Canada geese tend to get a bad press. As Simon Barnes says in a column for a recent Spectator, “… they’re noisy, filthy and polluting and far too efficient at breeding.” Barnes adds that he rather admires them for this. After all, they are rather like us. For more on geese generally, and our relationship with…
The Guardian website carried an evocative article last week that originally appeared in the Manchester Guardian in March 1916. It begins, “The sun went down a huge ball almost blood-red in colour, and so vast that half the heaven in the west seemed to be covered. As it sank, all that remained of this ruddy twilight…
The deadline for making submissions to the House of Commons Education select committee enquiry into the purpose and quality of education in England has now passed, and you can find all the written evidence on the committee website. A significant section of the evidence provided had a focus, one way or another, on outdoor learning,…
The Bumblebee Conservation Trust says that a foraging bumblebee with a full-stomach is only ever about 40 minutes from starvation, so “help feed bumblebees”, it says. Here’s an informative 10 minute video on YouTube about what plants to grow in the garden. It’s full of information about how vital bees, in general, are to our food…
Margaret Bates, professor of sustainable waste management at the University of Northampton, allowed the BBC go through her rubbish, weigh it out and chart its journeys from her home to various points near and very far. The results are revealing. After it is collected, Margaret Bates’ waste is sent to firms which specialise in different…
Spring has arrived, if you are a weather forecaster, as it starts on March 1st, whether or nor the sun is hot or snow is thick on the ground. This always comes ahead of the spring (vernal) equinox, which is popularly said to be the 21st March – next week. This is when we (non-weather…
Planet Earth is a free magazine aimed at the public with an interest in the environmental sciences. It’s available on-line here, and requests for a print version (available for UK subscribers) can be made here. It is a rich source of up to date information and ideas, and the pictures are wonderful. Every school should have this in their…
Here’s a lively, if a little breathless, video from Barts hospital in London about their successful attempts to be more sustainable; that is, to save money and work more effectively for patient health. The numbers are impressive. Barts have made savings of £9.2m and 48,511 tonnes of CO2. The video blurb says that sustainability in the NHS is…
The 2nd Interdisciplinary Conference: “Getting Connected to Nature” will be held at the University of Derby, on 15 June. Submissions are invited around the core themes of the conference: • Improving links between research, policy and practice in this area • Latest research and perspectives on: – the benefits of a connection with nature –…
The Geographical Association, and SSAT, are offering professional development in critical thinking and problem solving, through the new British Council Connecting Classrooms programme. This ‘Teaching the core skills’ training package gives primary and secondary teachers of geography or history the knowledge and approaches they need to effectively integrate the teaching of core skills in their…
Environmental Education Research [EER] has published a paper from the USA on practitioners’ perspectives on the purpose of environmental education. You can download it here. The Abstract says: Since the 1980s, scholars have suggested that environmental education (EE) has a ‘definitional problem’ represented by a multiplicity of perspectives that have critically impacted its discourse, practices,…
We recently carried a guest posting from Geoff Guy about the enclosure of land and the benefits to environmental and outdoor education arising from more recent legislation open it up again through the ‘right to roam’. If you are interested in the enclosures, then you might like A Short History of Enclosure in Britain by Simon Fairlie which is published in the Land…