The UK’s first underground farm is protected from the vagaries of the weather but not, it turned out, from another perennial problem for farmers: trespassers.
The appearance of spray-painted squares on the floor of the former air raid shelters under Clapham in London mystified Steven Dring, co-founder of Growing Underground: “Then someone said to me ‘that’s where the speakers were going to go for a rave’.”
Stronger doors were quickly put in and the farm is now producing daily crops of herbs which go the the capital’s fresh produce market at New Covent Garden and a home delivery service. The aim of the company, said Dring, is […]
But as it turns out, ageism in the workforce is built on a faulty premise, according to leading Australian researchers of intergenerational employment.
Associate Professor Leanne Cutcher from the University of Sydney Business School is about to publish a new study that has found that contrary to stereotypes and assumptions, the most innovative companies are the ones where the age of employees does not matter. […]
Whether or not Einstein equated bee extinction to human extinction has been challenged and perhaps debunked. He may have never said anything close to that. After all, he was a physicist, not a biologist. But no matter. The diversity of our crops is highly dependent on pollinators, predominantly by honey bees and somewhat further by butterflies.
In his 1976 paper, McGregor also points out, “Another value of pollination lies in its effect on quality and efficiency of crop production. Inadequate pollination can result not only in reduced yields but also in delayed yield and a high percentage of culls or inferior fruits. In this connection, Gates (1917) warned the grower that, … ‘without his pollinating agents, chief among which are the honey bees, to transfer the […]
For much of the first decade of the 2000s, America’s national parks were an area of rare bipartisan agreement in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush’s Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed a $1 billion National Parks Centennial Challenge program to raise public and private money for the National Park System. First Lady Laura Bush launched new initiatives to get more young people outdoors, promoted cultural and historic preservation, and lauded and advanced the Save America’s Treasures initiative, which was started by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to protect and preserve historic buildings, documents, and art. Likewise, Congress passed dozens of national parks, wilderness, and public lands bills with the unanimous support of its members.
Today, Washington’s bipartisan work to protect America’s parks and public lands seems like a distant memory. Since 2010, Congress has been incapable of passing individual parks and wilderness bills, legislators are pressing to sell off tens of millions of acres of publicly owned lands, and laws which help protect at-risk public lands—including the Antiquities Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund—are under relentless attack. A […]