to digest. 

It starts with a useful summary of the Earth.

I turned it into a short video for our Year 4 students to start their unit on the Earth. There are chapters on various earth systems which are important to consider when teaching about how the interconnections between nature are easily disrupted.

There is a need for some hopeful messages in the teaching this specification given the deluge of negative stories which seem to be developing every day. These will need to be part of the thinking.