Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Environment advocates have called for important migratory shorebird habitat off Tasmania to be declared ‘no-go site’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here The Albanese government has greenlit a contentious windfarm proposed for Robbins Island off north-western Tasmania, promising to impose conditions to protect threatened bird species, including the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot. The environment minister, Murray Watt, announced on Friday that he had approved an application by the renewable energy company Acen Australia to build up to 100 turbines, a 1.2km bridge between the nearly 10,000-hectare island and the Tasmanian mainland, a 500-metre wharf and four quarries. Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter Continue reading...

Survival International says Mashco Piro seen in nearby Amazon village in alarming sign group is under stress Members of an Indigenous tribe who live deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest and avoid contact with outsiders have been reported entering a neighboring village in what activists consider an alarming sign that the group is under stress from development. The sightings of members of Mashco Piro tribe come as a logging company is building a bridge that could give outsiders easier access to the tribe’s territory, a move that could raise the risk of disease and conflict, according to Survival International, which advocates for Indigenous rights. Continue reading...

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Feargal Sharkey back campaign to save the animal, which once inspired placenames, songs and stories When the Somerset Levels flood in winter, their reed-fringed waterways swell into a glinting inland sea – haunting and half forgotten. Generations ago, these wetlands pulsed with the seasonal arrival of eels: twisting through rhynes – human-made water channels – and ditches in their thousands, caught in baskets, sung about in pubs and paid as rent to Glastonbury Abbey. Today those same waters flow more slowly, more sparsely: once-teeming channels now show only the barest traces of what was here. Continue reading...

Volunteers are tasked with logging about 150,000 park trees by hand – and for some, it’s become a strange obsession On a recent morning, as the late August sun began to beat down, a few dozen New Yorkers stood in the shade of one of the nearly 500 trees adorning Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, worrying a bit about hurting its feelings. We had already identified the species – bald cypress – thanks to its feathered leaves and “strong pyramidal shape”, measured its trunk’s circumference (17in; 43cm), and noted that its roots appeared normal, its leaves were healthy and its branches had suffered some damage from improper pruning. But now we were tasked with assigning the tree an overall grade – on a scale of “poor” to “excellent” – and no one seemed to want to say. Continue reading...