The Guardian News Independent Journalism on Telegram by GRT : Environment / Climate crisis / Wildlife / Energy / Pollution

Eighty tonnes of sand and junk: why Mona’s latest exhibition is destined to collapse in front of our eyes
Mirrorscape, an intricate sand sculpture by French artist Théo Mercier, is a ghostly scene of decay that resembles the aftermath of a disaster – or perhaps ‘a fossil from the future’

* Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

Théo Mercier, the French visual artist, choreographer and stage director, has spent months in Tasmania taking photos of junk.

In Mirrorscape, an exhibition that opened on the weekend at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), he and an international team of expert sculptors – Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Sue McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini – used 80 tonnes of compacted sand to recreate the scenes of decay and detritus he found, serving them as a mirror of our own ruin. It’s a ghostly scene of domestic, environmental and industrial decay in still life, and it’s beautiful.
Continue reading...

Sarah Aitken

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/feb/18/mona-mirrorscape-exhibit-theo-mercier-sand-sculpture

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

‘Biologists were not part of the crime food chain’: why Ecuador’s scientists are facing violence, threats and kidnapping
Despite government efforts, armed groups control many remote areas. Now researchers are caught in the crosshairs

Raul*, a biologist from Quito, has been leading conservation projects in the Chocó rainforest in north-east Ecuador for more than 20 years. It has not been easy, he says, recalling the threats he has received over the years for reporting illegal hunters and loggers in reserves, but he never considered giving up.

Last year, however, tensions in the area escalated after violence soared on the country’s coast. Accounts of almost daily killings in the cities of Esmeraldas and Guayaquil emerged as gangs appeared to fight over territory, while forced recruitment in rural areas increased, as did extortions, known locally as vacunas, or vaccines.
Continue reading...

Kimberley Brown in Quito

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/17/ecuador-crime-drug-gangs-scientists-violence-threats-kidnapping-national-parks

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

Country diary: An eruption of the most delightful, sociable ‘bumbarrels’ | Jim Perrin
Llandrindod Wells, Powys: Moving in joyful groups through the copse, long-tailed tits are admirably cooperative, the perfect paradigm of a mutually helpful society

Suddenly, out of the margins of a thorn thicket that surrounds the common, a flock of long-tailed tits, 20- or 30-strong, erupts into darting, swirling flight, borne along on a soft and eager susurrus of liquid call-notes. I love th ese little birds, so tiny, so vulnerable, so active, so tribally cooperative in their nesting and breeding, so charming in their twirling round the small branches of the copse.

In terms of size, without those long tail feathers this tiny bird might well rank as our smallest avian species, but the tail, which it folds over its head in the nest, gives a misleading impression of one of our absolute featherweights. It is truly minute.
Continue reading...

Jim Perrin

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/17/country-diary-an-eruption-of-the-most-delightful-sociable-bumbarrels

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

A tale of two suckers: Donald Trump’s plastic straws and Keir Starmer | Stewart Lee
The US president has scrapped paper straws because they allegedly ‘explode’ – a bit like the PM’s reputation if he keeps refusing to confront him on the big issues

It’s difficult to know whether to set any store by Donald Trump’s bleak and yet also often banal pronouncements, which read as if handfuls of offensive concepts have been tossed into the air by a monkey, read out in whatever order they landed and then made policy. Until it’s clear they can’t work. At which point, the monkey must toss again.

But this month, Trump, whose morning ablutions increasingly appear to consist of dousing himself in sachets of the kind of cheap hot chocolate powder I steal from three-star hotels, like a flightless bird stuck in the machine that glazes Magnum lollies, declared he wanted to build his hotels on the mass graves of Gaza. Hasn’t Trump seen The Shining? It won’t end well. Pity those whose children have the misfortune to die next to a monetisable stretch of shoreline. And hope humanity’s next wave of mass killings happens somewhere uneven and way inland that hopefully wouldn’t even make a decent golf course.

Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
Continue reading...

Stewart Lee

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/16/a-tale-of-two-suckers-donald-trumps-plastic-straws-and-keir-starmer

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

Cat person or dog person? It’s which animal we loathe that matters in the end | Andrew Anthony
A councillor’s alleged attempt to blow up a bird-prowling moggie reveals the pet-loving divide runs deep

The resignation last week of James Garnor, a parish councillor in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, may look like further proof of the maxim, established by the infamous Jackie Weaver lockdown meeting, that low-level politics produce high-level emotions. However, the cause of his undoing was nothing as trivial as democratic principles; it illustrates a far more profound question that, sooner or later, we all confront: are you a cat or a dog person?

Garnor, we may safely conclude, is not a cat person. He quit following allegations that he rigged up a bird table with a firework device so that it exploded when a cat paid a visit. The consequences of this shocking but non-lethal incident, which took place back in 2023, have only now come to a head, but it’s fair to say that, as anti-cat statements go, a remote-detonated IED is at the extreme end of things.
Continue reading...

Andrew Anthony

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/15/cats-or-dogs-antipathy-councillor-alleged-ied

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

Extreme weather is our new reality. We must accept it and begin planning | Gaia Vince
As wildfires, floods, droughts and record-breaking temperatures have shown, the post-climate change era has arrived. Now we need honesty and action from our leaders

Not yet a quarter of the way into this century and global average temperatures are already 1.75C above the preindustrial average. January 2025 was the hottest on record and has also set a record for the highest yearly minimum global surface temperature, and likely the highest minimum in the past 120,000 years. It is part of a clear pattern. Last year’s global average was 1.6C above the preindustrial – a sobering reality check, given that, only three months ago at the UN Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, leaders were still declaring that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C was within reach.

We are firmly in the post-climate change world now, and the serious implications of this demand honest acknowledgment. The reality is that we are living now in a time of continual disasters that are unfolding alongside our slower, planetary scale disaster. In this riskier time, we need to prepare.
Continue reading...

Gaia Vince

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2025/feb/15/extreme-weather-new-reality-wildfires-floods-droughts

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme

Country diary: My daughter says she’s seen a fawn – has she? | Kate Blincoe
Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: Muntjac deer mate all year round, so it’s quite possible. I take to the oak throne that we have on the farm, and scan the view

It’s a bright morning with a light frost sparkling on the meadow. The traffic noise from the nearby dual carriageway is louder than normal, oppressive in this rural scene. There are lots of deer prints here, the two toes making that characteristic heart shape. Roe deer and muntjac intermingled, making neat little paths, deer motorways, tracking through the field.

My daughter says she saw a fawn grazing here yesterday and, at first, I thought she must be mistaken – it’s far too early – until I remembered that muntjacs give birth all year round. And so I take to the large throne of a seat that we have here, hewn by my Dad out of a massive piece of oak. I climb up and perch on it, feeling small in its expanse.
Continue reading...

Kate Blincoe

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/15/country-diary-my-daughter-says-shes-seen-a-fawn-has-she

The Guardian Climate Change on Telegram by @TheGuardianTelegram
A @grttme project - Other backups: @Hallotme