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French President Emmanuel Macron warns ‘weeks ahead will be hard’ on visit to firefighting centre in the Gironde region
The life forms shaped by symbiosis; bringing sustainability into the boardroom; and a warning about wilder weather
The prince's warning comes as wildfires rage in parts of Europe and the UK during a spell of extreme heat.
The prince's warning comes as wildfires rage in parts of Europe and the UK during a spell of extreme heat.
Intensive nature of modern chicken farming creates ideal conditions for campylobacter, allowing bacteria to evolveIndustrial chicken farming is accelerating the spread of the world’s most common bacterial cause of diarrhoea, scientists have found.The study found a dramatic increase in the exchange of campylobacter strains between wild birds and chickens as farming has intensified, creating the ideal conditions for the bacteria to mix, spread and acquire new traits. There has also been a rise in antimicrobial resistance traits in circulating strains, raising concerns that serious illness in people will be more difficult to treat. Continue reading...
Experts who helped Burnham draw up Manchester carbon neutral pledge say backtracking would send wrong message amid wildfires and heatwavesLeading climate scientists who created Greater Manchester’s carbon neutral by 2038 commitment are urging Andy Burnham to unequivocally reject new drilling in the North Sea.In a letter to the prime minister they said he, as mayor of Greater Manchester, had unveiled one of the UK’s most ambitious local climate programmes that tackled housing, green growth and public transport. Continue reading...
As heatwaves make the capital increasingly dangerous, outreach workers warn that vulnerable people face barriers to finding water and cool spaces“You’ve just got to bear it. It’s like being in a hot country. It drains you,” said Tom*, a man in his 60s who has been homeless for a number of years. “I haven’t seen weather like this for as long as I’ve been outside.“I keep to my routines, but you need to find somewhere to sit down and rest. Either some cardboard outside or you find somewhere they’ll let you sit and sleep a bit inside,” he added. Continue reading...
With large areas still burning, damage from national park’s worst blaze could take decades, if not longer, to put rightIt is the jewel in the crown of the Highlands, one of Scotland’s most impressive natural landscapes, but 12 days on from the start of an enormous wildfire that is tearing through moorland and forest, the Cairngorms national park is unrecognisable.Hectares of blackened land were visible as low cloud cleared on Sunday, with smoke billowing into the air from large areas still ablaze. In the evening, the sky glowed an eerie orange. Continue reading...
Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night examines Earth Liberation Front, a US eco-anarchist movement, and its legacy of radical environmentalismAre echoes of 1990s radical environmentalism returning louder or fading away? It’s a question posed by Fires in the Night, a new book on the history of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a loosely grouped band of US Pacific north-west activists that used economic sabotage and arson to protest against environmental destruction.The members called themselves “the Family” and were known to the outside world as Elves, after the acronym for the group: ELF. Unlike rightwing extremists of the era, they practiced non-violence toward life, though not property. They were labelled domestic terrorists and practiced “leaderless resistance”. Continue reading...
At a time when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer, climate policies are being deprioritisedA new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth.The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...
From BBC drama The Rapture on the climate crisis to Apple’s Criminal Record on the rise of the far right, culture often sees what politics fails toIn the BBC’s new apocalypse drama, The Rapture, the UK is engulfed in a terrifying heatwave. I watched a preview of the programme in May, while preparing to interview the lead actor Ruth Madeley. I thought at the time: “This will be much more frightening when it chimes with the real life weather, bad luck for them that it’s not coming out for a couple of months.” But, by the time of meeting Madeley the following month, we were already in the middle of a heatwave that would lead to the highest ever recorded June temperature in the UK. The whole encounter made the show feel even more prophetic. She was in a central London hotel, air-conditioned inside, but all the door handles and surrounding street furniture – benches segmented by metal arm rests, to make life just that little bit harder for homeless people – had got way too hot. It was like playing The Floor is Lava, except instead of “floor”, “everything”. It surely can’t hit the screens at a more apposite time than this, I thought, failing to predict that by late July we’d be in heatwave number three, and France would be on fire.The Daily Mail’s reviewer was upset that Christianity was portrayed “as a bastion of anti-science nutjobs and fundamentalists” in the show, wondering rhetorically whether the BBC would ever create such a drama about a “Muslim imam”. Peculiar thing to get upset about, I thought, since the religion is really more of a symptom of, or even a garnish to, the central atmosphere of engulfing heat. It’s like complaining that cats get a bad rap in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno (yes, there is a cat in it). Continue reading...
