Category: Direct Action

A Climate Hole in One in Spain

Golf courses are notorious for being awful for the environment and as a place that ruins otherwise good walks. Spanish Extinction Rebellion members have had enough of local golf courses consuming vast amounts of water for an elite sport while the world literally burns. The water golf courses use can be better used in nature, for crops, or for people to drink. Good on XR Spain for taking some direct action and calling out the horrible practices of golfers.

XR said it wanted to point out the “cynicism of continuing to allow this type of elitist leisure while Spain dries up and the rural world suffers millions in losses due to the lack of water for their crops.”

Spain has been in a long-term drought since the end of 2022, with conditions exacerbated by soaring temperatures. In April, temperatures in the city of Córdoba reached 38.8 degrees Celsius (101.8 Fahrenheit), the highest April temperature ever recorded in mainland Spain. And in late June, temperatures soared to more than 44 degrees Celsius (111.2 Fahrenheit) in parts of the country.

The drought has had far-reaching impacts. Some reservoirs sunk to less than 10% of capacity, millions of hectares of crops across the country have been lost and some towns and villages have been forced to to rely on trucked in water.

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No Mow May No Mo’?

Maybe, maybe not. It’s the end of May and hopefully you haven’t been mowing. The No Mow May campaign encourages people with lawns to let them grow during the month of May to let insects and other critters thrive. This makes sense, and if you have a lawn then you still let it go during May.

If you’re fortunate enough to have access to land that you can alter to your preference then you may want to think about what plants you have. The best solution to help the planet and make your life easier is to plant native plants.

“There’s so much good intention out there,” she explains, but No Mow May oversimplifies the complex relationships between native pollinators and the plants that support them. “(There’s) all of this misinformation that comes from not understanding what a native bee is versus a non-native bee, what a native spring plant is versus a non-native spring plant.”

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Instead of ditching our lawn mowers, Sheila says we should learn more about native pollinators and plants in the places we live and how they help one another in nature. Last year, she co-wrote a bookalongside writer, editor and community advocate Lorraine Johnson that unpacks the complexity of native pollinators and how to create habitats that support them.

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An Interview with a Cat

cat

Those frisky felines are at it again! This time one of them is dishing out advice on how to improve your working life by communicating and acting with others. Jorts the cat is a Twitter celebrity that helps students understand their rights and workers understand theirs too. The key thing about the effectiveness of Jorts is not only that he’s a cat but that he communicates the struggle of modern American workers in a way that the average person can understand.

AG: In your year of public activism, you’ve been a source of information for many, especially around workers’ rights. Why is this important to you? 

JTC: Especially in the United States, many workers do not know their basic rights. For example, we have a legally protected right to talk about our wages, yet forbidding that is a widespread ‘policy’ in many workplaces. In truth, it is against the law to retaliate against workers for talking about their wages. 

Everyone needs to talk about their wages, because so often there are big discrepancies for no real reason. These gaps are especially large comparing white men to any other demographic. (If you’re a white man, you especially should talk about your wages.)

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Don’t Move to Paradise, Make a Paradise Instead

A man in New Zealand thinks it’s better to create your own piece of paradise than to move to a natural one and just taking it over. Back in 1987 Hugh Wilson moved to a neglected part of the country where the natural environment was not doing well and has since turned it into a veritable paradise. He did so by respecting and encouraging native plants and using a permaculture approach to cultivation. It’s great work and very impressive! Not only did he set out to save a small part of the world, he also wants to encourage everyone to make a small piece of natural paradise in their own space too.

The incredible story of how degraded gorse-infested farmland has been regenerated back into beautiful New Zealand native forest over the course of 30 years.

Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced ‘weed’ gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry – the plan was the sort to be expected only of “fools and dreamers”.

Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best – and that he is no fool.

Puffinling Patrol Save Baby Puffins

In Iceland puffins get help from humans who volunteer on the Puffling Patrol to ensure that the little birds can thrive. When baby puffins, known as pufflings, hatch they usually head to the sea from their nests on shore, but when bright lights are nearby they’ll go towards the light. To get these pufflings away from dangerous lit areas like roads, factories, or other human made structures volunteers escort the birds to the water. It’s adorable and helpful.

They’re part of the Puffling Patrol, a Heimaey volunteer brigade tasked with shepherding little puffins on their journey. Every year during the roughly monthlong fledging season, kids here get to stay up very late. On their own or with parents, on foot or by car, they roam the town peeking under parked vehicles, behind stacks of bins at the fish-processing plants, inside equipment jumbled at the harbor. The stranded young birds tend to take cover in tight spots. Flushing them out and catching them is the perfect job for nimble young humans. But the whole town joins in, even the police.

No one knows exactly when the tradition started. Lifelong resident Svavar Steingrímsson, 86, did it when he was young. He thinks the need arose when electric lights came to Heimaey in the early 1900s. Saving the young birds likely began as “a mix of sport and humanity,” Steingrímsson tells me in Icelandic translated by his grandson, Sindri Ólafsson. Also, he says, people probably wanted to sustain the population of what was then an important food source.

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