School of Sustainability

Half the wheat, half again the profit

For two winters, an international research team that included researchers from the University of Göttingen watched wheat grow in nine landscapes around the city. The fields were worked three ways: conventionally farmed wheat with a strip of wildflowers along the edge, organically farmed wheat, and plain conventional wheat as a control. The question was plain - which of the two subsidised options is actually worth a farmer's while, and what each does for everything else living in the field.

On biodiversity, the two measures came out nearly level. Both the wildflower strips and the organic fields supported roughly 20 to 30 per cent more species than the plain conventional wheat, on the measures the team used. That is an awkward result for anyone designing subsidy schemes, because the two options ask very different things of the land and the farmer.

The economics broke the tie. The organic fields yielded only half the wheat of the conventional ones, yet their profits ran one and a half times higher. The study, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, does not say where that gap came from. It simply records that the lower-yielding system was the better-paying one, and that the wildflower strip, for all its ecological return, did not match it.

What the study does not settle is scale. Nine landscapes around one German university town, watched for two years, is a careful comparison, not a verdict for every farm. But it puts real numbers on a choice any wheat grower weighing the two subsidised routes will recognise, and it separates the two things subsidy schemes tend to bundle together: what a measure does for the field, and what it does for the farm's books.

Regeneration International · Read the source

The Cairngorms fire waited thirty hours for its helicopters

When fire took hold of Glenmore and RSPB Abernethy this summer, burning through an area the size of Dundee, the first people on the ground were not helicopters. They were firefighters backed by more than a hundred volunteers, gamekeepers and land managers who knew every track and bog on the hill. The helicopters, when they finally came, had been thirty hours away - because the aircraft based in Scotland were already fighting fires in England and Wales.

It was not even the year's biggest burn. In 2025 a megafire at Dava and Carrbridge, on land managed for sheep and shooting, took out forty-five square miles of mostly moorland, an area the size of Manchester. Drained peat and burned heather make ready fuel, and once peat catches it can smoulder underground for weeks or even months. Almost every one of these fires begins with a person. The Cairngorms now bans summer campfires by byelaw, with signs on every road into the park.

What actually stops fire is less dramatic than aircraft. It is water. Where peatlands have been rewetted, where beavers have dammed burns, where rivers have been reconnected to their floodplains, moisture sits in the ground and fire struggles to cross it. The pattern seems to have held this summer: the rewetted peatland and the naturally grazed ground came through in better shape, while the drained and intensively managed moorland proved the more flammable.

The Cairngorms National Park's Climate Adaptation Fund points at what preparedness looks like in practice: £300,000 shared among fourteen businesses and community groups this year, twelve of the grants spent on firefighting machinery and kit. Much of that equipment was already in use against the summer fire. The Scottish Rewilding Alliance now wants the government to call a Landscape Resilience Summit bringing together land managers of every kind, emergency services, communities and scientists - because the people who know the terrain are the ones who will be standing on it when the next fire starts.

Trees for Life · Read the source

The philanthropist who put someone else's name on the building

Peter Buckley, born in 1947, was a lawyer first, then a successful entrepreneur, and then something rarer: a philanthropist with no interest in being known as one. The money went out across education, activism, land conservation and green building, and he founded or co-founded a string of institutions along the way. The pattern in all of it was the same: build the thing, make it last, stay out of the photograph.

The thing he built largest was the David Brower Center. He imagined it, led the long work of getting it built, and stayed on as its president from the day it opened until his death. The building pushed past the highest levels of LEED green-building certification, but the certification was never the point. The point was the tenancy: the centre became a working home for dozens of cutting-edge, influential environmental and social justice organisations under one roof.

Bioneers, the conference network he supported quietly from behind the scenes for many years, remembered him this month alongside three much better-known names: Gloria Steinem, Carl Anthony and Wendell Berry. Steinem and Anthony had both spoken at the conference; Berry never did, though his thinking shaped decades of its programme. Buckley is the only one of the four most readers will never have heard of, which appears to be exactly how he arranged it.

Bioneers · Read the source