Luxury London dry cleaners fined £10k for dumping chemicals in nature reserve
A pile of waste in Redbridge was found to contain blue dry-cleaning bags, cardboard boxes and plastic chemical bottles Source link
All posts tagged: nature
‘It’s a great healer’: why being outdoors in nature means so much to us | Wildlife
As a recent study revealed almost half of UK adults now spend less than three hours a week in natural settings such as gardens, parks, fields or woods, we asked readers to tell us about what being outside means to them. The replies – heartfelt and passionate – came flooding in, with some admitting they just did not have the words to say how important it is. “It’s my happy place, my therapy and a reason to slow down and pause during my busy week,” wrote Hannah Powell from Perrywood garden centres. “I HAVE to look at plants every day. I notice every change in the garden. I sit facing the garden for my breakfast. I look out for nature on the way to work (recently seeing a little owl, red kites, foxes, hares, and more). It helped me get better when I had burnout and FND in London. I wouldn’t (couldn’t) be without it.” A little owl on a tree trunk. Photograph: Images from BarbAnna/Getty Images “I am more fully human, my whole self,” …
Wealthy people with environmental ideals are the biggest emitters
Private jets are the most carbon-intensive way to travel Steve Allen / Alamy People who care the most about the environment also do the most environmental damage with their jet-setting lifestyle, at least among those with the highest income and education. But rather than being a critique of environmentalism, this finding shows that changing policy is more important than changing values when it comes to halting the climate and biodiversity crises, scientists say. “We do not want to suggest that individuals are solely responsible for their carbon footprints”, since low-carbon alternatives to activities like flying are often still hard to find, says Malte Dewies at the University of Cambridge, one of the researchers behind the new work. In fact, the term “carbon footprint” was popularised by BP to shift responsibility to consumers. It’s long been known that a person’s footprint tends to increase with their income. This study, however, brought personal beliefs into the equation. Researchers first asked 5000 people across Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US about their income, wealth, education …
Why Your True Nature Is Hidden From You
Do you surprise yourself, reacting emotionally to a colleague or family member more strongly than seems rational? Do you occasionally observe your own behavior and wonder why you just did what you did, even though you’ve tried many times to avoid that behavior? Or do you not do things that you’d repeatedly sworn to yourself you would do? If your answer is “yes,” welcome to the human race. At one time or another, we all observe our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors and go, “Huh?” There are multiple reasons why it occasionally seems that we are passive spectators of our own feelings and behaviors, rather than active drivers of them. One is that a particular behavior may require ultra-fast pre-conscious or unconscious processing. For example, a golf swing or the production of speech, where we lack the time to think about what each muscle should be doing while swinging a club or to consciously form individual words in every sentence. Another reason we surprise ourselves is that we store away so many experiences in our lifetimes …
How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens
Wherever you are reading this, look around you. Every living thing you can see – other people, pets, birds flying past, trees, flowers, mushrooms, fish – is here because of unions between different species. Classic cases are lichens (typically formed of algae and fungi) or corals (made of algae and animal components), but these examples underplay just how far and deep symbiosis goes. In my new book Togetherness, I make the case that symbiosis – which means “living together” – has been neglected in our explanation of biology and ecology. It’s not just that I think it’s a shame that its significance has been unappreciated; it’s that recognising symbiosis is vital to help us understand who we are and how we came to be. Complex life – all those things you see around you – exists only because of a deep form of cellular symbiosis, and all plants rely on symbiosis to grow and to produce all the food we eat. But this isn’t widely recognised. Since before Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, and even …
A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams review – what we get wrong about men and women | Science and nature books
According to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone gets sex wrong. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to minimise them, and to assume that nurture and socialisation play a decisive role. He wants to promote a more nuanced, scientifically rigorous public conversation about why and how men and women differ to guide better policymaking. Some sex differences are relatively pronounced, he claims, such as whether you’re primarily attracted to men or women, upper body strength, height, the likelihood you’ll murder someone and occupational interests. Many, such as ability in maths, or conscientiousness, are much more modest. Such differences are best visualised as two overlapping bell curves. To illustrate this, consider height: the shortest humans are almost all women, the tallest are men, the average man is taller than the average woman, but there is considerable common ground. Knowing that someone is 5ft 8in won’t enable you to guess with any confidence whether they are a man or a woman, for instance. A professor of psychology at the University …
Enjoy Three Hours of Free Nature Videos Narrated by David Attenborough
For your weekend viewing pleasure, enjoy three hours of David Attenborough narrating free nature videos from the BBC. Attenborough just turned 100 this month, and he’s still going strong! via Kottke If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks! Source link
People in the UK: why do you love spending time in nature? | Health & wellbeing
As summer comes and our gardens, parks and woodlands burst into life, many of us are heading outdoors. Scientific evidence shows how vitally important greenery and the natural world are for our mental and physical wellbeing. But access to outdoor space is limited for many who need it most, including a significant proportion of young people. We would like to hear from people about why they love being outside in nature. Do you have a favourite memory of being in the great outdoors from your childhood, or more recently, to share? Why do you think it is so important for people to spend time outdoors? Share your experience Please share your responses in the form below or by messaging us. Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will only use the data you provide us for the purpose of the feature and we will delete any personal data when we no longer require it for this purpose. For alternative …
Artists Tackle the Nature of Images, and Reality, in the Face of AI
Every time a tech company promotes an emerging technology like AI or the metaverse, the pitch sounds the same: a promise to “unleash” the imagination, or a new “immersive world.” When Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, its ad showed four people looking at Henri Rousseau’s Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, as it sprung to life and a portal opened before them. Four years later, when Meta debuted its Ray–Ban Meta smartglasses, the company touted its in-lens display and voice activation with an ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt looking at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, i.e. the banana, which Hemsworth promptly ate. What does it say about our collective consciousness that the direction of tech innovation seems to always lead to that scene in Mary Poppins, when the nanny and her wards jump onto a chalk drawing and end up in an animated world? That question lay at the center of several works performed at Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) earlier this month. Related Articles Located in what was once William S. Burroughs’s loft …
A classic psychology study on the calming effects of nature just got a massive update
New research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology suggests that watching videos of natural environments, such as forests, helps people recover from stress more effectively than watching videos of urban environments. The findings provide evidence that nature imagery can positively influence a person’s emotional state. This offers a simple way to support mental well-being in spaces where actual nature is out of reach. Scientists conducted this study to test the reliability of a highly influential experiment from 1991. That older experiment introduced the idea that simply looking at natural scenes could help the human body and mind recover from stress. Since the publication of that original paper, many hospitals, offices, and schools have used nature pictures to help calm people down. Agnes van den Berg, an environmental psychology researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, led this new collaborative effort. “Although the original study is still widely cited as foundational evidence that exposure to natural environments, compared to urban environments, supports stress recovery, it had never been directly replicated across multiple sites …