Veronika Wild

-Image by Adolfo Cj from Pixabay  We are told   – usually by fossil fuel interests and pro – nuclear enthusiasts, how solar installations (and windfarms) mar the landscape, harm the environment and destroy farmland.  Though some of these giant installations do look rather intrusive initially, they don't have to stay that way as we'll see below, and the benefits will mostly outweigh the visual impact. In my view, countries which have any choice at all should not opt for energy sources which are likely to keep cooking us slowly, or those which leave behind intractable waste. We've already seen in the previous post how smaller community grids close to where people live, don’t necessarily have to make a great blot on the landscape. Nor do they need a massive investment in infrastructure. The City of Heillbronn in Germany (population 128,334) for example, gets at least one third of its energy from community -run solar projects -mostly using rooftop solar and, according...

  -Image by Microsoft Bing AI  It doesn't matter whom or what you love, so long as you love To misquote Martin Luther King, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that." ---------------------------------------------------  I didn't know that St.Valentine was also the patron saint of beekeepers. Living in the third century AD he secretly married couples against the orders of the Roman Emperor who preferred his soldiers to remain single. He was subsequently executed for this on the day that bears his name. Read More his life here. As to the association of honey with love , it was thought to be an aphrodisiac and fed to newly married couples to enhance their fertility - hence the first month of marriage was called the honeymoon. See more about this and other customs related love, bees and St. Valentine here.

  -Image by NoName13 from Pixabay Dear Friends, The whole of April is Earth Month. It began as Earth Day in America in 1970 by Gaylord Nelson, the Governor of Wisconsin. This led to legislative changes such as The Clean Water Act and The Endangered Species Act and the establishment of Environment Protection Agency to monitor and enforce them. By 1990, 200 million people from 141 countries had joined in and it soon became evident that much more than a single day was needed. It also led to the first UN Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 where world leaders first pledged to protect the planet and its biodiversity. While many issues such as ending the use of leaded petrol have since been resolved, others such as the proliferation of plastics and the continued use of pesticides have not and they have been joined by newer concerns such as climate change and sustainability, so the need to think about what we do is even more urgent than it was in the 1970s. We need it to be Earth Month ...