Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Former and current NFL and WNBA stars are ushering in a wave of athlete-farmers who see farming as a greater mission When Jason Brown speaks to schoolchildren, they clamor to hear about his seven-year NFL career. A mountain of a man who stood six-three and weighed 330lbs in his prime, he excelled at center – gridiron speak for the innermost lineman who initiates offensive plays by “snapping” the ball between his legs to the quarterback. Brown entered the draft in 2005 after standout years at the University of North Carolina. He quickly gained a reputation for being a human plow who relentlessly cleared pathways for some of the game’s best. He got paid well for it, signing a $20m free-agent contract with the St Louis Rams in 2009. At 26, he was the position’s highest paid player in the league, and he bought the toys to show it: the MTV Cribs-style house, the flashy cars to match. Continue reading...

Here are some of the standout images from the 2024 Nature Conservancy Oceania photo contest. The 2024 contest saw close to 2,000 entries from photographers in Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea Dead native birds and flying foxes found in SA town home to one of world’s largest lead smelters Continue reading...

Campaigners want rethink of national policy because of ‘wasteful knock-it-down-and-start-again approach’ Campaigners are calling for planning rules to consider the environmental implications of knocking down buildings after a controversial redevelopment of Marks & Spencer’s historic store on London’s Oxford Street was given the green light by the government. Save Britain’s Heritage said national policy should consider the embedded carbon linked to a site when considering its future and prioritise reuse of historic buildings amid the climate crisis alongside issues such as preserving important architecture. Continue reading...

The overwhelming majority of Europeans support climate action, but they must be compensated for its costs in tangible ways This year was not an easy time to be Green. Green parties took a beating in June’s European elections, with their seat count plummeting from 71 to 53. In national elections they haven’t fared much better. The Green party was nearly wiped out in last week’s general election in Ireland, losing all but one of its seats after having been part of a coalition government. At the same time, climate-sceptic parties framing environmental policies as elitist and unfair have surged across the continent. In Germany, for instance, the far-right AfD owes some of its electoral success to its rallying cry against an emerging “eco-dictatorship”. Björn Bremer is an assistant professor of political science at Central European University and a John F Kennedy Memorial fellow at Harvard University. Jane Gingrich is a professor of social policy at the University of Oxford. Hanna Schwander is a professor of political sociology and social policy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. They are all co-conveners of the Progressive Politics Research Network, whose findings are published here Continue reading...