Over 70% of England's water infrastructure is owned by foreign governments, overseas pension funds and international investors.
Your water comes from the ground beneath England.
The profits leave the country.
Northumbrian Water: owned by Hong Kong and a New York investment firm.
Yorkshire Water: owned by Hong Kong and the Singapore government.
Wessex Water: owned by a Malaysian billionaire's family.
Southern Water: owned by Australian asset managers and US investors.
Thames Water: owned by Canada, Abu Dhabi, China and Australia. £20 billion in debt. Sewage in your rivers.
Only Severn Trent, United Utilities and South West Water are listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Nobody voted for this.
In the driest desert on earth sits a mountain of discarded clothes so vast you can pick it out from space. Most of it is the synthetic fabric sold as fashion's future.
Here is where your wardrobe goes to not die.
- Tens of thousands of tonnes are dumped in Chile's Atacama every year, shipped in from Europe and North America, much of it never worn, tags still on
- A great deal is polyester and acrylic, plastic made from petroleum, the very fibres marketed as the conscious choice
- The rich world sends it here precisely to keep the mess off its own soil. The donated and the unsold alike end up in the sand
- In the bone-dry air it cannot rot, so it is torched instead, the toxic smoke of burning polyester drifting into the poor towns nearby
- Buried or burned, it bleeds microplastics, dye and petrochemicals into the ground and air for two centuries.
Plastic clothing was sold as the planet-friendly option and became a mountain in a desert, glowing on satellite photos and smoking over people's homes. Wool would have gone quietly back into the soil. This just sits there, refusing to leave.
One of the pairs of Sandhill Cranes doing their mating dance for each other.
It starts out so graceful and balletic and quickly dissolves into drunk party dancing. I absolutely love it and I had no idea they did this.
Stepping stones in Pompeii still doing their job after 2,000 years. The Roman city’s paved roads doubled as open-air drainage channels during heavy rain, flushing away any refuse downhill. Raised stones kept pedestrian feet dry while carts rolled right through. Roman genius!
So many people going ballistic at climate change deniers (rightly so), but then do exactly the same thing when it comes to COVID.
If you can’t accept the science, or the facts, when it comes to the pandemic, how can you criticise others who don’t accept them with climate change?
As we head into a period of extreme hot weather in England with temperatures forecast to soar to 40°C, a reminder that the vast majority of hospitals do NOT have any form of air conditioning or mechanical ventilation on wards.
This will cost lives.
https://t.co/h96ZLcDjcb
80% of all autoimmune disease patients are females.
Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Hashimoto's... the disparity is massive.
But WHY is the female immune system so prone to attacking itself?
I wrote this 7 years ago
In it I called for cities to better embrace greenery, reflective coatings, water and shading to tackle urban heat.
More relevant than ever….
🚨 It's wild that the UK has a minimum legal workplace temperature but no maximum.
If it's too hot to safely work, workers deserve protection.
Heatwaves aren't the future. They're here now.
☀️The #heatwave is upon us☀️
To help people stay safe and cool
we have prepped a:
👁️101 Visual Summary of our Cooling Tips
High quality PDF download on our website
🖇️👇
2025 update: For the first time, ME/CFS causes higher societal costs than Long COVID. 32.8bn € ME/CFS, 31.6bn € Long COVID. The reason: many Long COVID patients develop ME/CFS, and recovery rates are extremely low. Report: https://t.co/YqtVawQxBn
Everyone ignoring climate change when each summer is getting unbearably hotter really summarises people’s attitudes towards things. Exact same with viruses and chronic illnesses, they stay in denial.
The tale of how we've been stymied is actually pretty shocking and appalling. I encourage people to read the background to understand our reasonable requests and aims, and to see why we're nearly three years in on trying to get this basic change to governance...
#pwME#MECFS
Fun fact: our hypothalamus, which controls basically everything essential to some degree, like eating, body temperature, & reproduction, weighs just 4 grams
https://t.co/5ZsdGtRf8N
this is about the same weight as the amount of glucose (sugar) in our blood
https://t.co/lieuwd6kF6
Oak trees have evolved a smart way to overwhelm the animals that eat acorns.
Every few years, across hundreds of miles, they drop a massive number of acorns all at once. The year before, almost nothing. The year after, almost nothing again.
It's called masting, and the strategy is brilliant. Squirrels, deer, blue jays, turkeys, and bears all eat acorns. If oaks produced a steady crop every year, the animals would maintain populations sized exactly to eat most of it. By producing almost nothing for several years and then flooding the forest floor all at once, the trees overwhelm the predators.
There are simply too many acorns for the animals to eat, and the surplus germinates into the next generation of oak trees. The ones that hoard and forget, squirrels especially, become inadvertent planters.
What's harder to explain is the synchrony. How do oaks across 700 kilometers coordinate the same decision in the same year?
The leading explanations involve shared weather cues, a specific temperature pattern in spring that acts as a trigger across the whole region, and possibly pollen coupling, where trees that need pollen from other trees synchronize flowering and, by extension, fruiting. Chemical signaling through the air or soil is a third hypothesis still being investigated.
None of these fully accounts for the scale. The trees aren't talking in any way we can intercept and understand. They're responding to the same world and arriving at the same answer, simultaneously, across a landscape larger than most countries.