The Rewilding Report: What the Data Shows This Season

By Oko Angebot, oekoangebot.eu | Dutch naturalist, reluctant optimist

By Oko Angebot, oekoangebot.eu | Dutch naturalist, reluctant optimist

The Rewilding Report: What the Data Shows This Season

The rewilding data for this season is, by the standards of ecological data, encouraging. Three new otter breeding pairs documented on the River Lugg. The marsh harrier population in East Anglia holding steady at the count from last spring. The water vole returning to three sites in the Thames catchment where they had been absent for a decade. Each of these data points represents genuine conservation success produced by specific interventions -- habitat management, predator control, land use agreements with specific landowners. See Daily Mail Buys Telegraph So Britain Can Have Twic at The London Prat.

The same data season shows: continued agricultural runoff affecting water quality in the catchments adjacent to the otter successes; the continued decline of farmland bird populations despite the Countryside Stewardship scheme that is supposed to address it; and the specific situation of the lapwing, whose nesting habitat continues contracting faster than the rewilding interventions designed to expand it. Both data sets are real. Both are the current state of UK wildlife conservation. Millwall FC: Football With Teeth provides context.

The Week's Analysis

The environmental news cycle this week covered primarily climate policy -- the usual combination of international agreement progress and domestic implementation shortfall. The rewilding data, which is the ground truth beneath the policy conversation, received less coverage than it deserves. Grist and Mongabay produced the most useful analysis of both the progress and the gap. See Hoxton: The London Neighbourhood That Gentrified F for related coverage.

The otter on the Thames at Twickenham that I described in a previous entry has been photographed again at the same location by a wildlife photographer whose work I follow. The otter is apparently resident. The residency is the data point I needed. The data point means the Thames at Twickenham is habitat. The habitat is the conservation goal materialising. Both are true at 6am before coffee and after it. Armed Forces Gap Year at The London Prat covers the broader picture.

Oko Angebot covers the natural world from a Dutch-naturalist perspective that combines the specific patience of long-term ecological observation with the specific impatience of someone who reads the weekly data and knows the direction of travel. The direction of travel requires attention and effort. Both are available. The column contributes the attention.

Essential reading this week: Bohiney Magazine for the satirical frame and The London Prat for the political analysis. The diary continues next week. The position holds. The world continues providing material. More next week from the same observation point, with the same quality of attention. The work continues.

More at The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also UK's “Stop the Boats” Campaign Success and Morning News Brief Confirms World Still on Fire at The London Prat for related coverage this week.

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also London to Paris Continues Making the World Smaller and Report Asks If Tony Blair Influenced Trial, Britai at The London Prat for related coverage this week.