A busy few weeks back at Uni and much to think about and little time to write about it!

Therefore in the absence of time to write a full blog I thought I would share a few links to things everyone should read or watch:

1 – amid the terrible scenes of flooding we have seen in the UK over recent weeks, we have seen return to fearful, reactionary grandstanding as the Daily Mail call for foreign aid money to be redirected to flood victims and the conservatives promise no expenses spared and as much dredging as you want in the face of strong arguments and evidence that this won’t help.

For two interesting and important takes on the situation see:

Nicholas’ Sterns powerful article in the guardian.

And George Monbiot’s article on flooding and the agri-environment solutions we should be looking at.

Getting rather depressed about the politcal reaction to the flooding I was excited, (if cynical that it could just be grandstanding in the opposite direction) to see Ed Milliband filling the weekend papers with what seemed to be a bit of a political epiphany. Let’s hope that he and others are having a genuine realisation that we need to address the underlying problem and that the silver lining to the terrible scenes we have seen in recent weeks could be the appearance of some genuine political leadership in the mainstream of  environmental and climate change politics

2 – To move away from flooding – I spent a few weeks of this term, working on a project to looking at modelling the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland. This video captures the ecological vision, if not some of the more boring practicalities!