ENVIRONMENTAL: UK Government agrees to protect forests

Campaigning / petitioning group 38 Degrees have announced success in their long-running campaign to 'save our forests'...

Yesterday, after months of deliberations – we have the final, official word from the government that they will do what more than half a million of us asked them to – and protect our nation’s forests for good.

 Congratulations! We’ve really, truly, won.  It was a political defeat, and victory for people power they never saw coming.

In late 2010, the government announced a plan to introduce a new law to allow all publicly owned woodlands to be sold off in the future.

The government might have expected a few predictable protests, but there was nothing predictable about what happened next.

• 538,107 people signed the 38 Degrees petition
•  More than 100,000 of us contacted our MPs
•  We funded an independent poll, which found 84% of the public wanted our forests in public hands
•  Thousands raised nearly £60,000 to pay for ads in national newspapers
•  More than 30 local campaigning groups sprung into action around the country
• Over 220,000 of us helped spread the word on social media

When the government finally did admit they got it wrong, they promised to set up an independent forestry panel to advise them on what should be done next.

Again, 38 Degrees members sprang into action:

Read on.....

MATTHEW WILLIAMS SENT THIS: Wikileaks and the bee conspiracy

While the WikiLeaks media frenzy may have been focused on the release of tens of thousands of classified military and U.S. State Department documents, it's a leaked Environmental Protection Agency document that has conservationists, environmentalists and beekeepers abuzz.

The November 2nd memo, leaked to a Colorado beekeeper, indicates that the EPA was well-aware that the pesticide Clothianidin posed some serious risks to honey bees. There have been concerns about this chemical from as far back as 2003, and it's already been banned in Germany, France, Italy and Slovenia because of its toxicity. But the EPA chose to sweep all that under the rug to keep the pesticide on the market.

Clothianidin, marketed as 'Poncho' by Bayer, is widely used on corn, as well as canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers and wheat. As if the $262 million cash crop from last year wasn't enough, Bayer wants to keep expanding the pesticide's use. And the company's original registration was based on some seriously flawed science: they evaluated the wrong crop, with the wrong controls to assess the impact on bees.

This all adds up to some serious questions about the government contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder as they knowingly allowed Bayer to poison bees. And this is about a lot more than honey production ... native habitats and as much as one third of America's food supply rely on the pollination provided by bees.

In light of the leaked memo the National Honey Bee Advisory Board, American Beekeeping Federation, American Honey Producers Association, Beyond Pesticides, Pesticide Action Network North America, and Center for Biological Diversity sent a letter to the EPA requesting that the agency 'take urgent action to stop the use of this toxic chemical.'

The letter goes on to point out that this new information indicates an overuse of the Office of Pesticide Program's conditional registration programme. This bee boondoggle 'represents a failure that could and should have been avoided.' As a result the coalition is calling for an immediate moratorium on these types of registration until the programme is evaluated.

There's still a lot we don't know about Colony Collapse Disorder and the massive bee die-offs it's been causing. One thing we do know is that bees are in trouble, and that's not good news for all the animals (and humans) who rely on the plants these important insects sustain.

Join the call for the EPA to stop the sale of Poncho and conduct a thorough study into the pesticide's impact on wildlife.

See:
http://animals.change.org/blog/view/wikileaks_uncovers_government_bee_killing_conspiracy

REPORT: Stranded dolphins in Australia

TIM MATTHEWS: Environmental Concerns

Tim Matthews is one of my best friends, and also - coincidentally - one of the most controversial figures in contemporary forteana. He has been involved with the CFZ for nearly a decade now, raising eyebrows wherever he goes.

Everybody's bothered about the environment, right? You sit there in a massive queue of holiday traffic bemoaning car drivers and how there are too many of them (wrong type of drivers in the wrong type of cars) and then you visit some rare, ancient or historical site and further damage it for years to come. We want clean water but shove tonnes of pollutants down our sinks not to mention using a host of cleaning products that certainly damage our planet over a period of years.

Harsh? I should say so and we're all guilty of it.

Sometimes, to ease our consciences, we join one of the "make you feel better about it" organisations like Greenpeace or the WWF. And, sometimes, these organsations actually do some good. For example, as I write, pressure from the WWF and allied conservation groups has managed to get Russian oil and gas engineers to stop seismic testing underwater as it affects the gray whale, a critically endangered species.

The Sakhalin Energy company, backed by Shell and Gazprom, has agreed to stop working for a brief time, to give the remaining 35 females a chance to breed, in an area just off the Sakhalin shelf by Piltun bay. Mind you, BP and Exxon still want their workers to operate in the area and they have not agreed any deal with environmentalists yet.

Recently, I was in a bookshop with a friend of mine and she said, "I love looking in old natural history books but the shame of it is when you look at the listing they're often full of animals that are extinct or serious danger."

We often sit idly by, wondering what we can do. Surely we can do more than send twenty quid to some campaigning group? Wouldn't we prefer to do something by ourselves? Imagine all the energy and effort required to make a small impact on big business. The first thing surely must be to get our children and immediate families a little more interested in natural history. What is happening in their own gardens, what can be done to encourage insects and other animals into them, what easy steps can be taken to limit their own impact on the world around them. Some of it is easy and can be done today in the house you live and some of it is down to politicians and big companies in whom we can only have marginal trust.

It is up to you to decide what to do but the best ever slogan, and call to action, must surely be, think globally, act locally. How the CFZ fits into this remains to be seen but I suspect that we all know what we should do.

THIS is why we have to get political

Over the past few days there has been some debate on these pages about whether politics should be discussed. Party politics will never rear its ugly head on Cryptozoology:Online. However it does behove us to get more political, even militant when faced with news like this....

January 2009. The three-year battle to save West Thurrock Marshes from destruction suffered a massive set-back when the Court of Appeal judged that the decision to build on the site was lawful.

One of the three most important sites for endangered wildlife in the UKWildlife charity Buglife took Thurrock Development Corporation to Court on the grounds that it had failed to protect the Marshes - rated as one of the three most important sites for endangered wildlife in the country with 17 protected species. The proposed warehouses and car parks will destroy up to 70% of the flower-rich habitat, home to many of these species including the Brown-banded carder bee. The case is the first legal test of recent biodiversity protection laws.


You can read the rest of the article HERE


This is dreadful news and shows the current British Government up in their true colours: exploitative cynical operators who put their own selfish needs, and the needs of their lickspittle cronies before anything else. They may be dressed in the clothers of caring, sharing New Labour but it is still Capitalism Uber Alles, and as far as I can see it always will be.

Now, boys and girls the Government, and in particular our beloved leader launched the following initiative recently:

Welcome to the Number10 YouTube channel. This is where you'll find exclusive films and features from Downing Street and the British Prime Minister.NEW: The Prime Minister has launched a regular initiative, 'Ask the PM', where he will be responding to the most popular questions submitted by the YouTube community. Submit videos on this channel by clicking the gadget to the right.

You can find out more HERE

I strongly suggest that as many readers of this blog as can go to this page and ask Gordon Brown whether he is a cynical despoiler of the environment or merely a crass idiot?