Southampton water in the snow

South Devon Coast

just some nice pictures taken on a crisp early Autumn day in South Devon

Big steps

It is easy to moan that nothing will change until consumers demand that it changes, but sometimes it takes a a big company to say 'we wont wait - we'll do it' to drag everyone along with them; usually though it needs to be a VERY big company to actually make a real impact.

Proctor and Gamble makes Pringles, Bold, Crest, Iams, Olay, and lots and lots of other products you probably buy all the time (or maybe assiduously avoid). Regardless, it's the world's largest consumer products company, and this week, it revealed an ambitious "new long-term vision": It plans to eventually run on 100 percent renewable energy, use 100 percent recycled or renewable packaging, and send no waste to landfills.

Large companies have made bold promises in the past, but this is extra bold. What's encouraging, though, is that P&G has committed to incremental, 10-year targets along the way. The company is aiming to get 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, for example. It will take a while for it to get there, but P&G deserves credit for setting the bar where it should be: up at 100.

(retweeted/aggregated/lifted/nicked from Good

The Government Responds...

Earlier in the year I signed a Surfers Against Sewage petition on the No 10 website urging the government to do more about marine litter. "Volumes of marine litter are dramatically increasing year after year. Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) has successful marine litter campaigns targeting manufacturers, mobilising large-scale grass roots direct action and increasing public awareness on this ever-worsening problem. However, with each new high tide comes a new marine litter line impacting on our beloved beaches and surf spots.

Current anti-litter legislation such as The Environmental Protection Act 1990, MARPOL and the Port Waste Reception Facilities regulations are not providing the levels of protection needed for the coastline.

SAS believe that marine litter is coming from a wide variety of sources, including; beach users, sanitary related debris, industry, and fishing. SAS and other environmental NGOs have found that almost 70% of this litter is plastic. Plastics have a devastating impact on the marine environment over a long period, as well as economic impacts on local communities and the fishing industry.

As an SAS supporter, I urge you to implement a National Marine Litter Strategy to combat this worsening issue and help protect our coastlines."

And their response....a we're not doing much, and will continue to do not much.... or as they put it;

"The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the government department responsible for the marine environment and recognises the importance of tackling marine litter to achieve the Government’s vision for ensuring our seas are clean, healthy and safe. Defra’s strategy for dealing with marine litter encompasses a range of national, European and North East Atlantic initiatives.

Within the UK, it is against the law to drop or throw litter anywhere in the open air, including beaches, and Defra already supports a number of initiatives to reduce litter including providing funding to support Keep Britain Tidy which runs the Blue Flag and Quality Coast award schemes in England, and Fishing for Litter - a Defra funded project to land and dispose of litter caught up in fishing gear in SW England. This pilot project has recently been expanded to include the port of Appledore in North Devon.

Defra’s ‘Charting Progress 2’ report, an integrated assessment of the state of UK seas, to be published this summer, draws attention to the limited evidence available regarding the problems litter can pose for habitats and species in the marine environment. The wide range of sources, number of entry pathways, ease of transport by currents and wind, as well as insufficient knowledge on the impacts of litter in the sea, make it a complex issue to address.

Marine litter has also been highlighted in the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008). All Member States, including the UK, are required to put in place a programme of measures by 2016 to ensure that ‘properties and quantities of marine litter do not cause harm to the coastal and marine environment’ by 2020. The European Commission has appointed a group of experts through its Joint Research Centre to review the current research on the impacts of marine litter and consider possible indicators for monitoring and assessment. This report has just been completed and is being used by the Commission as a basis for developing methodological standards and criteria which Member States will use as a basis for assessing the scope of the problem, with a view to putting in place any measures that may be necessary.

Defra considers that the framework set out by the Directive offers the best opportunity to consider what action is necessary to tackle the problem of marine litter. As one of the next steps in taking this forward Defra is hoping to explore the issues associated with marine litter in a workshop to take place this Autumn. We will be inviting key stakeholders and hope that you will attend to represent your organisation."

amazing volcano

apropos of nothing - just some stunning photography on this blog

is all plastic all bad?

One of the things that stuck me most in my previous blog, about Subaru's zero-landfill plant in the US, was their use of re-usable plastic boxes that suppliers were obliged to use when sending components to the factory. The simple idea was that using robust packaging all but eliminated the need for wooden pallets and in particular, cardboard - both of which are relatively fragile, generate a heavy carbon footprint to produce and create a voluminous waste stream.

Through my work I recently visited two supermarket distribution 'hubs' (both terrifyingly huge, airport terminal sized monsters), but they both had an employee, gloriously titled Environmental Champion, responsible for ensuring that all that could be done, was being done. I was there to help them re-cycle the unavoidable number of wooden pallets they use, but I was impressed by the amount of heavy-duty plastic crates they now use for many of their products. The producers co-own the boxes with the supermarket; sharing costs and responsibility and in a stroke eliminating a large waste management cost for both companies.

This is all very well hidden in the back loading dock where fickle customers don't see them, but it's become increasingly clear that even green-minded consumers think all plastic is bad. And this is a deep and complicated problem that is at the core of our waste problem. There's a lot more to this but I'll let the following article, in the gruniad back in March, explain....

Riverford Organics, one of the largest vegetable box schemes in the UK, has suggested it may move away from cardboard packaging and towards plastic. In this week's note to customers, Guy Watson at Riverford says that plastic boxes could reduce the carbon footprint of the company's packaging by 70%. He strongly hints that the company wants to move to plastic immediately but is frightened of the reaction of customers.

This issue is an important one. Householders continue to see plastic as wicked and paper-based goods as benign. But when considered over the entire life of the packaging, paper and cardboard embody far more greenhouse gases than their plastic equivalents. Paper products take substantial amounts of energy to make. Crushing a tree down into small fibres, mixing the wood pulp into a slurry and then passing the wet mass through huge rollers cannot be done without use of enormous quantities of power. Making paper and cardboard is almost certainly the third largest industrial use of energy on the planet. By contrast, plastic is light, durable and its manufacture is generally not particularly energy intensive – at least by comparison to paper. A second concern is that many paper and cardboard products, probably including Riverford boxes, end up in local authority landfill, where they rot down anaerobically, creating the greenhouse gas methane in the process. Plastic, as is well known, doesn't rot and sequesters its carbon for ever.

Guy Watson's company delivers its products to homes in cardboard boxes that can be returned to the delivery driver the following week. Watson says that the boxes are designed to last for ten delivery cycles before being recycled. They typically only actually survive four outings before they are lost or made unusable. Because these boxes are 'free', the householder doesn't look after them properly. As a result, about 10% of the total carbon footprint of the business is derived from making and recycling the boxes. This is about the same figure as the carbon cost of shipping the Riverford vegetables to the local distribution hubs. If I have done the calculations correctly, the carbon cost of its boxes would be greater than plastic replacements even if they did actually last 10 cycles and were never used, as the company says, 'to let the dog give birth in'.

85% of our packaging footprint is made up of paper and cardboard yet our customers are very happy with this packaging; virtually all negative comments on packaging relate to plastic punnets and bags which contribute only 8% to the footprint.

It is the customer who is stopping Guy Watson and his colleagues using long-lasting plastic for any form of packaging, not economics or carbon accounting. Watson despairs of getting householders to understand the true environmental cost of paper goods and one can only sympathise as he demands government action to force suppliers to recognize and account for the full cost of packaging.

We all need to understand, far better than we do now, that anything that doesn't last – like paper for packaging – is almost certainly a far greater problem than an almost infinitely recyclable plastic crate. Yes, of course, plastic is an increasingly serious litter problem, in the UK and elsewhere. But it is not a significant cause of CO2 pollution compared to paper.

As a devoted customer, my suggestion to Guy Watson is that he pushes ahead with plastic – perhaps only with customers who agree in advance – and gives us a small price reduction but imposes heavy deposits on each plastic crate left on our doorstep each week. If we don't leave the box out next week, we get charged. Painful, but there is nothing like a punch in the wallet to get people to change behaviour. In the longer run, a 'closed loop' recycling system using plastic crates is infinitely more environmentally sustainable than one based on cardboard boxes.

Subaru's zero-landfill car plant

I blogged about this remarkable achievement - from an unlikely industry - some months ago, but my swish new design rendered it unreadable, so here it is again. The original was by Sara Snow on treehugger.com

There is a Subaru plant along a stretch of I-65 that you can't miss if you happen to find yourself about an hour north of Indianapolis, travelling toward Chicago. It's a 2.9 million square foot facility (with 3.4 million usable square feet including a second floor) that covers over 70 football fields. It's big, but I can't say that this particular plant looks all that different than any other from the outside.

But get inside (they offer a 90 minute tour) and you'll learn that not only was it the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to achieve zero-landfill status, but they took that to heart and have gone a lot further.

I learned a great deal as my husband and I toured through the facility under the leadership of their master guide, Tom Elgin, but it was when we sat down with the manager of safety and environmental compliance, Denise Coogan that how hard they work to go beyond expectations really became apparent.

Subaru is a Japanese automaker, a country where they're often thinking ahead of us because they simply don't have the space for landfills. It was from the top down that the zero-landfill directive came. So the plant set to work figuring out new uses for their trash in order to achieve zero-landfill status.

Their three biggest waste sources have always been steel (it's a highly valuable recyclable, so there's no problem in getting rid of that), cardboard (also easily recycled), and pallets (which are also recycled). While they found that it was easy enough to find ways to recycle or re-use this type of trash, they wanted to find a way to cut down on the amount of trash they were producing in the first place.

Originally 30% of their waste was paper from the bathrooms and cafeteria. That all went to an incinerator where it was burned and turned into steam energy. And though that met the requirements for a zero-landfill facility, it wasn't good enough for the higher-ups at SIA (Subaru of Indiana Automotive); they wanted to do better. Now they use biodegradable paper products (some made from corn) and have set up two 90 gallon composters behind the plant where the paper products and other food scraps are turned into nutrient dense soil that employs can come and pick up for their own gardens on weekends.

One of the other biggest contributors to their waste stream was all of the shipping materials their suppliers used when shipping various parts in. So SAI started providing their suppliers with big plastic bins that they could fill with parts and ship back. The bins, much like the ones you use to store out of season clothes or old sports equipment in your basement, can be used over and over again, cutting down on the need for disposable shipping boxes.

They found that their single largest energy expenditure came in the form of the 4 air compressors used around the facility. Though the air itself can't be recycled per-se, it can be used more efficiently. Through a series of checks and balances they were able to cut down to 2 air compressors, which cut their energy costs literally in half.

They even made changes to the paint application process. They use a water-born paint now, which is much less toxic than the old type. And their application process has an 85% efficiency, up 30% from the old application method. A company just east of Chicago reclaims the paint runoff.

At SAI, their belief is that waste is just a raw material with a next use that hasn't yet been discovered. Discover that use, and it's no longer waste.

The same was the case for the additional land where the plant resides. Wasted land? Definitely not.

The plant sits on 836 acres but the manufacturing facility only uses about 500 of those acres. The remaining 300+ acres have been turned into dedicated wildlife zones. In fact, there's a pond, right in the middle of the test track, that serves as a blue heron sanctuary and a bald eagle migration zone. Pretty remarkable.

fawley before the leak

oil leak closer to home

not as big as what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, but I was interested to read this on Guido Fawkes' blog as it is directly opposite 'our' beach. To state the bleeding obvious; oil and water just don't mix.

"The Environment Agency have been called to Southampton to investigate a leak in a pipeline controlled by American oil giants Exxon (Esso to Brits). It is believed this Yankee oil could be seeping into the English channel. Will the coalition now embark on a sustained trashing of Exxon’s share price? Guido can’t quite see Dave going round demanding to know “whose ass to kick”.

UPDATE : Exxon have got in touch:

In view of your latest blog and comment that oil could be seeping into the English channel, please find attached a statement from Esso on the spill last night at Fawley marine terminal. The amount of oil released is estimated at 20 barrels.

Statement 5 – Oil Spill at Fawley Marine Terminal

Monday 21 June 2010

We can confirm that at 9.20 pm on Sunday 20 June there was a release of oil from a pipeline at the company’s Marine Terminal at Fawley.

The incident happened whilst a ship was being unloaded. The offloading was immediately stopped and the pipeline valve closed. We are collecting
any residual oil from the leak site until the pipe can be drained completely. The amount of oil released is estimated at 20 barrels.

We immediately deployed our local oil spill response procedures and informed the Harbour Master and the relevant environmental agencies."

why are clean beaches important?

Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

Simple and appalling - use the map to enter your home town and then get the scale of the spill in perspective.

http://www.beowulfe.com/oil/

the price of good beaches

Last week's Tonight programme on ITV was titled 'how safe is your beach?', and proceeded to investigate the cleanliness of sand and water on our nations beaches - particularly those rated 'good' that turned out to be 'bad'.

Tonight does have a habit of reducing important issues to sub-tabloid levels of hyper-sensationalism, but it was pretty well balanced and didn't get too over excited despite the use of a lot of rather nebulous stats. What exactly does a "one in seven chance of getting sick" really mean? Am I really going to get sick every seventh time I go swimming? I do worry that alarmist stats like that actually numb the viewer into a general sense of unspecific unease without helping to really press the case. We don't want people to avoid the beach - just take more care of it.

As clean beaches are the basic raison d'etre of this blog I was delighted to see the issue on prime-time, even if there was a definite sense of deja vu. The Beeb's Panorama covered the story in slightly more graphic style last year from Surfers Against Sewage's perspective and Tonight's version didn't raise much that was really new. They were obviously sparked by the release of the MCS' annual Good Beach Guide, which is a curate's egg of a thing, as the BBC website reported with a blindingly confused title, "More UK bathing beaches have excellent water quality than last year, but pollution has worsened since 2006, the Marine Conservation Society says. It rated 421 of 769 beaches as excellent - 33 more than 2009, but below the 505 rated highly in 2006."

I'm afraid that if you're being harsh that synopsis really reads as 'Some of Britain's beaches are a bit better than last year but they're mainly still shit'.

I did enjoy the part of the programme where the reporter gave the Environment Agency spokesman a deserved kicking and the poorly-chosen spokesman for the water industry twitched and flinched through the interrogation and just made his clients look as culpable as they undoubtedly are.

The idiot from the EA made the statement that you were 'more likely to drown on a beach than get sick from the water', which the reporter quickly informed us was rubbish - actually there's a one in a million chance of drowning versus the vaunted one in seven chance of getting sick. The man from the Agency quickly disappeared up his own fundament with gibberish phrases like 'I'm not sighted on that intelligence' and firmly proved that the EA has no control over the water industry it is supposed to police (it lets them record and reveal how often they pump poop into the oceans without any oversight), and worse, that its senior officials are happy to blurt out made up stats.

So here we are again. Another pretty good bit of TV that highlights a serious problem and reminds us how dangerous uncontrolled utilities companies can be, but what will actually happen to improve the situation, particularly in relation to allowing untreated sewage to be vented into the sea?

SAS reports that there are over "4,000 unregulated Combine Sewer Overflows (CSOs)" in the UK which are overflow pipes which release excess 'fluid' into the sea when the storm drains overwhelm the sewage system. The water industry seems reluctant in the extreme to do anything to prevent or even reduce the practice, but in a country where it has been known to rain a bit, it seems unbelievable that this 17th century practice is still so prevalent.

SAS are maintaining their pressure (see their article here), but they acknowledge that it will require more action to see significant change.

What no-one asked is why raw sewage has to be pumped into the sea at any time? What are the alternatives and why aren't they happening or being made to happen? The age-old argument that it's a problem of the the antiquated infrastructure that the water companies inherited can't be sustained any longer. Surely they should be obligated to find a way of keeping storm water and sewage separate. With BP having to shoulder responsibility for the toxins they're releasing into the Gulf of Mexico, so too should the water companies take responsibility for their mess.

From an economic point of view, the water companies' major costs are tied to the volumes of water that they have to treat - thus CSO's provide a handy reduction in sewage that they have to process, reducing treatment volumes and therefore costs. Just as a bye-the-bye, I read that Severn Trent Water has reported a 19% increase in profits to £541m for 2009/10 and

South West Water's pre-tax profits have risen by almost 9% over the past 12 months.

Profits went up by 8.7% to £132.5m.

A quick wild under-guesstimate.

4,000 CSOs each releasing 100,000 litres each stormy day (I imagine it's a lot more given that an Olympic pool holds 2.5 million litres), and guess that there are a minimum of 30 stormy days a year? Equals a rough 12,000,000,000 litres. Or a little over a European billion.

Even if you wildly under-guesstimate the amount of merdre being released by the CSO's around the coast, it adds up to a frightening amount of crap that really has no business being there at all and a huge saving to the companies' shareholders.

What to do? Simples as the meercat would say. Install flow metres on every CSO and charge the responsible company per litre that is released. Fair discounts will apply for the ratio of water to poo, but a base of 50p per litre would make the companies move pretty quickly I'd imagine (£6 billion by my spurious maths).

Reasons why not? None I can see.

Chris Huhne

Chris Huhne is the MP covering our much maligned beach in Hamble and I have met him on a couple of occasions regarding environmental issues. As a constiuency MP he was excellent - dealing with my requests swiftly and writing to the Minister in question (then labour) and letting me know how the follow up went.

And now he's Energy Minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and as the Gruniad comments, he has the experience and power to make 'cleantech' a viable way forward for the government....

"At the risk of sounding like a mini Alan Sugar, what the Department of Energy and Climate Change needs now is to get business savvy.

We've had just about all the bureaucracy we can stand with the likes, as worthy as they are, of the Carbon Trust's carbon labelling schemes and the Carbon Reduction Commitment. To keep DECC relevant, what we need now is an effective green investment bank to hand out smart loans swiftly to support projects for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

We also need government to help businesses, especially in the engineering and manufacturing sectors, to save energy and innovate with clean tech products via small loans and tax rebates. In addition, companies investing in renewable energy production need clarification on the Renewable Obligation Certificate subsidy system quickly.

The arrival of Chris Huhne as energy minister at DECC is a good sign. He is aware of the investment needs of cleantech and, after his stint in the City as vice chair of ratings agency Fitch, he'll know how business and investors work, and hopefully how the department can work with them.

Unsurprisingly, RenewableUK has told me it is "delighted by the proposal of the coalition government to increase renewable energy targets". But Richard Gledhill, global leader of climate change and carbon market services at PwC, took a more reserved stance, explaining: "Chris Huhne… has got to keep the lights on and to keep energy affordable, at a time when public expenditure is going to be under huge pressure."

We will no doubt see an upward trend to energy prices as a result of various climate change levies, and DECC will have to be fair and transparent about how the money will be raised and where it is going.

There is also a need to deal with EU carbon pricing realistically. If the carbon price is to be useful to compliant businesses it needs to be more stable and to rise predictably; but that's a matter to be dealt with at the European level, and will take time. Part of this shift may involve supporting a 30% reduction in EU emissions by 2020, to lower the emissions cap.

His experience in the investment community will make Huhne more likely than most to spot the wise bets in clean energy. His more challenging task may be in overcoming the political obstacles along his way."

The guardian sustainable business section also reports here on more from Chris and the new green government...

bluebell woods

cutting across country to avoid jams on the M5 has its rewards

Guido’s Advice to Newbie MPs

I regularly follow Guido Fawkes' political blog - not because I agree with is right-ish/libertarian sentiments - but mainly because he pulls no punches and skewers left and right equally.

So I am happy to cut and paste his advice, and warning to the new batch of MPs; whoever their leader might maybe.

"First day for a couple of hundred or so new MPs today. The thrill of looking for a new office, excitement at your new status, a slight sense of disbelief that you pulled it off. Congratulations, well done.

Here’s some advice. Read the Green Book, it is your responsibility to know the rules. Better still read the Shadow Kelly Report on reforming the rules and best practise, there are copies in the House of Commons library. Screw up and try to use the excuse “I thought it was within the rules”and you’ll be unemployed after the next election (which might be sooner than you think).

Don’t claim for a single thing that you don’t want to see on the front page of your local constituency newspaper.

Why are you in parliament? If it just to climb the greasy pole of power (and for many of you it is) well nothing Guido says is going to influence you. If you have ideals, hold onto them, resist all baubles and temptations that might lead you to abandon those ideals. Being a backbench MP who influences legislation for the better is a worthy if not so glamorous role.

Finally, never forget Guido and his co-conspirators will be watching you. Step out of line by doing the wrong thing and we’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks. Be seeing you…."

Eneropa

And the interesting (wacky/clever/could that work?) ideas are coming thick and fast at the moment - and it's another Euro architect who has caught my eye.

The gruniad reports that maverick architect Rem Koolhaas has wiped out a couple of millennia of history and re-drawn the national boundaries of Europe along sustainable energy lines. The article is nicely Utopian and as As Reinier de Graaf, the partner in charge of the proposal, says (I suspect with his tongue in his cheek): "Megalomania is a standard part of our repertoire."

The graphics make tasty food for thought.

Organic seaweed farm powers bio-hydrogen airship

How can you go past a headline like that?

Regular readers will know that I have a love of both quality sci-fi and sensible environmental solutions to our planet's travails, so this idea from Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut ticks all my boxes..... except perhaps the one marked simple and quick to install. But why pick holes with an idea that includes airships powered by seaweed. That's got to be ace hasn't it? Briefly, Monsieur Callebaut has dreampt up a sustainable air-cargo ship/office block that is powered by renewable bio-gas from fast-growing organic matter.

The full story is here on treehugger and whilst it is easy to dismiss as a mad scientist's flight of fancy, it does show the kind of integrated big thinking that is needed - not just for practical advances covering several problems at once - but in setting an engineering agenda too. And it looks super-cool to boot.

Change - yeah yeah blah blah

Tomorrow the UK goes to the polls to vote for change. Or for more of the same. All the parties are claiming that they are the only true agents of change, but really this is like a choice between takeaways; all are superficially tasty with the promise of fulfilment, but bad for you in the long run. Burgers, pizzas or chips - that's the choice - there's nothing radical on offer like vegan, Nepalese or macrobiotic - not even a basic vegetarian option. Nothing that might be hard to stomach to begin with but that is ultimately healthy and life-boosting.

And we've heard it all before Obama said 'Change' and everyone was filled with joy and a new dawn emerged. Frankly being African-American was change enough and it showed that the most blighted political landscape could be changed radically without him even having to sign a bill into law. The fact that he's gone on to be true to his word on big issues like healthcare ensures that he'll be rightly remembered for far more than his skin. We don't have such a candidate - they all say 'Change' and we say 'yeah yeah blah blah.'

The media is slathering that this has been the most exciting and extraordinary campaign in decades, but also point out that even with the emergence of Nick's Liberal Democrats, none of the three leaders are telling the electorate anything they don't want to hear. Like details of the fact that the country is going to have to undergo some very nasty belt-tightening that means none of us are going to feel better off for years. They're not saying that vital investment in environmental development will surely be slashed and that we're all in for a grim old time.

As with politics stateside, there's precious little obvious difference between the parties' policy-wise so we end up electorally lashing out at them all - "a plague on both your houses". The LibDems have done well purely because they are the only ones who haven't been in power since Prime Ministers had big moustaches and MPs wore fob-watches. They're agents for change simply because the other two haven't let them play with the ball since the first world war.

I always used to joke that I'd vote LibDem for a bit of a giggle - it would be funny to see them in power - but the joke is on me now as they do have a good chance of wielding power of some kind and are really the only ones with the chance to deliver some kind of change. Even if it's token gestures here and there. And there's the rub. Until we the people really get involved and demand change as a set of tangible, measurable actions then we'll get the government we deserve and be back here, on the eve of another election, with even less of a choice than before. The prospect of a hung parliament is the opportunity that activists (supine or otherwise) have to grasp and enforce real change, real fairness and real action.

So change will surely come with the new government, but it's not an Obama-esque hope-filled change we might wish for (there's no-one with his charisma standing here); it's a change like The Who sang about...."meet the new boss, same as the old boss....won't get fooled again". Will we?

Duh! story of the day

Just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

This is a charming story on the BBC website that really is a 'you don't say!?' story and apparently "There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being." Who'd have thunk it?

"In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem. The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.

The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail.

The biggest effect was seen within just five minutes.

With longer periods of time exercising in a green environment, the positive effects were clearly apparent but were of a smaller magnitude, the study found.

Looking at men and women of different ages, the researchers found the health changes - physical and mental - were particularly strong in the young and the mentally-ill.

A bigger effect was seen with exercise in an area that also contained water - such as a lake or river."

I'm not sure what is more worrying - the fact that Mind, the excellent mental health charity, thought that it was necessary to conduct a study of the bleeding obvious (is water wet and fire hot?), or the fact that the Environmental Science and Technology journal found it necessary to point it out to the world. It is a sad, sad day when people are unaware that getting out into nature makes you feel better.

On the flip side - hooray for publicising the outdoors to glum people. I know that even a short burst of mother nature always heals me.

I love a good oil spill

Simon Barnes, writing in The Times today, makes the point that no one can really argue with...it's a silly way to live.

"I love a good oil spill. With a really good oil spill, every possibility of ambiguity is vanquished. With an oil spill, there really is no “on the other hand”. An oil spill is plainly, unremittingly, remorselessly dreadful. I love a good oil spill because there is not a single good thing that can be said about it.

I’ve been to one. I was in West Wales when the Sea Empresswent down in 1996. The sweet smell that hung in the air wasn’t even unpleasant, just hideously unnatural. A scent that told you fast as intuition that the world was out of joint.

I saw three or four ducks flying over the roofs. If you were any kind of birder you could feel the awfulness of this event. These ducks were scoters, sea ducks, and they never, ever, fly over land. Their minds had been scrambled by the terrible things that had happened to the place they live in.

On the beach I saw another scoter swimming along gamely. It was up to its neck. This was a duck, for God’s sake, the most buoyant thing on the planet, and it was going down with all hands, going down even as the stinking black treacle oozed on to the shore. No one, human or duck, could be in any two minds about the matter. It was awful.

It is even more awful as the great slick slithers across the Gulf of Mexico and starts to devastate the coast of the southern United States. I’ve been there, too. I saw brown pelicans, majestic aeronauts with comic-book beaks, and roseate spoonbills, bright pink birds with a beak like a ladle. Both species, along with many others, are going to cop it from the oil.

We have a dreadful oil spill, and we say, oh, this is dreadful, and dreadful it is. And then a few years pass and we have another one. We don’t seem to be making much progress. In the United States, they had the spill from the Exxon Valdez as far back as 1989.

You’d have thought that any country would do anything to stop such a thing happening again, but here it is, happening again. It’s a different format of disaster — this is a rig, not a ship — but it’s the same old oil, and it’s here for the same old reason: because safety precautions are insufficient. It is more important to get oil than to stop occasional wallops of it polluting the world.

These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction to oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment — oil at any price — is madness. Treasure this spill: it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

We crave oil as the junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.

It threatens the continued existence of brown pelican Pelecanus occidentalis, roseate spoonbill Platalea ajaja and human beingHomo sapiens. Perhaps it’s time we did something about it.