We have all heard of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But in the case of the British nightingale, we have both rolled into one.

It is the signature voice of spring and yet it is falling silent, vanishing from one copse, thicket and wood after another, year on year.

Because so few people have now heard a real live nightingale – something everyone should experience at least once – I have been running a campaign to try and get the BBC to re-start its former annual May live broadcast of the bird. So far with no effect – but you can help by signing here.

I’ve also set up a website, Nightingale Nights, where you can hear the bird, hear a remarkable singer (Ziazan) who sang to one and it sang back, and find places to hear them and events to join, as well as a Soundcloud site of nightingale songs (birds and humans).

The Ecologist is based in Oxford – which for a piece about the nightingale, is a shame, as they have all but disappeared not just from the city, but from the whole county of Oxfordshire, as they have over so much of England and even from their former corners of Wales.

In his book The Nightingale and Its Song and Other Familiar Songbirds, written in 1932, naturalist and film-maker Oliver Pike described the nightingale as “common in suitable places” in Oxfordshire and stated: “I have seen more nightingales close to the city of Oxford than in any other part of England.”

That could not be said now. Indeed there are probably more environmental film-makers than nightingales around Oxford today.

Fewer nightingales than people called ‘Nightingale’

In 1980 a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) found 79 singing Nightingales in Oxfordshire: another survey in 1999 found just 17. The BTO believes that if nothing is done to change current trends, the Nightingale could be extinct in Britain within 20 or 30 years.

They calculate that it has already lost 43% of its former range, and has declined over 90% since the late 1960s. The latest estimate is that there are around 5,850 singing (only the males sing) nightingales in Britain, which is fewer than people named ‘Nightingale’ (around 10,000).

Nightingales have always been found mostly in the south of Britain but old studies (and perhaps the distribution of people named Nightingale) show they used to be found as far north as Cheshire, South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

They were also quite common across much of the Marches, parts of Wales, the Midlands and into Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire, as well as the Home Counties and East Anglia. Now they are increasingly confined to SE England – and getting rarer even there.

The decline continues. In recent years, researchers at the magnificent Ancient Woodland of Bradfield Woods in Suffolk, uncovered one factor in the disappearance of nightingales: deer are literally eating their key habitat, low dense growth such as that created by coppicing. But by the time their studies were published in full, the birds themselves had gone.

Over the past two or three decades, Southern England has seen a massive explosion in the numbers of deer, especially the small introduced muntjac which escaped from Whipsnade Zoo. They are literally eating nightingales ‘out of house and home’, as well as eliminating many wildflowers such as orchids, primroses and bluebells.

Lynx could help. Also, we could stop blitzing their habitat

That’s one undoubted cause, and the only solution is to shoot or otherwise control muntjac and roe deer, and for landowners and managers to fence their woods, which is expensive. There are proposals to re-introduce lynx into England which could help but they’d have to get very busy. Until then, eat wild venison to help nightingales in Britain.

With a warming climate you might expect nightingales to be spreading north as some other birds are but the reverse is true. They are retreating south.

One reason maybe that in common with some other summer migrant visitors to Britain that winter in the African ‘humid forest zone’ near the equator (such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove), the nightingale is not getting a ‘climate signal’ that spring is coming earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.

So these birds, unlike those wintering in North Africa, may still turn up at the ancestral time, only to find that key food items have gone. They could be ‘out of synch’. Their wintering places too are changing, with forest converted to intensive farmland.

Other possibilities are that pesticides such as neonicotinoids may play a role, or even that hitherto uninvestigated factors such as the parallel decline of the southern wood ant, which old nightingale catchers and keepers used to use as bait and food, might be involved. But that’s me speculating.

What is certain, is that nightingale homes have been cleared away, thickets tided up or grubbed out, and coppicing of woodland is far less widespread than it once was. Britain’s biggest single population of nightingales at Lodge Hill in Kent, is even under threat from housing development.

It’s also true that a host of insects from moths and butterflies to ants, are far rarer than they used to be. With government funded research into most of our native flora and fauna almost abandoned, we may never get to nail down all the causes until the nightingales are ‘in the coffins’.

With action comes hope

There are some glimmers of hope. With help from Anglia Water, last week the BTO published a guide for landowners on how to manage ‘scrub’ – thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn – to maximise its suitability for nightingales.

Grafham Water near Peterborough is one place where Anglia Water has done this successfully: they deserve credit for it. If enough land mangers acted on this advice we might possibly turn the tide. The 3,500-acre re-wilding project at Knepp in West Sussex is another big success story.

Then there’s the lynx, deer fencing and venison burgers, and tackling climate change, and organic farming. They’d all help.

What would it matter if the nightingales disappeared? We’d still have nightingale culture: a phalanx of poets led by Keats, endless literary references from Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention the Anglo Saxons (nightingale means ‘night-singer’ in old English), people called Nightingale, pubs called The Nightingale and a lot of Nightingale Lanes and Nightingale Closes.

Plus the BBC would have its historic recordings featuring a celebrated cellist (1924) and the painfully evocative lone nightingale singing against the drone of bombers in 1942 (Youtube video above) – the year the BBC abandoned the nightingale live broadcasts – plus David Attenborough’s’ tweet of the day.

Our children would still have plenty of British nightingales to listen to, only they’d all be dead. But that would leave something important forever missing from the heart of our country.

Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again.

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Over 2,500 people have signed so far. Please join us so we can stop this loss of experience, and focus the attention needed to rescue this magical, extraordinary creature.

Chris Rose lives in North Norfolk and is a campaigns and communications consultant and former campaigner for WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Website: Nightingale Nights tweeting as @NgaleNights contains a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Moonlit melody – the resurgent nightingales of Knepp‘ by Hazel Sillver.

We have all heard of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But in the case of the British nightingale, we have both rolled into one.

It is the signature voice of spring and yet it is falling silent, vanishing from one copse, thicket and wood after another, year on year.

Because so few people have now heard a real live nightingale – something everyone should experience at least once – I have been running a campaign to try and get the BBC to re-start its former annual May live broadcast of the bird. So far with no effect – but you can help by signing here.

I’ve also set up a website, Nightingale Nights, where you can hear the bird, hear a remarkable singer (Ziazan) who sang to one and it sang back, and find places to hear them and events to join, as well as a Soundcloud site of nightingale songs (birds and humans).

The Ecologist is based in Oxford – which for a piece about the nightingale, is a shame, as they have all but disappeared not just from the city, but from the whole county of Oxfordshire, as they have over so much of England and even from their former corners of Wales.

In his book The Nightingale and Its Song and Other Familiar Songbirds, written in 1932, naturalist and film-maker Oliver Pike described the nightingale as “common in suitable places” in Oxfordshire and stated: “I have seen more nightingales close to the city of Oxford than in any other part of England.”

That could not be said now. Indeed there are probably more environmental film-makers than nightingales around Oxford today.

Fewer nightingales than people called ‘Nightingale’

In 1980 a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) found 79 singing Nightingales in Oxfordshire: another survey in 1999 found just 17. The BTO believes that if nothing is done to change current trends, the Nightingale could be extinct in Britain within 20 or 30 years.

They calculate that it has already lost 43% of its former range, and has declined over 90% since the late 1960s. The latest estimate is that there are around 5,850 singing (only the males sing) nightingales in Britain, which is fewer than people named ‘Nightingale’ (around 10,000).

Nightingales have always been found mostly in the south of Britain but old studies (and perhaps the distribution of people named Nightingale) show they used to be found as far north as Cheshire, South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

They were also quite common across much of the Marches, parts of Wales, the Midlands and into Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire, as well as the Home Counties and East Anglia. Now they are increasingly confined to SE England – and getting rarer even there.

The decline continues. In recent years, researchers at the magnificent Ancient Woodland of Bradfield Woods in Suffolk, uncovered one factor in the disappearance of nightingales: deer are literally eating their key habitat, low dense growth such as that created by coppicing. But by the time their studies were published in full, the birds themselves had gone.

Over the past two or three decades, Southern England has seen a massive explosion in the numbers of deer, especially the small introduced muntjac which escaped from Whipsnade Zoo. They are literally eating nightingales ‘out of house and home’, as well as eliminating many wildflowers such as orchids, primroses and bluebells.

Lynx could help. Also, we could stop blitzing their habitat

That’s one undoubted cause, and the only solution is to shoot or otherwise control muntjac and roe deer, and for landowners and managers to fence their woods, which is expensive. There are proposals to re-introduce lynx into England which could help but they’d have to get very busy. Until then, eat wild venison to help nightingales in Britain.

With a warming climate you might expect nightingales to be spreading north as some other birds are but the reverse is true. They are retreating south.

One reason maybe that in common with some other summer migrant visitors to Britain that winter in the African ‘humid forest zone’ near the equator (such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove), the nightingale is not getting a ‘climate signal’ that spring is coming earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.

So these birds, unlike those wintering in North Africa, may still turn up at the ancestral time, only to find that key food items have gone. They could be ‘out of synch’. Their wintering places too are changing, with forest converted to intensive farmland.

Other possibilities are that pesticides such as neonicotinoids may play a role, or even that hitherto uninvestigated factors such as the parallel decline of the southern wood ant, which old nightingale catchers and keepers used to use as bait and food, might be involved. But that’s me speculating.

What is certain, is that nightingale homes have been cleared away, thickets tided up or grubbed out, and coppicing of woodland is far less widespread than it once was. Britain’s biggest single population of nightingales at Lodge Hill in Kent, is even under threat from housing development.

It’s also true that a host of insects from moths and butterflies to ants, are far rarer than they used to be. With government funded research into most of our native flora and fauna almost abandoned, we may never get to nail down all the causes until the nightingales are ‘in the coffins’.

With action comes hope

There are some glimmers of hope. With help from Anglia Water, last week the BTO published a guide for landowners on how to manage ‘scrub’ – thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn – to maximise its suitability for nightingales.

Grafham Water near Peterborough is one place where Anglia Water has done this successfully: they deserve credit for it. If enough land mangers acted on this advice we might possibly turn the tide. The 3,500-acre re-wilding project at Knepp in West Sussex is another big success story.

Then there’s the lynx, deer fencing and venison burgers, and tackling climate change, and organic farming. They’d all help.

What would it matter if the nightingales disappeared? We’d still have nightingale culture: a phalanx of poets led by Keats, endless literary references from Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention the Anglo Saxons (nightingale means ‘night-singer’ in old English), people called Nightingale, pubs called The Nightingale and a lot of Nightingale Lanes and Nightingale Closes.

Plus the BBC would have its historic recordings featuring a celebrated cellist (1924) and the painfully evocative lone nightingale singing against the drone of bombers in 1942 (Youtube video above) – the year the BBC abandoned the nightingale live broadcasts – plus David Attenborough’s’ tweet of the day.

Our children would still have plenty of British nightingales to listen to, only they’d all be dead. But that would leave something important forever missing from the heart of our country.

Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again.

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Over 2,500 people have signed so far. Please join us so we can stop this loss of experience, and focus the attention needed to rescue this magical, extraordinary creature.

Chris Rose lives in North Norfolk and is a campaigns and communications consultant and former campaigner for WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Website: Nightingale Nights tweeting as @NgaleNights contains a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Moonlit melody – the resurgent nightingales of Knepp‘ by Hazel Sillver.

We have all heard of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But in the case of the British nightingale, we have both rolled into one.

It is the signature voice of spring and yet it is falling silent, vanishing from one copse, thicket and wood after another, year on year.

Because so few people have now heard a real live nightingale – something everyone should experience at least once – I have been running a campaign to try and get the BBC to re-start its former annual May live broadcast of the bird. So far with no effect – but you can help by signing here.

I’ve also set up a website, Nightingale Nights, where you can hear the bird, hear a remarkable singer (Ziazan) who sang to one and it sang back, and find places to hear them and events to join, as well as a Soundcloud site of nightingale songs (birds and humans).

The Ecologist is based in Oxford – which for a piece about the nightingale, is a shame, as they have all but disappeared not just from the city, but from the whole county of Oxfordshire, as they have over so much of England and even from their former corners of Wales.

In his book The Nightingale and Its Song and Other Familiar Songbirds, written in 1932, naturalist and film-maker Oliver Pike described the nightingale as “common in suitable places” in Oxfordshire and stated: “I have seen more nightingales close to the city of Oxford than in any other part of England.”

That could not be said now. Indeed there are probably more environmental film-makers than nightingales around Oxford today.

Fewer nightingales than people called ‘Nightingale’

In 1980 a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) found 79 singing Nightingales in Oxfordshire: another survey in 1999 found just 17. The BTO believes that if nothing is done to change current trends, the Nightingale could be extinct in Britain within 20 or 30 years.

They calculate that it has already lost 43% of its former range, and has declined over 90% since the late 1960s. The latest estimate is that there are around 5,850 singing (only the males sing) nightingales in Britain, which is fewer than people named ‘Nightingale’ (around 10,000).

Nightingales have always been found mostly in the south of Britain but old studies (and perhaps the distribution of people named Nightingale) show they used to be found as far north as Cheshire, South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

They were also quite common across much of the Marches, parts of Wales, the Midlands and into Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire, as well as the Home Counties and East Anglia. Now they are increasingly confined to SE England – and getting rarer even there.

The decline continues. In recent years, researchers at the magnificent Ancient Woodland of Bradfield Woods in Suffolk, uncovered one factor in the disappearance of nightingales: deer are literally eating their key habitat, low dense growth such as that created by coppicing. But by the time their studies were published in full, the birds themselves had gone.

Over the past two or three decades, Southern England has seen a massive explosion in the numbers of deer, especially the small introduced muntjac which escaped from Whipsnade Zoo. They are literally eating nightingales ‘out of house and home’, as well as eliminating many wildflowers such as orchids, primroses and bluebells.

Lynx could help. Also, we could stop blitzing their habitat

That’s one undoubted cause, and the only solution is to shoot or otherwise control muntjac and roe deer, and for landowners and managers to fence their woods, which is expensive. There are proposals to re-introduce lynx into England which could help but they’d have to get very busy. Until then, eat wild venison to help nightingales in Britain.

With a warming climate you might expect nightingales to be spreading north as some other birds are but the reverse is true. They are retreating south.

One reason maybe that in common with some other summer migrant visitors to Britain that winter in the African ‘humid forest zone’ near the equator (such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove), the nightingale is not getting a ‘climate signal’ that spring is coming earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.

So these birds, unlike those wintering in North Africa, may still turn up at the ancestral time, only to find that key food items have gone. They could be ‘out of synch’. Their wintering places too are changing, with forest converted to intensive farmland.

Other possibilities are that pesticides such as neonicotinoids may play a role, or even that hitherto uninvestigated factors such as the parallel decline of the southern wood ant, which old nightingale catchers and keepers used to use as bait and food, might be involved. But that’s me speculating.

What is certain, is that nightingale homes have been cleared away, thickets tided up or grubbed out, and coppicing of woodland is far less widespread than it once was. Britain’s biggest single population of nightingales at Lodge Hill in Kent, is even under threat from housing development.

It’s also true that a host of insects from moths and butterflies to ants, are far rarer than they used to be. With government funded research into most of our native flora and fauna almost abandoned, we may never get to nail down all the causes until the nightingales are ‘in the coffins’.

With action comes hope

There are some glimmers of hope. With help from Anglia Water, last week the BTO published a guide for landowners on how to manage ‘scrub’ – thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn – to maximise its suitability for nightingales.

Grafham Water near Peterborough is one place where Anglia Water has done this successfully: they deserve credit for it. If enough land mangers acted on this advice we might possibly turn the tide. The 3,500-acre re-wilding project at Knepp in West Sussex is another big success story.

Then there’s the lynx, deer fencing and venison burgers, and tackling climate change, and organic farming. They’d all help.

What would it matter if the nightingales disappeared? We’d still have nightingale culture: a phalanx of poets led by Keats, endless literary references from Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention the Anglo Saxons (nightingale means ‘night-singer’ in old English), people called Nightingale, pubs called The Nightingale and a lot of Nightingale Lanes and Nightingale Closes.

Plus the BBC would have its historic recordings featuring a celebrated cellist (1924) and the painfully evocative lone nightingale singing against the drone of bombers in 1942 (Youtube video above) – the year the BBC abandoned the nightingale live broadcasts – plus David Attenborough’s’ tweet of the day.

Our children would still have plenty of British nightingales to listen to, only they’d all be dead. But that would leave something important forever missing from the heart of our country.

Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again.

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Over 2,500 people have signed so far. Please join us so we can stop this loss of experience, and focus the attention needed to rescue this magical, extraordinary creature.

Chris Rose lives in North Norfolk and is a campaigns and communications consultant and former campaigner for WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Website: Nightingale Nights tweeting as @NgaleNights contains a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Moonlit melody – the resurgent nightingales of Knepp‘ by Hazel Sillver.

We have all heard of the ‘canary in the coalmine’ and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But in the case of the British nightingale, we have both rolled into one.

It is the signature voice of spring and yet it is falling silent, vanishing from one copse, thicket and wood after another, year on year.

Because so few people have now heard a real live nightingale – something everyone should experience at least once – I have been running a campaign to try and get the BBC to re-start its former annual May live broadcast of the bird. So far with no effect – but you can help by signing here.

I’ve also set up a website, Nightingale Nights, where you can hear the bird, hear a remarkable singer (Ziazan) who sang to one and it sang back, and find places to hear them and events to join, as well as a Soundcloud site of nightingale songs (birds and humans).

The Ecologist is based in Oxford – which for a piece about the nightingale, is a shame, as they have all but disappeared not just from the city, but from the whole county of Oxfordshire, as they have over so much of England and even from their former corners of Wales.

In his book The Nightingale and Its Song and Other Familiar Songbirds, written in 1932, naturalist and film-maker Oliver Pike described the nightingale as “common in suitable places” in Oxfordshire and stated: “I have seen more nightingales close to the city of Oxford than in any other part of England.”

That could not be said now. Indeed there are probably more environmental film-makers than nightingales around Oxford today.

Fewer nightingales than people called ‘Nightingale’

In 1980 a survey by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) found 79 singing Nightingales in Oxfordshire: another survey in 1999 found just 17. The BTO believes that if nothing is done to change current trends, the Nightingale could be extinct in Britain within 20 or 30 years.

They calculate that it has already lost 43% of its former range, and has declined over 90% since the late 1960s. The latest estimate is that there are around 5,850 singing (only the males sing) nightingales in Britain, which is fewer than people named ‘Nightingale’ (around 10,000).

Nightingales have always been found mostly in the south of Britain but old studies (and perhaps the distribution of people named Nightingale) show they used to be found as far north as Cheshire, South Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

They were also quite common across much of the Marches, parts of Wales, the Midlands and into Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire, as well as the Home Counties and East Anglia. Now they are increasingly confined to SE England – and getting rarer even there.

The decline continues. In recent years, researchers at the magnificent Ancient Woodland of Bradfield Woods in Suffolk, uncovered one factor in the disappearance of nightingales: deer are literally eating their key habitat, low dense growth such as that created by coppicing. But by the time their studies were published in full, the birds themselves had gone.

Over the past two or three decades, Southern England has seen a massive explosion in the numbers of deer, especially the small introduced muntjac which escaped from Whipsnade Zoo. They are literally eating nightingales ‘out of house and home’, as well as eliminating many wildflowers such as orchids, primroses and bluebells.

Lynx could help. Also, we could stop blitzing their habitat

That’s one undoubted cause, and the only solution is to shoot or otherwise control muntjac and roe deer, and for landowners and managers to fence their woods, which is expensive. There are proposals to re-introduce lynx into England which could help but they’d have to get very busy. Until then, eat wild venison to help nightingales in Britain.

With a warming climate you might expect nightingales to be spreading north as some other birds are but the reverse is true. They are retreating south.

One reason maybe that in common with some other summer migrant visitors to Britain that winter in the African ‘humid forest zone’ near the equator (such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove), the nightingale is not getting a ‘climate signal’ that spring is coming earlier in the Northern Hemisphere.

So these birds, unlike those wintering in North Africa, may still turn up at the ancestral time, only to find that key food items have gone. They could be ‘out of synch’. Their wintering places too are changing, with forest converted to intensive farmland.

Other possibilities are that pesticides such as neonicotinoids may play a role, or even that hitherto uninvestigated factors such as the parallel decline of the southern wood ant, which old nightingale catchers and keepers used to use as bait and food, might be involved. But that’s me speculating.

What is certain, is that nightingale homes have been cleared away, thickets tided up or grubbed out, and coppicing of woodland is far less widespread than it once was. Britain’s biggest single population of nightingales at Lodge Hill in Kent, is even under threat from housing development.

It’s also true that a host of insects from moths and butterflies to ants, are far rarer than they used to be. With government funded research into most of our native flora and fauna almost abandoned, we may never get to nail down all the causes until the nightingales are ‘in the coffins’.

With action comes hope

There are some glimmers of hope. With help from Anglia Water, last week the BTO published a guide for landowners on how to manage ‘scrub’ – thickets of blackthorn and hawthorn – to maximise its suitability for nightingales.

Grafham Water near Peterborough is one place where Anglia Water has done this successfully: they deserve credit for it. If enough land mangers acted on this advice we might possibly turn the tide. The 3,500-acre re-wilding project at Knepp in West Sussex is another big success story.

Then there’s the lynx, deer fencing and venison burgers, and tackling climate change, and organic farming. They’d all help.

What would it matter if the nightingales disappeared? We’d still have nightingale culture: a phalanx of poets led by Keats, endless literary references from Chaucer and Shakespeare, not to mention the Anglo Saxons (nightingale means ‘night-singer’ in old English), people called Nightingale, pubs called The Nightingale and a lot of Nightingale Lanes and Nightingale Closes.

Plus the BBC would have its historic recordings featuring a celebrated cellist (1924) and the painfully evocative lone nightingale singing against the drone of bombers in 1942 (Youtube video above) – the year the BBC abandoned the nightingale live broadcasts – plus David Attenborough’s’ tweet of the day.

Our children would still have plenty of British nightingales to listen to, only they’d all be dead. But that would leave something important forever missing from the heart of our country.

Let’s not allow the nightingale to slip quietly into the night and never be heard again.

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Over 2,500 people have signed so far. Please join us so we can stop this loss of experience, and focus the attention needed to rescue this magical, extraordinary creature.

Chris Rose lives in North Norfolk and is a campaigns and communications consultant and former campaigner for WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Website: Nightingale Nights tweeting as @NgaleNights contains a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Moonlit melody – the resurgent nightingales of Knepp‘ by Hazel Sillver.

I’m standing high in the canopy of an old oak, atop a tree platform. It is a clear spring night and moonlight is falling through the branches onto the faces of the people around me.

We stand silent, waiting, waiting. The breeze moves through the leaves with a rustle. Eventually, we are rewarded for our patience. The distinctive, melodic song of the nightingale cuts through the air.

His quick succession of notes is varied and rich: first a high peel, then a sonorous warble, next a low rasp. Soon another bird begins to sing in the scrub of hawthorn and bramble close by, then another, and another.

I have lived in Sussex for almost ten years, but can count on one hand the amount of times I have heard a nightingale. Yet here I am in the Knepp Estate near Horsham in West Sussex, hearing four at once!

A new ‘wilderness’ in the heart of Sussex

Knepp is the largest ‘re-wilding’ project in the UK and very inspiring it is too. Once intensively farmed, the 3,500 acres here have been allowed to regenerate over the past 14 years, with minimal human intervention.

Inspired by the theories of Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, Knepp’s owner Charlie Burrell has turned this land wild again, using grazing animals, such as pigs, long-horned cattle and deer. The result is a fascinating landscape of grassland and scrub, which has attracted a wealth of rare wildlife, including nightingales. Knepp currently plays host to 2% of the nightingales that fly annually from Africa to breed in the UK.

Why these fascinating birds travel so far is a mystery, but it’s thought that in times gone by, they flew north to the once lush green pastures and wetlands of North Africa, before these turned into the scorched sands of the Sahara. When the desert formed, the birds simply kept flying north … as far as leafy green Sussex!

The male birds arrive first and settle in, building a nest. This will be hidden in low scrub, such as the knitted mesh of hawthorn, bramble, sallow and dog rose at Knepp. Then they will begin to sing. Their song, so harmonious to our ears, is a cry of flirtation to any female birds that may be flying in from Africa – if his warbling is up to scratch, she may flutter down and nest with him.

Although nightingales are associated with evensong, in fact they chirp away all day, pause at dusk, and then begin to sing again. The amount of time they rest for at dusk varies and tonight they made the other bird lovers and myself wait until 10:30pm. But it is worth it. When those enchanting notes resound through the moonlit air, everything seems well with the world.

A rare cornucopia of native wildlife

Knepp are now opening their gates to the public for a series of Wildland Safaris. Over the next few weeks, they are offering the Nightingale Safari, which I was lucky enough to attend. This includes a tour of the beautiful and ecologically important Knepp Re-wilding Project, a delicious supper and the chance to listen to the nightingales.

Because of a loss of habitat, the nightingale has become increasingly rare in the UK over the past few decades. Thankfully, the dense, thorny scrub they like to build their nests in is found in abundance here.

The newly ‘wilded’ land at Knepp is attracting other rare birds, such as turtle doves and ravens, as well as other fascinating wildlife, such as the Purple Emperor butterfly, which breeds here en masse in July after a colourful mating display.

There are many opportunities to visit and enjoy this natural abundance (see below). But if you have time this spring, don’t miss the nightingales.

Come nightfall, when all the other birds fall silent (with the exception of the owls), the sound of this little bird singing beneath the stars is magic.

Hazel Sillver is a freelance journalist and long-standing contributor to The Ecologist’s ‘Green Living’ strand. Email: hazel@theecologist.org.

Nightingale safaris at Knepp: the next Nightingale Safaris at Knepp will run on the 7, 9, 16 and 21 May, 7.30-9.30pm, £25 per person. See also a list of nightingale events around the UK.

Other wildlife events at Knepp: The safaris on offer at Knepp over the summer include Bee Safaris, Wildflower Safaris, Bat and Moth Safaris and Purple Emperor butterfly Safaris, and range from half-day visits to overnight stays in one of the yurts, bell tents or shepherd’s huts.

Petition: ‘BBC, Please bring the magic of Nightingale song to people all over Britain this May, by broadcasting it live on local and national radio and TV!‘

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Don’t let our nightingales go quietly!‘.

The life of Freddie Gray, and of so many others, was endangered many times over by numerous forms of systemic racism before it was finally taken in the custody of police – an event that has sparked protests in Baltimore this week.

Among these forms of endangerment was the lead that poisoned Gray as a child.

Reports indicate that Freddie Gray, like too many children – especially children of color and those in poverty – experienced significant exposure to lead as a child.

In 2008, Gray’s family filed a lawsuit against Stanley Rochkind, the owner of a home they rented for four years, arguing their children’s exposure to lead “played a significant part in their educational, behavioral and medical problems”, according to reports.

In six tests conducted between 1992 and 1996, Freddie Gray and his siblings had lead levels between 11 micrograms per deciliter and 19 micrograms per deciliter, according to an article citing court documents.

Those levels of lead in Gray’s blood far exceeded the upper limit of five micrograms per deciliter deemed safe by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Extensive research has demonstrated that childhood lead exposure can cause life-long and very serious developmental, cognitive, medical, and psychological issues.

These harmful effects can happen from the womb, even at low levels of exposure. Researchers point out that exposure to lead and other environmental toxins can have significant effects on the developing brains of babies, even at levels far lower than those that would be toxic to adults.

So as we examine the problems of systemic racism, economic injustice, and state misconduct, we should be careful not to leave out hidden forms of violence, including environmental injustice.

A pervasive but invisible violence

Exposure to environmental toxins is extremely widespread. As children’s health advocates Philippe Grandjean and Philip Landrigan told the Atlantic:

“Our very great concern … is that children worldwide are being exposed to unrecognized toxic chemicals that are silently eroding intelligence, disrupting behaviors, truncating future achievements and damaging societies.”

This poisonous lead exposure, and the possible developmental harm it causes, is just one example of the invisible violence inflicted on so many individuals through absorption of environmental toxins and through other harmful and unequal environmental conditions.

Environmental issues are not often described in terms of violence, at least not violence against humans. But the environmental injustice that slowly poisons poor and minority individuals and deprives them of access to healthy food and healthy living environments in the US and globally is, in my view, most certainly a form of violence.

Rob Nixon, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls this type of harm to vulnerable populations “slow violence.”

Environmental injustice may seem like a secondary issue in the face of massive police brutality, poverty, and civil uprising, and I don’t suggest that it should preempt conversations about other forms of systemic racism.

But as we talk about the devaluing of black lives and black bodies that has taken place in Baltimore and across the country and the world, we cannot ignore the ways that this manifests in a subtle and constant disregard for the health of marginalized communities.

‘Food deserts’ in the concrete jungle

Lead poisoning may sound like a small issue or one that is primarily in the past, but this is not the case. It is a far-too common event in many regions in the US. Combined with this are conditions in which black and poor individuals often have limited access to fresh food and green space.

These communities also experience disproportionate proximity to garbage incinerators, factories, and other sources of toxic emissions, according to a number of studies from academics, advocacy groups and government agencies.

Freddie Gray serves as an example of the issue of food deserts as well. He lived in a community with limited access to fresh food (see the map here from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), as do one in five residents of Baltimore City and one in four school-aged children in Baltimore.

Research also indicates that “in areas where residents are almost entirely white, there is 11 times more green space than areas where more than 40% of residents are black, Asian or minority ethnic.” And while class and income level are factors in these types of environmental injustice, race remains a major factor even when isolated from class.

Outside the US, we see these same phenomena playing out among many poor and non-white populations. And this inequity is exaggerated even further when we consider that those populations most affected by climate change are likely to be in poor countries with predominantly black and brown people.

Indeed, many have argued that the delay among wealthy nations to significantly curb climate change is motivated by a lack of interest in or respect for the lives of people of color.

Environmental racism

Issues of systemic racism like widespread poverty and police brutality deserve much more attention than white America has given them. I don’t wish to draw any attention away from these issues, or from a full examination of police misconduct in cases like Gray’s and many others.

But to fully demand any justice for Freddie Gray and other victims of systemic violence, we have to reject all forms of systemic racism, including the subtle but devastating forms of environmental racism.

Freddie Gray’s life ended violently and tragically in the custody of police. This tragedy, and so many others like it, must be answered for.

But the tragedies of Gray’s life started long before this – not only with underfunded schools, income inequality, and myriad egregious denials of institutional support for his community – but also with the slow theft of his potential caused by his exposure to toxins like lead.

This country is denying huge numbers of black and brown children their chance to achieve untold levels of cognitive potential by quietly poisoning them. We then compound this denial by providing deeply unequal educational opportunities. And, finally, we disregard their civil rights as well.

Addressing any one piece of this picture while leaving the others in place guarantees continued injustice.

The call that #blacklivesmatter means that black bodies and minds matter. It means that it matters when black individuals are killed by police, and it also means that it matters when black individuals are slowly and invisibly stripped of their health.

Rita Turner is Lecturer in American Studies, Sustainability, and EcoJustice at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article, or for more coverage on the Baltimore riots, see here.

In seven months’ time the most important climate negotiations ever will take place in Paris.

At those negotiations world leaders will sit down and decide the fates of millions around the world. Clear, bold action on climate change is possible – but it’s far from inevitable.

Lord Stern has said that what’s on the table is inadequate but there is still time to improve it. And even after Paris, we’re going to have to keep campaigning, keep improving global initiatives to protect our environment.

You need to elect Green MPs to make sure there’s a strong voice for action from the UK.

Climate change – a clear and present reality

We’re already seeing the impact of climate change on our planet, on our wildlife, and on our communities. A study just last month found that extreme heatwaves and rainfall events are now at least four times more likely than before as a result of climate change.

Around the globe peoples’ lives – and particularly the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable – are afflicted by rapidly increasing temperatures and increasingly unstable weather patterns. Year after year we’re seeing violent storms, from Eastern Asia to the Caribbean, rip through communities.

In many parts of the world we’re seeing farmers unable to feed their families or supply their communities, as crop failures become the norm.

And here in the UK, with summer temperatures rising, we’re seeing older people suffer, and even die, from the excess heat, while floods menace communities in vulnerable areas.

We know we have to act, and we know we have to act now. And we need to act not just for environmental reasons, but also to tackle pressing economic and social concerns.

Leadership in arms sales, fracking, nuclear power and fuel poverty?

After five years of the sad sick joke of the “greenest government ever” – which the Centre for Economic Performance says has left us lagging behind most other OECD countries in clean technology take-up and innovation, Britain stands at a crossroads.

This election represents a decision point. What path will our economy, our society take?

Will it choose a dangerous, destructive dead-end, that will ultimately leave us stranded internationally, economically and environmentally? Or do we offer hope to the rest of the world, lead by example and embrace 21st century solutions to the problems that we face?

We’re now a world leader in arms sales and in the fraud-ridden, dangerously unstable financial sector, with its heavy investment in the fossil fuel industries.

These industries threaten our collective futures. They are no kind of foundation for our economy or our society. Yet they are at the heart of plans offered by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems.

All three parties want us to pursue the fantasy of fracking as an energy source, ignoring the need to decarbonise our electricity supply by 2020. Conservatives and Labour want to build new roads and expand airports, ignoring the environmental and social impacts on communities.

None of the ‘establishment parties’ have the bold plans to improve energy efficiency on the scale that we need to both tackle fuel poverty in Britain and to cut our carbon emissions.

None have plans to break up the oligopoly of the Big Six energy firms, to democratise our energy supply and put it in the hands of communities and small local companies.

None have acknowledged that nuclear power is another failed 20thc entury dinosaur. Blow after blow hits the nuclear power sector. The two European plants under construction are wildly over schedule and over budget, and may not generate a single watt.

But the nuclear lobbyists still find government doors swept open before them, while policies fail to deliver for our renewable future.

Or real leadership for a green and sustainable Britain?

Only the Green Party is setting out the policies that could make Britain a leader in the technology we need to build a low carbon future, which is the only future we can have. It would be a future of tremendous possibility, of good, stable jobs and warm, comfortable, affordable-to-heat homes. A future with a stable climate.

The Green Party has set out how we can take real action now to help people live lower carbon lives. That’s why we’d insulate 9 million homes in Britain – helping to end the scandal that is fuel poverty, and cutting household energy bills in the process.

It’s why we’d renationalise our railways, and cut fares by 10% – to give people a positive alternative to using their cars. And it’s why we’d invest 1% of GDP in research – to ensure that Britain is at the forefront of building the technology we need for the 21st century.

The truth is that we can’t afford not to take action on climate change. The investment we make now, paid for by cutting new road projects, scrapping HS2 and ensuring that the richest pay their fair share in tax, will save us all money in the long run. The cost of inaction is far, far greater.

And my message to the people of Britain today is: if you want action on climate change and if you care about protecting our shared environment for generations to come – vote Green.

Voting Green can never be a ‘wasted vote’!

By voting Green, you’ve got a chance to show whoever the next Prime Minister is just how much the fight against climate change matters to you. You’ve got a chance to send a message, loud and clear, to whoever is negotiating on your behalf in Paris.

Green MPs will do all they can to stop a Tory Government taking office, but if they do get back in you can rest assured that Greens will be on their case, holding them to account and exposing their shortcomings.

But, with a Labour minority administration looking increasingly likely, you’ve got a chance to elect a strong group of Green MPs who can have an effective influence on Ed Miliband on issues like fracking, home energy efficiency and breaking up the influence of the big six energy companies.

Green MPs will always fight against fracking, they’ll always oppose new roads ploughing through our countryside and expensive private homes chewing up the green belt. They’ll always fight to ensure that climate action and social justice are dealt with together.

On Thursday you’ve got a chance to send a clear message, and to send Greens MPs to Westminster.

Across the country, from Brighton, to Bristol and Sheffield, in my own constituency in Holborn and St Pancras in London, and here in Cambridge, our campaigns are strong and our commitment is unbending.

Vote Green – and Britain can lead the way in tackling climate change and building a sustainable future.

Natalie Bennett is Leader of the Green Party of England & Wales.

This article is the text of her speech given in Cambridge yesterday, 5th May 2015.

Safety checks following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March 2011, when a 10 metre-high sea wall was overtopped by a tsunami, have shown that nuclear plants are at greater risk of catastrophic flooding as a result of climate change.

All nuclear plants need large quantities of water for cooling so all must be built close to the sea, large rivers or lakes. This makes them vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surges and to the possible collapse of large dams upstream from poor construction, floodwater or seismic activity.

Since nuclear plants are designed to operate for as long as 60 years and need around a further century to decommission, accelerating sea level rise and more intense rainfall may present serious problems.

There are currently 435 operating nuclear reactors in the world, many of them potentially vulnerable to flooding because of natural disasters. Examples from the UK, Finland and the US show that the extent of the danger is not always being disclosed.

Dungeness quietly shut down for 5 months after flood assessment

In Britain, after discovering in May 2013 that one of their reactors would be at risk during a storm of inundation by seawater, the owners, EDF Energy, quietly shut it down. The reactor, at Dungeness and built on a shingle beach beside the English Channel, supplies 750,000 homes.

The company informed the Office for Nuclear Regulation that it was being shut down as a precaution. The reactor remained off-line until 15 October that year while a new sea wall was constructed – losing the company around £100 million in revenue.

Although the company did announce the closure at the time, the extent of the problem and the length of the shutdown were not announced. Later EDF admitted that the emergency works had taken place following an assessment of the flooding danger after the Fukushima disaster.

Stephen Thomas, professor of energy policy at the University of Greenwich in London, criticised EDF for its attitude. He was quoted by the UK’s Independent newspaper as saying:

“If a plant closes for five months it is not just fiddling about, it is something serious, and EDF can’t pretend it is not … we need to be told the truth.”

In US, 30 nuclear plants at risk of flooding

The same fears were raised in the US by the Union of Concerned Scientists after a report was leaked about the danger to nuclear reactors from dams bursting.

According to a report by the US Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRC), which had been withheld, more than 30 nuclear installations were in danger from flooding. The Commission was later accused of using security concerns to mask embarrassing information.

Among many revelations in the report was the fact that the authorities had known for a decade or more that the failure of a dam upstream from the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina would cause floodwater to overwhelm its three reactors, possibly causing a catastrophic meltdown.

The odds of the dam bursting were far higher than the chances of the accident that devastated Fukushima.

Oconee is one of the largest nuclear plants in America and has been operating since 1983. Its owner, Duke Energy, remains confident that it could shut the plant down safely in an hour, before floodwaters from upstream could reach the reactors. The NRC has decided that this is sufficient safeguard.

Dave Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The NRC knows – and has known for many years – that flooding from dam failures can disable the emergency equipment needed to prevent reactor core meltdown.

“The agency must require plants to address known flooding hazards and thoroughly investigate other plants that may be at risk and require them to resolve any potential hazards.

“If such a flooding accident occurred, the NRC would quickly determine which other plants were vulnerable and require them to strengthen their protection against similar events. Wouldn’t it be smarter for the agency to do that before an accident occurs?”

Scandinavian reactors remain vulnerable

More open about its problems is Finland’s Loviisa nuclear power plant on the Baltic Sea, which was flooded by a 1.73-metre storm surge in 2005.

Since then four cooling towers have been built 10 metres above sea level to avoid inundation in a new storm surge, and new floodgates and waterproof doors have been installed to protect the reactor. A new road has been built above flood level so that emergency services can reach the plant to pump away floodwater.

Even so, the Rain Project, a consortium of experts on safety and climate change, thinks more can be done to protect against potential disaster. Christer Pursianen is professor of societal safety and environment at the Arctic University of Norway.

He says that although Finland is in the forefront of nuclear safety, more needs to be done to train staff in emergencies and to develop links with neighbouring countries so as to gain experience in disaster prevention:

“The risk of a serious nuclear accident remains always above zero as a result of unexpected phenomena taking place.”

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

In 2009 I helped organize a protest outside the Houses of Parliament. Swine Flu was then a considered threat and there was a chance that the WHO might enact the law to mandate vaccination of citizens during an epidemic.

As you may recall, this did not happen but many people were concerned that vaccination could have been forced.

Six million British people, mostly children, received the vaccine but tragically, 60 people in the UK suffered side effects, committing them to an incurable and lifelong condition (1).

They are about to receive a multi-million-pound payout from the government as compensation for their swine flu vaccine-induced brain damage (narcolepsy and cataplexy). Over 800 children across Europe suffered similar damage from the swine flu vaccine but many will never receive any compensation.

More recently there have been protests in Poland, Serbia and other European countries where childhood vaccination is mandatory: in March in Belgrade, Serbia, and this month demonstrations are planned for the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

In fact just under 40% of EU member countries have some vaccines mandated, (2) from only Polio in Belgium, to 17 doses against 10 diseases in Hungary and 22 doses against 10 diseases in Serbia (non-EU member).

For example, parents in Belgium face jail if they refuse to vaccinate their children with polio. (3) In Serbia parents who refuse vaccination are fined around a month’s wages or face losing their children after a court hearing.

In some countries medical exemptions to vaccination do not apply

In some countries (Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and others), medical or religious exemptions do not even apply. The parents there are also seeing vaccine damage but they do not even have reporting systems, let alone a damage fund as we do in the UK. In Poland the organization Stop NOP is campaigning for a vaccine adverse effect reporting system (4).

Here in the UK MPs are debating amendments to a 36-year-old piece of legislation which Jackie Fletcher of JABS (Justice Awareness and Basic Support), mother of a severely-disabled MMR victim, described as “grossly unfair” and a major factor in skewing national statistics about vaccine safety (5).

Her son Robert did receive a modest payout in 2010 but it took 20 years. He is now age 23 with the mental age of a 3-year-old, doubly incontinent and can’t walk, talk or feed himself. Jackie and Robert’s lives were changed forever by the MMR, and they are not alone. (6)

If vaccines have the potential to cause serious harm and even death, then mandating them for every child is not only Russian Roulette but totally unethical – all the more so as the state does not look after the injured or cover all the costs.

Not only do vaccinated children risk very serious side effects but certain vaccines (e.g. the MMR and Rotovirus) can actually cause the disease(s) vaccinated against as a result of live virus shedding (7) and many vaccines do not work for all recipients.

Mandating a procedure that may spread disease or may not ‘protect’ from disease therefore needs serious re-thinking. Surely informed choice by the main carer is the best option.

The EFVV is a forum of 20 European countries

I am part of a European group called the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance, EFVV (8). It was founded in 1999 by a group of French and Spanish doctors, homeopaths and vaccine risk awareness group organisers concerned about the number of vaccine injuries they were seeing.

By 2006, the group had expanded considerably and completed a report containing a statistical analysis of more than 1,000 cases of injury from six EU countries. The report was presented to the European Parliament and a press conference was held in Brussels but little notice was taken.

Every year we meet and can’t believe the stories of fines, threats and legal action from our neighbours in Hungary and Slovenia. This year attendance will nearly double with representatives from at least 20 European countries at our AGM: doctors, lawyers, campaigners and parents. Given recent trends in both the US and Europe, the main focus will be mandatory vaccination.

We have recently launched a petition to the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, entitled ‘Respect, promote and protect freedom of informed vaccination consent throughout Europe‘. (9)

The goal is to present it to the European Parliament, Commission and Council in Brussels with a report from each country on the practice that is experienced. And great news – just today it received its first 10,000 signatures!

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union states clearly: “Free and informed consent must be respected in the fields of medicine and biology” (10) and this is only one of many human rights documents affirming the right to informed consent. To mandate vaccinations is to deny this fundamental freedom and as such, it is a breach of our Universal Human Rights.

In 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe”. (11) Under such circumstances, how can we possibly accept the risks of compulsory vaccination? I understand the claimed Public Health issues around high vaccination rates but Scotland has 97% vaccine uptake with free choice, so it is clearly possible to achieve high levels of vaccination without mandates.

I am very concerned that vaccination policy may become mandatory in the UK as it is trending in the US, Australia and in Europe. Not only are there well documented unwanted side effects, some severe, live virus can shed from newly vaccinated recipients during the first few weeks and outbreaks have been started by fully vaccinated people.

So would we really want to mandate vaccination for the health of our children? Or should we be focusing on other ways to reduce disease and increase health? Consider the situation in the US where the greatest number of vaccines in the developed world are given, yet they have the highest level of child mortality. (12) There is clearly more to health than vaccination.

Vaccination may have come a long way in safety since the 1800s – but we still do not test them with benign placebo, or with a control group and we don’t test them for BSE and can’t filter out the animal DNA or viruses as they are too small. (13) Download any vaccine insert and you will see the disclaimer they all bear, “This vaccine has not been tested for carcinogenic properties … “.

Mandating vaccines goes against the Nuremberg Code

The EFVV petition is however not about vaccines and their worth per se, but about human rights. It is important to remind ourselves that all medicine comes with serious potential harms and vaccination is no exception.

Informed choice is vital in a democracy. Mandating vaccines actually goes against at least a dozen European ethical documents, including the Nuremberg Code. (14)

Please don’t become caught up in the frenzy to remove parental rights and mandate medicine on otherwise healthy children, as some of our European neighbours are doing. Or removing benefits as Australia has done. As Professor David M. Salisbury, ex-Director of Immunisation, wrote in the BMJ 2012, (15)

“Mandatory vaccination in the UK was attempted first in the 19th century. The legislation was ineffective, discriminated in favour of those able to use the exemptions, and was divisive; it fostered substantial anti-vaccine sentiment and was counterproductive. Attempts to impose compulsion today would undoubtedly be challenged in terms of autonomy, inappropriate intrusion of the state, availability of choice, and parental rights and responsibilities. Bolstered by access to information, its unacceptability to the public would be likely to have the same consequences.”

However, there is a new Director of Immunisation – Dr Andrew Pollard – who may have a very different view.

I urge you therefore not be become desensitized to the issues around vaccine damage, long term child health and human rights, and sign this important petition.

Anna Watson is co-chair of the European Forum for Vaccine Vigilance (EFVV) as well as a mother and Primary school teacher with an interest in ethics and patient involvement. She sat for 3 years on her local PCT and then CCG board as the patient representative, and founded a Arnica, a grass roots network for parents and health practitioners that now meets in nearly 100 towns. She is UK representative to EFVV.

Petition: ‘Respect, promote and protect freedom of informed vaccination consent throughout Europe‘.

References

1. http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Health/article1382119.ece

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_population

http://www.eurosurveillance.org/images/dynamic/EE/V17N22/DAncona_tab1.jpg

3. http://www.ctvnews.ca/jail-for-belgians-who-reject-polio-shot-1.281974

4. http://www.stopnop.pl/

5. https://www.gov.uk/vaccine-damage-payment/overview

6. http://www.jabs.org.uk/wigan-evening-post24th.html

7. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18922486

8. www.efvv.eu/

9. https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-european-commission-council-of-the-european-union-respect-promote-and-protect-freedom-of-informed-vaccination-consent-throughout-europe

10. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf, Article 3, page 9

11 Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 131 S. Ct. 1068, 179 L.Ed.2d 1 (2011), http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf

12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate

13. J. Roberts/Medical Veritas 5 (2008) 1897-1905 1897 The dangerous impurities of vaccines, Janine Roberts http://homeoint.ru/pdfs/Janine.pdf

14. http://history.nih.gov/research/downloads/nuremberg.pdf

15. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2435

Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean received what may prove a fatal blow yesterday when the City of Seattle issued its finding that the oil company’s use of the Port of Seattle violated planning laws.

Seattle’s Mayor Ed Murray announced that an investigation carried out by city’s Department of Planning and Development’s showed that the 20-year old shoreline permit for the Port’s Terminal 5 did not allow its use for as homeport for Shell’s Arctic drilling fleet.