We wait for them during the entire winter and most of spring, but finally they have arrived, those nice, warm sunny days. They get us thinking about holidays and sunbathing; they boost our morale and make us feel happier. This is the time of the year where we start to envy those working outdoors such as construction workers, gardeners and postmen… We think they’re lucky because they get to enjoy all those benefits the sun brings all day long, but are they? Overexposure, as well as regular and prolonged exposure, to the sun can cause sunburns, skin ageing, eye damage and skin cancer. It may also affect the immune system.…
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Natural Cycles and Their Delicate Environmental Balance
Being quite a keen cyclist I want to talk to you about natural cycles – no, not about biking around the countryside but how substances and elements are moved around in nature. If you research how long the planet has been in existence you will come up with a figure of 4 billon years, give or take a few million. Yet, even after all this time, substances on which nature relies to exist have not been consumed. This seems a little odd, when you think about it – 4 billon years is a very long time. But it’s because Earth is essentially a closed-loop system: very little gets in and…
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Buying a ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – Or Another ‘Tragedy’?
Buying a ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – or another ‘Tragedy’? I’ve never been a fan of the idea of environmental “offsetting”. The concept is most frequently applied to greenhouse gas emissions – with which NEBOSH Environmental Certificate students who have studied Element 1 will be familiar – where an organisation (or individual) seeks to compensate for the carbon emissions they cause (usually through using energy) by paying for improvements elsewhere. Carbon offsetting has become institutionalised through regulated schemes such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and there is also a host of commercial ‘carbon offsets’ that are available for purchase from specialist companies. Carbon offsets are usually sold as tonnes of…
