#667: Natural History Podcasts #10: 'As the Season Turns'

Thanks to Michelle Graffagnino for the recommendation to this podcast on the Facebook group.

It's presented by Alice Boyd.

"As the Season Turns" has two new episodes each month - on the first of each month there is a post from Lia Leendertz, who was mentioned in the previous post.

Later in the month, Alice speaks to someone.

In the August edition she visits Jackie Morris.

Jackie Morris has worked with Robert MacFarlane on a series of projects.

#665: Thought for the Day

“We should pay more attention to how we're treating our mountains, how we’re treating our world, how we’re just treating everything.

We’re just mistreating Mother Nature. That's, like, being ugly to your mama, you know?”

Dolly Parton (RIP)

#636: Alexander von Humboldt

Another in a series of posts on people who one would probably be worth discussing with students as part of the final course, because of their contributions to Natural History.

It remains to be seen whether this will actually form part of the final specification.

Alexander von Humboldt should have a place on any such list.

There is a very useful book on the life and work of von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf: a biography published in 2015 which won several awards. 

It outlines his pioneering work in a range of sciences, including the creation of 

Here's a short video from the Smithsonian which talks about his ideas, some of which were contemporaneous with other figures.

His first major expedition to South America began in 1799. It would last five years and what he 'discovered' and described there was to kick start his career.

.

& one from TED Education...

Von Humboldt was also credited with some of the early examples of infographics, which he developed.

#578: Deepdale Podcast

I am fortunate enough to live close to the North Norfolk coast. I used to live on the coast itself at Snettisham for 12 years which allowed me to cycle to the beach. 

On the edge of the village is Ken Hill, which has latterly become a venue for Springwatch and a regenerative farm.

The Deepdale Podcast is now live, and there are several posts which would be of interest.

#555: Changing banknotes

I've mentioned some of the wildlife that features on coins and bank notes previously.

Many countries feature wildlife on bank notes as part of the nation's heritage and culture.

Now we may get more wildlife on our bank notes.

Following a consultation. 44,000 people had their say on what themes and images they'd like to see on their notes.

60% of people picked nature as their preferred theme, and so the Bank of England are making a big change.

This suggestion has not gone down well with the Daily Telegraph.

Here's the announcement from the Bank of England.

#553: RGS CPD on Biodiversity

As we move to the next stage of the development of the new GCSE Natural History, there will be a need for teachers to receive CPD in a wide range of new skills and knowledge. This sort of event will be particularly helpful.

How do we protect nature in a rapidly changing world?

Join us on Tuesday 17 March to hear leading conservation scientists and researchers discuss how we can safeguard biodiversity for the future.

• Professor Nathalie Seddon – Professor of Biodiversity (University of Oxford)
• Dr Liana Chua – Social anthropologist and Associate Professor in Malay World Studies (University of Cambridge)
• Dr Joshua Elves-Powell – Associate Lecturer in Biodiversity Conservation and Ecology (UCL) and National Geographic Explorer

Chaired by Martine Croxall (BBC News)

Be part of an important conversation on conservation, climate and the future of our natural world.

Book here - very reasonably priced.

#544: 3-30-300

A framework for nature I came across via a map activity shared by Bob Lang.

It's an evidence-based guideline for how to integrate nature into cities so people actually benefit from trees and green spaces.

The rule of thumb provides clear criteria for the minimum provision of urban trees in our urban communities by setting the following three minimum requirements:

• 3 mature trees from every home
• 30 percent tree canopy cover in every neighbourhood
• 300 metres from the nearest high-quality public park or other green space

Simple. Measurable. Backed by research showing that proximity to nature reduces stress, improves mood, and has genuine health benefits.

How does your neighbourhood score on this measure?

I can see a great many more than 3 mature trees frm my home and am less than 100 metres from green spaces. 

Not sure of the overall tree canopy cover, but it's fairly high... 

Image: Holkham Meals - Alan Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license.

#541: Nature - by Royal appointment

Catherine: the Princess of Wales has shared the 4th in a series of videos as part of her personal journey with cancer, and sharing the power of Nature. 

It is called Mother Nature.

Here are the 4 videos so far:

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

#509: Go Jauntly into your Naturehood

Via LinkedIn.

Go Jauntly has teamed up with the National Trust.

#501: Green to Grey

Green to Grey tracks environmental change in the EU.

Here's the opening shots of the website which includes a wealth of information and imagery on environmental change. Would go well with Daniel Raven Ellison's 100 Seconds films.

The website has many stories and details of specific locations.

It was featured in this recent Guardian piece outlining the rate of change of the environment. We often talk about deforestation in the Amazon, forgetting that we are degrading the landscape here in Europe, and even more so in the nature-depleted UK.

Thanks to Alice Griffiths for the tipoff here.

#495: Monty Don on the Power of Nature

A 5x15 conversation with Monty Don. 

#493: Nature Cure

A Guardian article from late 2023 had a piece on what it called the 'nature cure'.

A lot has been made of the health benefits of being outside in nature rather than inside staring at a screen. This is supposed to 'save the NHS' hundreds of thousands of pounds every year by reducing stress.

Nature connectedness will be a major element of the new specification I would hope.

#487: Cley Spy

One of the aspects of the new draft specification is the suggestion that students are exposed to fieldwork which takes them to areas of interest locally. The cost of fieldwork visits will be one thing which potentially limits the uptake of the new specification. Locally based fieldwork, and on-site fieldwork guidance will be important here.

There are a number of excellent locations where students may be taken. 

If I was teaching in Norfolk again, I would aim to head for Cley Marsh reserve. We have previously taken students there from Ely to carry out GCSE fieldwork exploring the management of the land for habitats. The area has been expanded over the years with additional land purchases and they have an active education programme.

Cley Reserve has an important place in the history of conservation. This is partly explored in this article in KL Magazine (a local magazine that I read when it comes out).

A history by Kay Forbes explains how ther reserve started.

The Simon Aspinall Centre at the reserve was opened by Sir David Attenborough.

What other Norfolk locations would you recommend? 

And where are your own locations that you think would fit well with the subject?

Image: Alan Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license.

#464: Neil Ingram and Nowhere Wood

Check out Neil Ingram's blog which contains his Stories from Nowhere Wood.

Neil shares regular updates from his local patch and is also a contributor to the GCSE Natural History Facebook page. Why not join the 800 members to be ready for further updates from this blog and elsewhere.

#430: Myth busting nature as a block to growth

A piece by Joe Keegan for the Wildlife Trusts' website.

This follows Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer's recent comments and language used by those who seek to block road and airport projects...

Research by PwC found that 47% of the companies on the London Stock Exchange are highly or moderately dependent on nature. The assertion that protecting nature undermines economic growth is simply incorrect; nature is the bedrock upon which the economy is built. The findings of the Dasgupta Review reiterate this view, highlighting the significant economic value of nature.

Nature is not a block to growth.... 

#421: Natural History Reading List #22: 'Homecoming'

'Homecoming' is the latest book by nature writer Melissa Harrison. 

It is a chunky almanac-cum-diary which can be filled in over the course of a year, but started at any time.

After an introduction into the importance of engaging with the natural world, and the benefits to be gained by doing that, the book includes a monthly summary of what can be seen in nature and the weather.

This is followed by a diary type set of page where observations can be recorded, and a set of tick boxes of typical wildlife interactions that you might have in that particular month. There are note pages and other things.

While you should of course support your local bookseller, if you are on a budget, this is currently half price on Amazon.

My copy was published by W and N

It was purchased from Topping Books in Ely. Support your local 

Hardback, 320pp

ISBN: 978-1399618779

#420: The National Trust's Annual Review for 2024

This has been getting a lot of coverage in the news: the charity's annual review.

Each year the Weather and Wildlife Review looks back on how weather has impacted wildlife through the seasons at the places the National Trust looks after.

One in six species in the UK are currently threatened with extinction and we're seeing the impact that the climate crisis is having on both common and rare species.

The review shows that our changing climate has led to the slow loss of predictable weather patterns and how traditional seasonal shifts are causing chaos and confusion for wildlife and people.

The incremental shifts we’re experiencing in terms of our seasons extending may not feel like much in a 12-month period, but over a decade the changes are extremely significant.

Ben McCarthy: National Trust Head of Nature Conservation and Restoration Ecology

With 2024 declared the world’s hottest year on record, it signals a red alert for nature. As global temperatures rise, scientists have previously said that the UK is likely to experience a wetter climate. That reality is now playing out in real time, impacting landscapes, nature and the places we look after. 

Following record-breaking warm years in 2022 and 2023, 2024 was mild and very wet by comparison, with unsettled weather dominating forecasts across the UK in the past 12 months.

2024 has seen record-breaking warm and wet months as well as temperatures see-sawing from one extreme to the other within a matter of days. 

Storms, flooding and multi-hazard weather events bringing snow, rain and wind simultaneously in different pockets of the country have caused destruction and disruption. Unusual sightings in the natural world from across the year also act as warning beacons for what’s happening to our wildlife and seasons. 

#411: Encounter app - now available to download

I've been following the progress on Melissa Harrison's nature recording app since it was first announced. I was one of the beta testers of the app when it came out a month or so ago, and was excited at the features it offers and the ease of use and the opportunity to record encounters with nature easily, sitting alongside some of the other apps I have on my phone such as MerlinID to identify birdsong.

The app is now available to download, free of charge from the various app stores. This is a soft launch for the app. There is more to come, but any use you can make of the app will help generate data.

It is called Encounter (Nature).

It is a useful companion piece to her recent book 'Homecoming'.

As Melissa said in a recent email to those involved in the testing:

It’s not perfect. We still need to build the search function (weirdly, far more complicated – and expensive – than you’d think); there are some UX (user experience) niggles I am itching to improve; we need to build relationships with nature charities and environmental NGOs so that we can feature their content; and it’ll take a while until the nature tips and information it contains can be properly targeted to users by location: we need to wait for good numbers of people to tag the things they see before we can start turning that data into useful content. But I think we’ve made a really good start, and I hope you’ll stick with us as the app grows and improves, bit by bit.

This is Encounter’s ‘soft launch’. We hope to build our user base over the winter, ahead of its formal launch in April. That’s when we’ll be trying to get press coverage: when Christmas is over, spring is happening, and people are going outdoors again. I’d be very grateful for any help with that when the time comes.

For now, please download the app, play around with it and most of all, enjoy using it: that’s what it’s for! 

I built it to help people notice nature, and to get into the habit of jotting down the things they encounter. The benefits that flow from that simple habit are hard to overestimate: both to us, as humans, and to the natural world itself.

#383: Anticipatory History

A cross-posting from my GeoLibrary blog.

This is a book published by uniformbooks. It explores ideas of localness and sense of place. 

Anticipatory history is the present day really, where we explore our landscapes and bring them to life with stories.

Here's a review from the uniformbooks website.

In brief, various authors have been given free rein to elaborate upon a number of critical terms now at work in debates about landscape, ecology, climate change and futurology, ranging from the technical to the poetical, and from the instrumental to the epiphanic. Thus we get wonderful expositions on what is meant by Adaptation, Dream-maps, Entropy, Liminality, Memory, Rewilding, and Presentism, amongst many others—in fact fifty glossaries in all. The initial brief for this research endeavour was “to explore the roles that history and story-telling play in helping us to apprehend and respond to changing landscapes, and to changes to the wildlife and plant populations they support.” The editors rightly caution themselves and their readers against the dangers of instrumentalising the history-writing process, bending a reading of the past to suit the needs of the present and the future.

Not surprisingly forms of land ownership and its management and stewardship loom large. The short essay on ‘Commons’ rehearses Garrett Hardin’s famous essay on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, which suggested that self-interest will always ultimately defeat the social aims of things held in common. However, it doesn’t reprise historian E. P. Thompson’s counter-argument that in particular societies at particular times, a ‘moral economy’ is brought in to play to regulate private behaviour. It was also surprising—though perhaps there wasn’t enough room—that the entry on ‘Rewilding’ focused entirely on vegetative succession with no mention of the fearful ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’, nor of the proposal to re-introduce sea-eagles to the East Anglian shoreline.

Attention also gravitates towards the newer, more problematic landscapes which now require a fuller understanding of how they might be managed in the future: the ‘edgelands’ or ‘drossscapes’ produced by failed urbanisation or de-industrialisation. Are these settings just as valuable and worth conserving as farmed or so-called natural habitat? What was once called the search for authenticity in human existential terms, now applies to concrete and clay. Here the newer discourses of psycho-geography and psycho-biogeography are proving to be invaluable in summoning meaning and history from even the bleakest terrain (on such matters see the excellent entry, ‘Liminal zone’).

There are no settled positions on any of these matters any more, as the entry on ‘Enclosure’ concludes. Once upon a time open common land was hedged in and parcelled up into private lots, which had very bad social consequences. When, a century or so later, the hedgerows were uprooted in the name of industrialised farming, much of the flora and fauna using them as habitat disappeared. Now we are re-instating hedges again. “Perhaps,” the author of this entry concludes, “we might think of enclosure as an example of the human modification of land that slips from its moorings, and accept that each generation makes the enclosure it needs.”

The book contains words, terms and concepts that are completely new to me, including the book’s suggestive title, ‘Anticipatory History’. I had not heard of Rephotography before, nor ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ let alone ‘Palliative curation’. ‘Presentism’ I knew, but not how to pronounce it—and still don’t. Yet these elucidations are vital resources in the debates ahead about how we handle the transition from the past into the future, and provide a much-needed contribution to the crucial matter of ‘Inter-generational equity’.
A terrific and thought-provoking book.

Ken Worpole

#375: A reminder...

 

Introducing “carbon capture technology”.

(Otherwise known as “nature”) 🌳 https://t.co/CcgJ56BGNl pic.twitter.com/2tCJcU6bMl

— James Shooter (@James__Shooter) October 4, 2024