Three articles

I've uploaded some photos of Broad Marston and Mucknell to a Facebook album. Let me you if you can't access them. There are more on www.mucknellabbey.org.uk.

Three articles have caught my attention:

• Otters have returned from the brink of extinction in England (except in Kent, I wonder why), following the banning of nasty chemical pesticides. Along the River Wye and in many watercourses in the southwest, numbers are at maximum capacity. A pretty rare good news story.
• Meanwhile... The UN biodiversity convention is meeting in Japan, and opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world. "We are now close to a 'tipping point' - that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity."
• And George Monbiot has written on his blog about a report recently published by the WWF. The report applies recent advances in the field of psychology to explain why people accept policies which counteract their interests (blue-collar workers in the US angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax). Monbiot suggests it could offer a remedy to the blight which now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change, i.e. provide them with the tools to change minds and society.