.A chance to enjoy good environmental news for a change. Happy New Year to all of you. After a hot and then wet 2025 what will 2026 bring? Let’s start with a celebration of Curry’s environmental stance on the climate crisis. On 17th January we will be celebrating the first five years of Curry Rivel’s very own environmental Charity. It is time to start a serious evaluation of how well we are doing. Your help is needed to measure the biodiversity of the land that has been bought and to build a database of changes as time goes by. To get professional guidance on this we have invited RoAM, the recorders of the Avalon marshes, to join us on the day of the meeting. Fred Giles will help us to set up an integrated biodiversity assessment system which, in the fullness of time, will be integrated into national recording schemes. To do this we will need help from people interested in nature.. The new trees we have planted on the CWCT site will be counted and identified in the Spring, then, regularly through the year, bio-indiator species such as butterflies, bumblebees and dragonflies. In particular we hope we can interest the School community to take part and perhaps have a display about the progress in the school. With new details of the UK Government’s plan to achieve 30/30 (30% of land being devoted to biodiversity enhancement by 2030) just having been published it is time to take our part in the Local Nature Recovery Network Strategy and to do this we need to know what is the biodiversity on the Trust land and to measure how it changes. A vital part of nature recovery is the insect population. If you can remember the time when a longish car journey resulted in a windscreen adorned with squashed insect bodies then you will know how diverse and plentiful it was. Now of course windscreens remain nearly entirely insect - free even on motorway journeys. This is entirely due to human ingenuity - insecticides have been invented that will kill pretty much every living invertebrate. Even in the 1960s this was of huge concern and if you haven’t read “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson from that era then please do so. It led to such an outcry at the time that many of the worst poisons were banned but there are still enough of the more benign sort used to lead to insect armageddon. Obviously with 80% of the human population in Britain being urban the connection between insects and the food chain pyramids is lost on most. Well, come along on 17th and see the display on ground nesting bumblebees that will be presented by Kath Thornton and spend a few minutes thinking about the thousands of other species that inhabit Curry Rivel with us. I don’t think an evolutionary advanced great ape (including you and me!!) has a right to destroy as many of the other millions of living species on this exceptionally lucky planet as suits it. You may well disagree; come along and argue your case for domination of this planet by the apes (there could be a film in that) I am happy to be on the side of the many species versus the few.(that’s a quote from Spock)There will be free bird boxes to make and free refreshments. 2.00 ‘clock in the Old School Room on the 17th January. Please, please come and support Curry Rivel’s own environmental Charity-and help us to try to save what’s left of our biodiversity (it’s a national priority for all political parties) - you know you want to!!
