I often have random conversations with people about Australia (somehow my accent is still almost instantly recognisable despite some 15 years of not living there) and people are shocked when I say that the Australian environment has, on a broad scale, at least in the most productive parts of the country, been wrecked. While the human toll of environmental degradation and climate change might not be as large here as in parts of Africa, the overall damage is at least as bad if not worse.

So it is that the government is about the flood with seawater what had been a major wetland area in South Australia – near the mouth of the stricken Murray-Darling system.

Much further upstream, governments have just spent a very large sum on buying a major cotton farm in an attempt to save another seriously threatened wetland, even though there’s no guarantee at all that the plan will work. That’s because while the purchase included its licence for irrigation water, the dam that would supply it is only 18% full, and therefore there’s no water to be had. What’s REALLY obscene about this is that the farm was only developed in the 80s, when the water problems were already all too evident.

But to finish on a slightly positive note, as the New York Times reported it shipping costs are starting to crimp globalisation.

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

And the campaigners are battling on – Jim on The Daily Maybe is keeping track of press coverage of the Camp for Climate Action here in the UK.

After the bees, the next animals to suffer from a mysterious mass die-back are oysters in France. And the population of puffins in Northumberland is tumbling fast.

And while some species – like the cattle egret which has just started breeding in England might benefit, you wonder what other species will suffer in consequence…

Saw this 1m-plus high thistle in a paddock in a farm just outside Moulins-Engilbert in Burgundy. Although of course they didn’t cooperate when I took the camera out, there were about a dozen bees swarming around it obviously having a lovely time, even though the flowers were well past their prime.

A lot is lost when we tidy things up too much….

Phone books.

When was the last time you opened one? I’d date my last touch of one for any constructive purpose back at least seven or eight years.

Yet still every year several arrive – usually plastic-wrapped – on my doorstep. So I pull off the plastic, then stack it by the door until I’m making a special trip to the central recycling facility (since I believe you can’t put them into normal paper recycling).

A totally pointless waste of resources.

I have to restrain myself from throwing things when I hear the latest Labour politician sprouting the nonsensical line “Britain is an international leader in the fight against climate change” … and here’s the unarguable figures:

…figures revealed last week in an obscure government report – snappily entitled Development of an Embedded Carbon Emissions Indicator – tell a much more sobering story. Produced by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Sydney University for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), it concludes that Britain is responsible for 200 million more tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year than official figures admit, an increase of 37 per cent.
And whereas Britain has been officially reporting that its emissions have declined by 5 per cent since 1992, the report says that the true picture reveals that instead they rose by 18 per cent.

And there’s more bad news from Australia – about five minutes after the drought declarations were lifted, 65% of NSW is again in drought – and the locusts are on the way.