EcoWarriorMe

The West of Scotland has seen one of the wettest Mays on record, with over double the average rainfall , and June looks to be heading the same way. Not a good omen for hiking and camping in Argyll with children but we persevered. To a point. Our first ambition was to climb the second lowest Munros, Ben Vane, which at 915m just makes it onto the list of Scotland's 3000 ft mountains.  We started out from the National Park's Visitor Centre at Inveruglas and hiked up access track leading to the hydro electric dam at Loch Sloy before starting up the mountain itself.  After a total of two hours walking in persistently heavy rain, with little prospect of improvement or of a view at the top we had enough of nature and turned back. While the outcome for the day was disappointing, it did show why this is such a good place for a hydro-electric scheme.  It is no surprise that over a third of Scotland's renewable electricity comes from hydro schemes, some dating bac...

Once the 4th largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has reduced to only 10% of its original size in under 50 years due to over abstraction of water in the rivers which feed the sea.  The world's newest desert, the Aralkum, has formed as a consequence, leaving fishing villages many miles from the coast and fishing boats stranded in the desert.  The once thriving fishing industry is gone, along with twenty out of twenty four indigenous species. Dust, sand and salt from the now exposed sea bed are stirred up by the wind, causing high levels of respiratory illness. The images paint a very powerful picture of the impact that we can have on nature. ARAL SEA from Romain A on Vimeo . The decision to abstract water for irrigation from the two principle rivers which feed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, was well intentioned - part of the Soviet era campaign to turn nature to mankind's use and to provide an opportunity to develop agriculture on an industr...

Nor any drop to drink... On Tuesday 7 June WaterAid will be hosting a non-stop tweetathon – hashtagged #WaterAid24 - to show supporters exactly what an international charity does over a 24-hour period. The important issue of water use, conservation and availability is often overshadowed by the battle to cut carbon emissions.  To highlight the issues, here are a selection of statistics from WaterAid's website : 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in eight of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF) 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost two fifths of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF) 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation - 4,000 child deaths a day or one child every 20 seconds . This equates to 160 infant school classrooms lost every single day to an entirely preventable public health crisis. Diarrhoea kills ...

Adam Corner's Guardian article " When energy-saving does not mean saving energy " looks at rebound effects: "But a newly published paper in the journal Energy Policy shows that even straightforward carbon-saving activities such as home insulation are not always quite what they seem. The problem is that making one change around the house leaves the door open for other changes – which might include 'rebound effects' that undermine the carbon savings. If a driver who replaces their car with a fuel-efficient model takes advantage of the cheaper running costs and drives further and more often, then the amount of carbon saved is clearly reduced." In the current economic climate that really should not be the case as 10-20% energy saving will only result in a cost "saving" that will offset rising energy prices, a trend that is likely to continue.  The global economy is still growing relatively slowly but when this growth accelerates, demand for ener...