Anthony Walker

Terrestrial ecosystem ecologist | models - data - forests - elevated CO2 - photosynthesis - life on Earth - mountains - hiking - books - cooking - music - more

[Anthony Walker @AnthonyPWalker]

Check out this Special Collection on the influence of people in terrestrial carbon cycling!

[Plants People Planet 🌱👥🌐 @plantspplplanet]

Announcing '#Anthromes and terrestrial carbon: From the deep past to net-zero' – a new joint Special Collection from Plants, People, Planet and New Phytologist 👇

📚 https://t.co/Q5CBVolfrh

@KathrynBaragwa @ymalhi @NextGenShovel

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Just kind of left speechless at an invading army whining to the United Nations that the people they are invading — and killing their civilians by the thousands — are fighting back. This is a mystifying level of lack of self awareness

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

Israel yesterday kidnapped four women. Two are footballers in the Palestinian National Team.

Their names are: Natali Abu Dia and Rand Halwani.

Is it normal to kidnap footballers, @FIFAcom? Where are sports media organisations? This story should be the headline everywhere.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are positioning themselves as the future of Labour.

Let’s talk about what that future looks like.

Burnham is distancing himself from the Manchester SEZs , deregulation zones co-signed with Sunak and Truss, despite being Mayor throughout.
Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotheram sat on the Freeport/SEZ board and signed off on them alongside the Tories. These aren’t footnotes. They’re the record.

Streeting has taken hundreds of thousands from the private health sector. He is currently the Health Secretary. The people funding him profit directly from NHS decisions he makes. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s corruption operating in plain sight. He blocks people who point this out.

Both backed Starmer’s position on Gaza throughout. Not a war. A genocide. Tens of thousands of civilians. Famine as policy. Both stayed quiet or offered cover while it happened.

Now they’re recalibrating.
Not because their conscience moved. Because the polling did.

This is the Labour Party that Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson , yes, that Mandelson, the Epstein-linked, now disgraced one, systematically purged the left to deliver.
Corbyn gone. principled MPs deselected.
The membership hollowed out. All so this prospectus could be handed to the country as progress.

Burnham and Streeting aren’t a departure from Starmerism. They’re its logical continuation, dressed up in regional authenticity or technocratic competence depending on the audience.

The obscenity isn’t just what happened in Gaza.
It’s watching the people who enabled it now audition for the next act.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The oak forests of eastern North America moved north after the last ice age in the beaks of blue jays.

When the last glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago, the trees of eastern North America had to migrate north to recolonize the deglaciated land. Most tree seeds (maples, pines) are wind-dispersed and can travel widely.

Acorns are heavy. They fall straight down. By every reasonable model, oaks should have moved north at a rate of a few meters per year.

The fossil pollen record shows they moved closer to 350 meters per year. Faster than wind-dispersed species. Almost impossibly fast for a heavy-seeded tree.

The 1989 Johnson and Webb paper in the Journal of Biogeography identified the mechanism. Blue jays carry acorns much farther than squirrels, preferentially bury them in disturbed open ground at the right depth for germination, and forget enough of them to keep the species moving. A single 50-jay flock in Virginia was documented caching 133,000 acorns in one autumn.

The eastern oak forest, the largest deciduous forest ecosystem in North America, exists in its current form in part because of a bird most people consider a nuisance at the feeder.

[Defend Our Juries @DefendOurJuries]

Judge Johnson led a shameless legal stitch up of four young people who refused to be bystanders to genocide.

We have written a formal letter of complaint about his biased and discriminatory conduct.

Read the letter:
https://t.co/viJEfzdykb

Sign here:
https://t.co/EDDF793zm1

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The United States has more than 90,000 dams on its rivers. Many of them no longer generate power, hold back floods, or serve a purpose at all. They just sit there, aging, holding the water back.

Take one out, and the ecological recovery can happen breathtakingly fast.

In 2024, the largest dam removal in American history finished on the Klamath River, where four dams came down along the Oregon-California line. Within days, Chinook salmon were pushing into water they hadn't reached in generations.

By the fall of 2025, they had climbed all the way into the upper basin, spawning in streams that had been sealed off for more than a hundred years.

Damon Goodman, a regional director for California Trout, put it plainly: the rivers "seem to come alive almost instantly after dam removal."

Maine's Penobscot tells the same story. After two dams came down, the river herring went from a few thousand fish a year into the millions, and with them came back the eagles, ospreys, and otters that live off the run.

A dam is one of the few environmental problems you can fix by subtraction. Take the wall away, and the river seems to remember what it was.

[andy peacock @AndyPeacock999]

As others have pointed out: this is a straightforward resignation matter.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🎥 Juliet Lamont, an Australian documentary filmmaker and Gaza flotilla activist, speaks to Double Down News about being raped by Israeli soldiers after the aid vessel she was aboard was intercepted earlier this month.

Lamont says soldiers pulled down her trousers and underwear and that an Israeli soldier forcibly penetrated her vagina while she was in detention. She was among more than 450 activists seized when Israeli forces intercepted the Global Sumud flotilla in international waters. Organizers say at least 15 detainees reported sexual assault or rape while in Israeli custody.

Full interview is linked below.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Israel is currently destroying Tyre — a 5000 year old city, home to hundreds of thousands of people.

Zero condemnation from a single British politician.

Endless impunity; a time of barbarism and monsters.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

Israel is shelling the town of Arnoun with white phosphorus

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world - the ancient city of Tyre - designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its incredible historical sites. This is what it looks like today following multiple Israeli airstrikes.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: We just won our second Emmy!

More Perfect Union took home the award for Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis for our video covering the real story of the Springfield, Ohio, immigration debate.

Watch our full acceptance speech here:

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Sky News completely destroys the Zionist regime's primary excuse for bombing Lebanon. The reporter confirms there is absolutely zero evidence of military activity in the civilian homes Israel is obliterating.

Washington is funding pure state terrorism!

[The Fraud @StarmertheFraud]

This is very interesting.

Here, @ZackPolanski talks about disproportionate media scrutiny. He brings up Labour Together, Josh Simons and the scandal around Labour Together hiring APCO Worldwide to target journalists, including me. Before Polanski can complete his point, he is interrupted by @robpowellnews, who says that was appropriately reported by the media.

But that's not what happened AT ALL.

In fact, I can now reveal, for the first time, that an as-yet unknown journalist at the Guardian KNEW about this story for 2 years and didn't report it.

I found this out in from my Subject Access Request to Labour Together. I've copied a screengrab below. It shows that in February 2024, Josh Simons forwarded a series of emails to the journalist. The emails had been sent by Simons and his Chief of Staff at Labour Together to the National Cyber Security Centre.

You'll note in the attached image that the name of the Guardian journalist has been blacked out. But Labour Together have confirmed that they were, indeed, a Guardian journalist.

The emails forwarded by Simons show that Labour Together had told the NCSC that I was at the centre of a mad conspiracy theory, making all sorts of wild, ludicrous, highly defamatory allegations about me, my colleague @andrewfeinstein, and my family. The emails explicitly mention that Labour Together had attached an extensive report on which these seriously defamatory allegations was based. It also made it clear that Labour Together had done this after I worked with the Sunday Times and other outlets to break stories about Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney's unlawful conduct.

What makes this all particularly egregious is that me and @andrewfeinstein have had a long relationship with the Guardian.

Andrew had worked with it's investigative team since the mid-2000s, focusing on investigating BAE Systems and corruption. The Guardian positively reviewed his book, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, on which I also worked. The award-winning feature documentary based on the book, made by recent Oscar nominee director Johan Grimonperez, featured a lengthy interview with the inimitable David Leigh about the BAE story. Leigh was the Guardian and Observer's long-time head of investigations.

I started collaborating with the Guardian investigation team in the mid-2010s, focusing on corruption at AgustaWestland. The Guardian also splashed with an investigation based on my work in South Africa in 2022, which had been covered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Andrew and I had both written for the paper, worked on joint investigations, and also acted as sources for Guardian stories. There are any number of stories where we are not credited but where we provided key information or connected the paper to whistleblowers.

This is not to cloak me and Andrew in mainstream respectability or buff our credentials, but to point out that debunking the lunatic claims in the NCSC emails would have taken five minutes and a few phonecalls around the Guardian office. Perhaps then the Guardian could have reported on this despicable attempt to destroy the reputation of long-time Guardian contributors and collaborators with fabrications and conspiracy theories by the people on their way to forming the next government.

But that didn't happen. Instead, a journalist at the Guardian KNEW that Simons and Labour Together had been doing all this outrageous stuff to protect Starmer and McSweeney. For two years: while Labour Together was funding 100 incoming MPs, Josh Simons was getting parachuted into Makerfield and Morgan McSweeney rose to the position of Chief of Staff. And nothing was reported.

We now know, of course, that the highest levels of the Labour Party had also been copied into discussions about the mad Labour Together/APCO investigation, including McSweeney himself and head of Comms, Paul Ovenden (who was later forced to resign as Chief of Strategy in Number 10 because of revelations from my book).

Just how many other people in Labour knew? Just how many other journalists knew? We still don't know. Can't say that mainstream outlets have done anything much to help me find out; half the time, as with the BBC, they don't even bother to ask me or Andrew to comment the scandal before amplifying the exculpatory self-justifications of Simons and his ilk.

In the end it took brave INDEPENDENT journalists like Khadija Shariffe & Peter Geoghegan (rightly now nominated for the Paul Foot Award), @PulaRJS and @OborneTweets to break the story. While I'm endlessly grateful for that reporting, and this story breaking through into the mainstream through the dogged work of Peter and Khadija, it should never have taken this long, and it speaks volumes that it only really did so after it was revealed that the Labour Together/APCO investigation had also targeted journalists at the Guardian and Sunday Times.

Just imagine the Guardian had reported on this back in February 2024.
Just imagine the Guardian, which has NEVER, not once, properly reported on the Labour Together donations story, decided to look into McSweeney's unlawful conduct.
Just imagine the public had been made aware of the character of Morgan McSweeney and the nature of this political project.
Maybe, just maybe, McSweeney's wretched, scandalous proclivities wouldn't have destroyed the first Labour government in 15 years, opening up the way for Reform, and tainting the Labour Party with the stench of Mandelson and the horrors of Epstein.
Maybe Starmer, so coddled and protected by the Guardian's soft-touch reporting, would have been made battle-hardened and ready for governance by some proper scrutiny and challenge.
Or maybe we could have found out, long before this current crisis, that he wasn't up for the task.

But don't try to pretend that there is an equality of scrutiny in the media, and that the mainstream media is fearlessly holding the powerful to task with the same rigour that makes it to literally go rooting around Polanski's dirty laundry.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Tony Blair thinks the answer to this country’s problems is AI, welfare cuts and endless spending on war.

Who benefits? Arms companies and tech billionaires.

Once again, Blair is wrong. The answer is a redistribution of wealth and power and the relentless search for peace.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.

https://t.co/1Onlpx9Nkh

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Farage must resign. Now.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

‘My phone was hacked by the Kremlin who exposed the £5m bung no-one is supposed to know about’ is certainly an interesting new angle..

I wonder if the journalist involved has broken any other major scandals? 🤔

Oh!

[Anthony Walker @AnthonyPWalker]

RT @VoyaWolfProject: For the 2nd year in a row, there was not a single depredation on the large cattle ranch in the middle of our study are…

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

An historic day, as the River Wye becomes the first river in the UK to have its rights recognised by local authorities across its catchment.

Hundreds of people gathered on the banks of the river to watch as representatives from Monmouthshire, Forest of Dean & Powys Councils, Herefordshire County Council, the Wye Valley National Landscape & Bannau Brycheiniog National Park signed the pledge recognising the rivers rights and then spoke about why they had done so what it would mean for the relationship of their organisation to the river. It went beyond legal formalities into something of a service of thanks & honour to the river, with poetry, a choir singing songs, & offerings to the river.

It has been a real honour to witness & be part of the surging movement towards river rights & guardianship on the Wye. Four years ago I met & advised Herefordshire Councillor Elissa Swinglehurst, who wanted to put a voice of the river on the Wye Nutrient Management Board. A year ago I sat around a fire on the banks of the river with other Wye guardians & Earth lawyers as the idea of a charter was first mooted. To see it become a reality, & supported by 6 public bodies, in just a year is astonishing.

Now, of course, comes the hard work of making those rights a reality. But given the hundreds of active river guardians, & increasing public pressure to protect & restore the river, if it can be done on any river, it will be done on the Wye.