Scylla and Charybdis

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

Letter: British farmers remain in a privileged position https://t.co/UJM4OTa50J via @ft

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

@WriterHannahBT Sunlight of the spirit

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

Working together for nature – collaborating on the first Local Nature Recovery Strategy in England  https://t.co/suuRtzORSS

[Robert Stern @RobertCStern]

Look what I found. Trumps own mother says it.

Let’s get it trending.
#disasterTrump

[Otto English @Otto_English]

Former MI6 head hammers Brexit and says:

Britain is now irrelevent

France has eclipsed us

Putin will have been absolutely delighted by our decision to leave the EU. So will Xi Jinping.

Russia is weaker than us but felt emboldened to invade Ukraine through our serial weakness

[Dave Goulson @DaveGoulson]

Regarding the recent application by @NFUtweets to allow 'emergency' use of neonics on sugar beet, this image explains the problem: most of the pesticide goes into soils, leaches into waterways, & is taken up by wildflowers & hedgerows. Only 5% in crop.
https://t.co/M3ltdM3U8Z

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

https://t.co/RdaaoOA6Dt

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

https://t.co/wcdA2P0hHI

[Marco Lambertini @ConvenerNatureP]

🇸🇪 Sweden to kill 20% of their #bears after #wolves & #lynxes

How come the richest countries in the world like #Switzerland #Norway can’t and don’t want to coexist with predators while in India #tigers are growing?

There is no other word but…shame! https://t.co/Ic05Gq2LDR

[Tzeporah Berman @Tzeporah]

The people most likely to die from a heatwave are the least likely to cause it.

It’s not just cruel irony, it’s structural inequality caused by corporate greed.

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

https://t.co/5Z5rmAotHD

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

Where are all the bats? – alarm as numbers fall in England https://t.co/Ohi5y6BiS9

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

Love the chant" less faeces- more species"@AmiesPhilip

https://t.co/bR523IUhr5

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

We've been closing this field in May for the last 3 years to allow the seed bank to germinate Amazing #birdfoot trefoil, #commonknapweed with nitrogen fixing coming from #clover .
Loving this #regenerative life.
The life that I have
Is all that I have
#interconnected

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

https://t.co/7JbqtkbTJ0

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

https://t.co/6G9njNRJJ7

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

What is the Nature Restoration Law? Inside the first-of-its-kind regulation approved in Europe today https://t.co/vkwHTye0xc

[Scylla and Charybdis @ScyllaChary]

Worth a watch https://t.co/oHL5bu3AEf

[Dr Iain Overton @iainoverton]

This description of winds in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is so, so lovely. Capturing winds with words. How can you not fall in love with a book that does that?

"There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days —burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.
There is also the ———, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.
And the nafliat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen —a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.
Other, private winds.
Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.
There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”
Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.”