Barbara Cormie

Marketing, brand & creative aficionado; @DigitalMum; photographer, canoeist & #Fifer. Dum spiro spero 🌍 🌏#rewilding. (Tweet in a personal capacity.)

[Trees for Streets @TreesforStreets]

The seriously hot summer has only strengthened our argument that our towns and cities need more trees 🌳

Sponsor a tree today for it to be planted this winter, in time for cooler streets in summers to come!

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

JUST A REMINDER: PEOPLE SURVIVED CENTURIES WITHOUT DATA CENTERS BUT HAVE NEVER SURVIVED WITHOUT CLEAN WATER.

[senpai @Senpaisaysbye]

I genuinely don’t understand how we are supposed to casually process that a glacier literally collapsed in Nepal, erasing 19 bridges and killing over 600 people, because the planet is too hot. And instead of stopping it, billionaires are building more data centres. It is completely psychotic.

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

So true

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

It would be cool if billionaires started competing over who could plant the most trees, build the most hospitals, libraries, and parks, house the most homeless people, restore the most ecosystems, and remove the most pollution from Earth, all just to show off.

[Tiger @tiger26931]

20. Not 200. Not 2,000. Twenty. In the wild. On Earth.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Britain’s water strategy in a nutshell:

▪️Sell off 35 reservoirs since 2017.
▪️Build no new reservoirs for 34 years.
▪️Approve 500 data centres that drink water like camels on a bender.

Then, the second the sun shows its face for a few weeks in summer, the water companies slap hosepipe bans on us.

Ah yes. The sacred Great British summer ritual: standing in a parched garden while a giant data centre in Slough is quietly necking enough water to keep a small town’s lawns green forever…so that someone in California can generate another AI image of a cat wearing a monocle.

But don’t worry. When your roses finally croak, just remember: the cloud never goes thirsty.

Priorities, Britain.

[Luis Recalde @Drunken_Forest]

Esto es lo que se promueve con videos "simpáticos" de loros cantando en redes. Docenas de aves incautadas en el chaco, así funciona la industria de captura de aves para venderlas a los "amantes" de los animales en las ciudades.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers, and the scientists have verified it.

Swiss researchers sowed flower strips through 10 winter wheat fields and compared them to 15 fields without. Cereal leaf beetle larvae dropped 40%. Second-generation adults dropped 53%. Damage to the wheat fell 61%.

That pushed the pest below the threshold where spraying pesticides is even worth the money.

A follow-up study on perennial strips found beetle larvae down 66%, and yield in the wheat beside them up 10%.

The catch is that this only works when the strips are built for it. Those Swiss trials used specific plants chosen to feed specific predators: cornflower, coriander, buckwheat, poppy. A generic wildflower mix along the field edge doesn't reliably do this.

The same principle scales down to a garden. Plant a strip of yarrow, dill, fennel, or mountain mint through the middle of your vegetable beds, not just around the outside.

Then leave it alone and let the bugs go to work.

[Nick Volpe @nvolpewild]

Indonesia is destroying 2,000,000 hectares of one of the world’s most important & biodiverse rainforests in South Papua for sugarcane. 😡
The world’s BIGGEST deforestation project. 🤬
Everyone should be SO angry about this. It is OUR planet and we are losing wildlife forever!

[Marcus Chown @marcuschown]

We should all do our bit to save water, says interviewee on BBC Radio 4’s Today.

Of course we should

However, people are unlikely to be enthusiastic about helping the water firms, which have given ~£80 billion to shareholders, built no reservoirs & poisoned our rivers with shit

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Gerald is standing in green grass this August, and the field across the lane has gone the colour of a paper bag, and the only difference between the two of them is a plough.

You can see the line from the gateway. It runs along the hedge like somebody drew it with a ruler. One side is pale and cracked wide enough to put a finger in and it crunches when you walk on it. The other side gives underfoot, and it is green, and there is a nine hundred kilogram Hereford working across the middle of it at the speed of a man reading a newspaper he has already read.

The lane field was ploughed and reseeded four years ago. New ley, high yield, drilled for a heavy first cut, and it gave one, and it has given less every year since, because the roots on it stop about four inches down where the drill left them. Four inches of soil in a dry August holds nothing. The man who owns it has had the bowser out twice this week and is buying feed in the middle of summer, which is the thing no farmer wants a neighbour to watch him do.

Gerald's forty acres have not had a plough on them since some time in the eighteenth century. Nobody planted that sward. It arrived over two hundred years of being grazed and dunged and rained on and otherwise left alone, and it is about forty different things growing in among each other, half of which have no commercial name, several of which have gone down after water past two metres. There is no dry spell in the recorded history of this country that reaches two metres.

So the grass keeps coming in the worst month of the year, and the bull keeps eating it, and what he leaves behind goes back in and the beetles have it buried inside a week and the roots go down after it again.

He came down a ramp there at five months old, looked at the whole forty acres for about ninety seconds, and walked to the south corner. He has never revisited the decision. Not in a drought, not in a hailstorm, not in the eleven days of horizontal rain, not at minus six with the trough iced solid. Same corner, same hour, same pace, for four years, in a country where everything else has an opinion about the weather.

The south corner has seven wildflower species in it now, and a bumblebee count, and a dung beetle population, and none of that was anybody's project. It is just what happens to ground that has one animal standing on it who has never once been talked out of anything.

There is no scheme paying for any of this. No contractor, no invoice, no line in the paperwork, because in the paperwork this field is classified as unimproved land, which is the official term for ground nobody has got round to wrecking yet.

The hedge is thick. The wall stands because the bottom of it is grazed. The swallows are over the middle of the field at seven every evening working the flies that follow him about, and they are not over the lane field, because there is nothing over there to work.

Half the country is being told the animal in that field is the reason the weather has gone wrong.

The animal in that field is the reason it is still green.

Gerald has not been informed that he is unimproved. Gerald is in the south corner. The south corner is fine.

[World Ocean Day @WorldOceansDay]

Remember: We are part of the planet, not above it.

Image by: @natureaddnurture

[Compassion in World Farming UK @ciwf]

Earlier this year, the UK Government consulted on ending cages for hens.

Nearly six months later, we're still waiting for the result.

Meanwhile, almost six million hens remain confined in cages.

Tell the Government: hens can't wait: https://t.co/Dkcl4uMAot

#EndTheCageAge

[Hedgehog Cabin @HedgehogCabin]

As we enter yet another week of drought conditions please, I beg you, put out water for the wildlife.
They have nothing.
No puddles.
No ponds.
No streams.
All have dried up.
Sometimes the birds are thought of and provided for.
But the nocturnal animals go unseen.
Unthought of.
No kind dishes.
Just the tantalising smell of water from a pond they may drown in, or a drain they may get trapped in.
Or a stagnant, dirty old birdbath they may get fatal fluke from.
Hedgehogs need to drink a lot of water to stay healthy. Please provide clean, fresh, safe, ground level water each evening for our precious nocturnal wildlife.
Tap water is best.
Pop a dish or two out tonight.
Dying of thirst is a terrible, painful way to die.
It should never happen to any animal, and certainly not in a country that has the safest tap water in the world.
The few minutes it takes you to fill a dish will make the difference between life and death.❤️

[Richard Corbett @RichardGCorbett]

Since water services were sold off by Thatcher to be run for private profit, the water companies have:
- amassed debts of over £50bn
- paid £78bn to shareholders
- raised CEO pay to £1-3 million a year
- lose 2.87bn litres of water a day through leaky pipes
- polluted EVERY river

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

Please don’t release balloons 🎈.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I can’t wrap my head around an economy where nursing homes cost enough to bankrupt families, yet the aides caring for our grandparents still rely on food banks. Or where daycare can consume an entire parent’s paycheck, while the people providing that care still can’t earn a living wage and need a second job. Something about that math just doesn’t add up.

[Hedgehog Cabin @HedgehogCabin]

As we enter yet another week of drought conditions please, I beg you, put out water for the animals.
Our nocturnal wildlife is dying of thirst.
A terrible, painful way to die.
And you hold the solution, the cure.
A turn of the tap will save a life.🚰
So get out your casserole pot lids, your flan dishes, your old baking trays - anything that is shallow and wide and not easily tipped.
It doesn't matter what it looks like, this is an emergency.
Put them out at dusk, front and back garden.
Your local charity shop will have loads of suitable water dishes - so with one simple act of kindness you can benefit so many.🥰
Keep them clean.
Keep them full.
Keep them coming.
Please share this to save a life today.

[Steve Perkins @Perky_43]

🚨 STOLEN GOATS – HEARTBREAKING THEFT IN RAINHAM, EAST LONDON 🚨

Two much‑loved Golden Guernsey goats — Maggie and Maple — were snatched overnight from Peel Stable, Mereborough Road, #rainham, sometime between 9pm Saturday 18 July and 7.30am Sunday 19 July.

A 40–50cm hole was cut through the barbed‑wire fence, then tied back to hide it.

Someone chased these goats around their field, dragged them through that hole, and took them.

Maple suffers from serious seizures and has only just finished medication. Without the right care, she is at real risk.

Their owner is devastated.

The goats were bottle‑fed from 10 weeks old, raised alongside the family’s horses, pony, ducks, chickens, cats, dogs — they are family, not livestock.

If you live near Mereborough Road, Rainham, check your CCTV, Ring doorbells, dashcams, or anything that might show suspicious activity between 9pm Saturday and 7.30am Sunday.

A £1,000 reward is being offered for information that leads to their safe return.

📩 Contact: [email protected]
📞 Or report directly to Kent Police by calling 01634 792209, and quoting 19-1342.

Earlier this month, staff at Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats told local paper KentOnline how they had been left heartbroken after Taco the goat was stolen overnight.

CCTV showed four men stealing him from the site in Boughton Monchelsea, near Maidstone, on July 4.

Seven baby goats were also stolen from their pen at Christmas Tree Farm in Cudham Road, Downe, on June 23. The animals were about four to five weeks old at the time.

🐐 PLEASE SHARE THIS POST

https://t.co/QNikMAK8mP

See also: https://t.co/VhVeCtFN5D

Source UKACF.