Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot make short film on the climate crisis

Carbon cycle and climate

The climate is warming fast around the World due principly to human industrial development that has caused a new loop to be added to the carbon cycle; one of our planet's major mineral and energy cycles. The new loop, which was absent until fossil fuels started to be burnt, causes reserves of carbon held deep underground to be released into the atmosphere. The burning of these fuels, starting with coal and ending with gas, has raised atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations which has effected the insulation and thickness of the atmosphere that traps heat energy which enters it; just like how a thicker duvet will trap more body heat. Heat gets into the atmosphere from two sources - not only from the sun (as has always been the case) but also from burning of fuels in the industrial era. The question is what can be done about it. This is the subject of much debate internationally within the IPCC, UN and within environmental organisaitons and universities. Mitigation and adaptation are both required. Sea level rise is occurring. Mean Pacific sea temperature is rising and species are going extinct 1000 times faster than the background rate of extinction without human impacts. Meanwhile political interests with multinational corporations are creating unhelpful system of alliances which include the media - which seek to confuse, delay and derail those measures so urgently needed and desired by international civil society. Meanwhile local weather patterns across the World, species migration patterns and species reproductive cycles have become often drastically interrupted and disrupted - contributing further to the rapid decline in global biodiversity. Other unhelpful aspects of the current situation remain ongoing wars over the control of oil fields, explored or to be discovered. Since 2001 the most positive political agendas of the late 1990's have nearly all been dropped from the international political agenda, kept alive now within NGO and UN bodies. This includes aspects of keeping to UN deadlines on halting losses to biodiversity, reducing cost of medication in developing countries and keeping to UN climate treaties e.g. Paris accord, Kyoto protocol and targets to introduce renewable energy and substitute fossil fuels for biologically derived and ecologically sustainable energy sources. The ongoing "war on terror" which itself is an infinite oxymoron, will eventually yield to a movement of people of the world who yearn to put their nationalities behind them in the humanitarian mission to find sustainable ways to live with their families in democracies linked through the UN. What is interesting about the "national interest" (so long confused with an industrial corporate agenda) is that it often blocks the pathways by which citizens of the world can learn to exist sustainably in just and peaceful societies.

research interests

* Biodiversity mapping & surveying
* Biodiversity monitoring
* Biodiversity Action Planning for farms
* Community Links To Land
* Releasing agriculture from fossil fuel dependence
* Comparison between organic, biodynamic and permaculture methods
* Effects of grazing on biodiversity of grassland habitats
* The efficiency of food production with or without livestock
* Use of farms as local education catalysts for the arts and sciences

The Conservation Conversation

I am interested in conversations around molecular ecology, environment and evolution.

Where to start? Well how about the molecular reality we are living in! Each one of us consist of about 200 billion cells living in metazoan community. Each cell contains millions of macro-molecules recognised as part of the biochemical cyctoplasmic metabolism. Each protein may chaperone or direct the reactions of thousands of much smaller molecules which form part of the earth's natural atmospheric, aqueous and mineral environment. These small molecules criss cross between the dynamic context of membranes between cells, tissues, individuals, populations and the abiotic and biotic factors of our planet. Due to counterbalancing positive and negative feedback effects, subtle changes to the concentrations of any of these components can effect large or micro changes to the overall balance of these systems - at vastly differing scales. Understanding how these processes have contributed to evolution may enable us to better conserve the diversity of species we share our beautiful planet with.

Ecology as a branch of biological science

Here is a link to a document I once wrote for some Masters Students who had all done Arts degrees but were interested to find out more about the scientific method.

Ecology as a branch of biology

It has occurred to me that my training as a field biologist has given me a particularly science focused idea of what the word 'ecology' actually means. To me it is simply the science (by which I mean nothing more sinister than the study of) relationship. And since it is living organisms which relate in the most complex ways, ecology is therefore about answering fundamental questions about the nature of relationship, and complex relationships at that - for example between species in a food web, or between sources and sinks within an elemental cycle such as the Carbon or Nitrogen cycle. Equally it could be a greater or lesser scales, from living molecules and their interactions within the complex ecosystem of a single cell, or cycles of energy, nutrient and mineral flux between habitats, ecosystems and biomes.

Education for Sustainable Development

2014 sees the culmination of the work of UNESCO's International Decade for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Rural Arts In Science Education is an attempt to bring ESD from the classroom into school grounds, sports fields, allotment sites, parkland, farms, smallholdings and woodlands. see www.raise-education.com