Category Environment

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When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard review – the Indiana Jones of trees returns

The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with an inspiring call to the next generation of ecologists

It’s 2021, and Suzanne Simard is in a police vehicle, being escorted off a protest site in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, where activists are locked in a standoff with the Teal-Jones Group, an industrial logging company. She decides to give the apprehending officer a piece of her mind – in the way only an earnest Canadian forestry ecologist can. “It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands,” she tells him. “We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundreds of years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees celsius.”

The officer is unmoved. But if you were responsible for one of the nearly 6m views tallied on Simard’s 2016 TED talk, you’ll know it was worth a try: few people can speak about trees with quite as much conviction as Simard. One part Indiana Jones, one part Mister Rogers, she is a Canadian national treasure and global environmental icon. When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galapagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon. In her TED talk, she describes once sprinting through the forest with a syringe filled with radioactive isotopes in each hand as she is chased by a grizzly bear.

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‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

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How can we really protect Britain’s environment?

Well-intentioned laws designed to safeguard nature frequently have the opposite effect

The importance of protecting nature is not up for debate. One in six species in Britain is threatened with extinction. Since 1970, more than half our flowering plants have decreased in areas where they once thrived. In the 1950s, Britain’s hedgehog population was 30m strong. Now, it is believed to be under a million.

All this demands action. The problem is that a lot of the action we’ve taken – mainly in the form of legislation – fails to target the biggest drivers of nature loss. Instead, it bites when we try to build: wind turbines, solar farms, railways or nuclear power plants, making their construction lengthier, more expensive or, in some cases, impossible.

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The best science and nature books of 2025

From the threat of superintelligent AI to the secrets of a longer life; plus the evolution of language and the restless genius of Francis Crick

This felt like the year that AI really arrived. It is on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way we learn, work and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate giants vying to control it.

But the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (Bodley Head), by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths … out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery Christmas reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, you’ll finally grasp all that tech bro lingo about tokens, weights and maximising preferences.

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Could urban farming feed the world?

From back gardens to hi-tech hydroponics, the future of food doesn’t have to be rural

In 1982, artist Agnes Denes planted 2.2 acres of wheat on waste ground in New York’s Battery Park, near the recently completed World Trade Center. The towers soared over a golden field, as if dropped into Andrew Wyeth’s bucolic painting Christina’s World. Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation was a challenge to what she called a “powerful paradox”: the absurdity of hunger in a wealthy world.

The global population in 1982 was 4.6 billion. By 2050, it will be more than double that, and the prospect of feeding everyone looks uncertain. Food insecurity already affects 2.3 billion people. Covid-19 and extreme weather have revealed the fragility of the food system. Denes was called a prophet for drawing attention to ecological breakdown decades before widespread public awareness. But perhaps she was prophetic, too, in foreseeing how we would feed ourselves. By 2050, more than two-thirds of us will live in cities. Could urban farming feed 10 billion?

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Should we treat environmental crime more like murder?

Serial killers and violent criminals dominate the headlines. What if we covered ecocide and pollution in the same way?

Whenever you read, watch, or listen to the news, you’re likely to be exposed to stories of violence and murder. As a criminal psychologist, I’m often asked to comment on these cases to pick apart the motives of the perpetrators. People want these kinds of insights because murders feel frightening and horrifying, but also oddly compelling. There’s a level of focus and fascination, and the way these crimes are covered profoundly influences our perception of what the most urgent problems facing society are.

One day it struck me that the world would be a very different place if environmental crimes were treated in the same way as murders. So, why aren’t they? And should they be?

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If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that’s smarter than a human being will kill us all, somehow.

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Why antibiotics are like fossil fuels

They helped create the modern world but are dangerously overused. How can we harness them sustainably?

In 1954, just a few years after the widespread introduction of antibiotics, doctors were already aware of the problem of resistance. Natural selection meant that using these new medicines gave an advantage to the microbes that could survive the assault – and a treatment that worked today could become ineffective tomorrow. A British doctor put the challenge in military terms: “We may run clean out of effective ammunition. Then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.”

More than 70 years later, that concern looks prescient. The UN has called antibiotic resistance “one of the most urgent global health threats”. Researchers estimate that resistance already kills more than a million people a year, with that number forecast to grow. And new antibiotics are not being discovered fast enough; many that are essential today were discovered more than 60 years ago.

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Look up: five hopeful novels about the climate crisis

Can fiction make us more optimistic about tackling Earth’s environmental emergency? These eco-focused books have hope at their core

‘Can literature be a tool to encourage something better – creating eco-topia on the page, so it might be imagined off it?” asks the novelist Sarah Hall in this weekend’s Guardian magazine. Climate fiction – or “cli-fi” – continues to grow as a genre in its own right; the first Climate fiction prize was awarded this year. And while the roots of environmental fiction are in apocalypse and despair, these five writers are moving beyond dystopia to hopeful possibilities.

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Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels

Environmental fiction is booming – but can it move beyond dystopia to a brighter vision of the future?

Nearly a quarter of a century ago when I published my first novel, Haweswater, about the impact of dam-building in north-west England, nature writing felt quite different, at least for me. Several landmark novels about climate apocalypse and survivalism had been published, including Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, but there was no imperative to write about such things. These stories involved anomalistic catastrophes – a mutated virus, nuclear war – and they were very bleak. They resonated but also seemed unusual. At the other end of the scale, Ben Elton’s Stark had comedically outlined the nature of oligarchic greed, resource consumption, and the ruination we were hurtling towards, while the Bezos and Musk equivalents could head off-world – not quite so funny now.

The public knew about climate issues, though terminology often stressed them individually – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, desertification, coral bleaching – rather than total Earth systems breakdown. Disparate, visionary science fictions didn’t indicate a genre movement yet. There was a luxury of choice regarding stories related to nature – no elephant in the room (or polar bear), if you didn’t tackle climate-change concerns.

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