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@RobGMacfarlane
Wandering a medieval churchyard today—& found the yew trees had performed their own form of brass-rubbing on weather-worn graves, picking out the engraved lines with their dropped needles.
A dog, a cross, a name & a life made visible again by this chance-made needle-work.
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@RobGMacfarlane
“The future is not in oil,” Greenland’s government said, “The future belongs to renewable energy.”
Courageous & exemplary decision, just out, by GL’s government to abandon all future oil exploration (despite c. 18bn barrels of oil under west coast alone). bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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@RobGMacfarlane
“Once inside a wood, you walk on something very like a seabed, looking up at the canopy as if it were the surface of the water, filtering the descending shafts of sunlight…”
(Roger Deakin, Wildwood,
2007) twitter.com/KHefferon/stat…
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@RobGMacfarlane
Have any of the candidates for PM yet made any reference in their stump-pitches to nature/the living world/the biodiversity & climate crises?
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@RobGMacfarlane
Conservation good news: the collapse of California’s Mono Lake has been reversed.
How? Stream rehabilitation & limits on water diversions (cc @Feargal_Sharkey).
“The lake is now an inspiration for efforts to heal degraded ecosystems worldwide.”
💥 insideclimatenews.org/news/30102022/…
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@RobGMacfarlane
An open letter to @iberojetair_es @privilege757 @TitanAirways @ukhomeoffice
The UK-Rwanda deportation deal is re-traumatising, racist, & must be cancelled immediately.
Our message to airlines: rule yourselves out of the Government’s dodgy cash for refugees deal #StopTheFlights
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@RobGMacfarlane
“Only some 70 parliamentarians turned up to last week’s presentation on climate change led by Sir Patrick Vallance and other scientific officials. None of the Tory leadership candidates was among them…”. theguardian.com/environment/20…
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@RobGMacfarlane
It's #internationalmountainday.
A celebration of these deep-time-keepers, these perspective-givers, these spirit-lifters.
A recognition of the communities that live among them. And a recognition of their vulnerability.
Send photos of the mountains that mean most to you.
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@RobGMacfarlane
"Jay, Jay, plant me an acorn.
I will plant you a thousand acorns."
Jays have planted half the trees in two new English woodlands!
theguardian.com/environment/20…
Here's a spell from The Lost Spells by me & @jackiemorris celebrating the "bright-backed, blue-winged, forest-making Jay."
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@RobGMacfarlane
Pretty huge if it passes; under a draft plan, the US Treasury Department would tax several of the biggest emitters of planet-heating pollution to pay for the climate crisis.
That's $500bn in "climate damages".
nytimes.com/2021/08/04/cli…
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@RobGMacfarlane
Question: what was the last novel you read which left you feeling grief when a character or characters died?
Still so strange to experience, this magic trick that fiction can pull of causing us to fall into love, friendship and hate with beings of ink & paper.
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@RobGMacfarlane
“When the Dark comes rising/Six shall turn it back…”
I wrote today about the Midwinter power of Susan Cooper’s great novel & the experience of adapting it over the last year with the great @SimonMcBurney & @Complicite.
Starts on @bbcworldservice 20/12
❄️
theguardian.com/books/2022/dec…
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@RobGMacfarlane
I'm a signatory to this letter to the Times today, calling for the Lords to vote down the #PolicingBill on 17 Jan.
If you want to add your voice, you can:
* Email yr MP or a Lord abt Part 3 of PCSC Bill
* Sign Liberty's petition opposing Bill:
action.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/page/78339/pet…
Pls RT twitter.com/KishWidyaratna…
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@RobGMacfarlane
Superb essay dismantling the “biological deserts fallacy”; the perception that cities are barren of wildlife/nature.
I’ve spent years arguing against this idea.
Tell me the wildlife of your city/town.
Mine, Cambridge: peregrines, bee orchids, grass snakes…e360.yale.edu/features/urban…
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@RobGMacfarlane
To young children, nature is full of doors — is nothing but doors, really — and they swing open at every step.
What we call landscape is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell & substance; place is somewhere they are in, not on.
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@RobGMacfarlane
Johnson’s government’s sustained deplete-and-degrade approach to the teaching of the creative arts/music at secondary schools continues.
This time with the removal of a “ring-fenced” £270m fund.
NB decline in uptake of arts subjects at GCSE & A-level.
Via @PrivateEyeNews.
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@RobGMacfarlane
Number Crunching
@PrivateEyeNews
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@RobGMacfarlane
The state of England's rivers is a disgrace.
@WildJustice_org is taking the regulator @Ofwat to court for its perceived failure to monitor & act on sewage discharges.
There's a fundraiser underway to support this. 👇
Pls spread the word, follow @WildJustice_org
Change must come. twitter.com/WildJustice_or…
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@RobGMacfarlane
Hello—as my followers tally hit 200k this morning, thought I’d send a note of thanks to you all for the generous, community-making conversations, sharing & debates that happen here.
Twitter doesn’t have to be a cesspit, even if our rivers are rn…
Here’s to kindness & long views.
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@RobGMacfarlane
Ah...the Hardy Tree has fallen today in London.
An ash tree, of course; the World Tree.
Hardy stacked gravestones around it 160 yrs ago––like the leaves of a circular book––after the dead of those graves were exhumed for the railway.
Life-in-death-in-life.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/d…
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@RobGMacfarlane
The Disasters Emergency Committee has launched an appeal for Ukraine; individual donations will now be matched by the UK Government through UKAid, up to an initial £20,000,000.
So e.g. £100 given becomes (with Gift Aid) £225 received by @decappeal.
Spread the word.
👇👇👇👇 twitter.com/decappeal/stat…
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@RobGMacfarlane
My Dad won the "Botanical" category of this year's Scottish Nature Photography Awards with this brilliant, defamiliarising image of a lichen-hung rowan tree near Glen Affric.
Like a medieval tapestry.
Coverage: bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…
Fascinatingly, he's red-green colourblind.
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@RobGMacfarlane
On street trees & climate crisis:
"Trees are, simply, the most effective technology we have to guard against heat in cities."
& so good to hear a city tree manager say this:
"our default position is, you don't take out big trees to put in small trees."
nytimes.com/2021/07/02/cli…
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@RobGMacfarlane
“We’ll use this one step back as two steps forward. This isn’t just going back to the status quo. We’ll ensure that we have better access to the countryside.”
👊👊👊
The protest against the Dartmoor decision will be peaceful & relentless.
Watch this space! theguardian.com/environment/20…
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@RobGMacfarlane
I found everything about this essay deeply depressing, from the brutal ecological asset-stripping of Nauru by high-income countries, to the imminent, unregulated wrecking of the abyssal plains of the oceans.
Nevertheless, it needs reading.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
@RobGMacfarlane
Books: Is A River Alive? (WIP) Underland, The Lost Words, The Old Ways, etc. | Films: River, Mountain, Upstream | Nature, climate, people | Prof @Cambridge_uni