I have been somewhat negligent of this blog for a few months so I thought I would drop a sneaky mid-year favourite books post, since everybody and their dog are putting these out online at the moment and I wanted to join in the fun. I’ve read lots of good stuff this year and am …
Author Archives: avleveri
Reviewing the natural history books of 2021 (so far)
Hello friends! It’s me again after another hiatus… to talk about some non fiction books I have been reading lately! I am not typically a non-fiction reader and find it much slower going than fiction but in a vague attempt at keeping to the sciency-theme of this blog I will go through some here. My …
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Veganuary 2021: One year on
Wow, a whole year has passed since Veganuary 2020. And now I am here to write about Veganuary 2021. And let me tell you, what a difference 12 months makes – especially when those 12 have been spent predominantly in isolation. I started off last year’s post by explaining how bad at being vegetarian I …
The books that took me through 2020
Hi guys! I know that I haven’t put anything new up lately due to me moving and getting a full-time job, however I thought I would do a little roundup of some of the books I have read this year. I have picked ones which I have particularly enjoyed/ found interesting, but there are loads …
How do zoos decide which animals to keep?
The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) boasts over 700 million visitors to its zoos each year – including London Zoo (UK), Calgary Zoo (Canada) and hundreds of other institutions around the world. This makes them a huge asset in raising awareness for the environmental threats that animals face, whilst also generating substantial funds …
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Yellowstone: Wolves as ecosystem engineers
The effects of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park, USA, have been widely studied – the prolonged absence and then reintroduction of wolves at the top of the food chain makes this case study a great natural experiment into ecosystem dynamics. This post will collate the interesting bits from the research, and look …
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Extinction Rebellion and the Climate Emergency
(Okay, so technically this does not begin with X for my alphabet…. but it still counts when abbreviated to XR, right?!)… History suggests that governments will only take action if there is intense pressure to do so (Gunningham, 2019). In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us that we have only 12 years …
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Wangari Maathai: Building change by planting trees
Nobel prize winner, environmentalist, and professor Wangari Maathai created the “Green Belt Movement”, an initiative to prevent environmental degradation linked to commercial deforestation across Kenya. During the 1970s and onwards, colonial and post-colonial pressures forced Kenyan farmers to grow cash crops such as tea and coffee for the foreign market, rather than the traditional crops …
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Viruses: how particles in our poo are making us sick
When human sewage gets into our water systems, it can have disastrous effects on health. The 1955-1956 outbreak of hepatitis in New Delhi due to contamination of the Jumna River was one of the first instances which led scientists to link human health with sewage contaminated water (Bosch, 1998). Since then, research has found over …
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Urban greening: make our cities green again!
55% of the world’s population now live in urban areas – in Europe, that number soars to almost 75% (The World Bank, 2020). These cities can be extremely densely packed, making green spaces difficult to preserve, and even harder to squeeze into established areas (Haaland & van Den Bosch, 2015). When gardens, parks and fields …
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