ecoexplorer.co.uk

Old bombs hidden since the Blitz still turn up every now and then in Coventry, but the idea of stepping on an unexploded device near your home is totally alien.

This quick vid from MAG (Mines Advisory Group International) brings the concept a bit closer to home.

My mate (and fellow West Wing fan) Kate, who I trained with, has flown out to Sudan today (more…)

With Copenhagen just 10 days away enjoy this corker from TheJuiceMedia.

At six minutes long it’s a bit epic but worth sticking with. Made me chuckle.

Jonny Dymond has done a smashing set of one-minute profiles for the seven frontrunners in the race to be President of Europe. They’re running them on the Today programme and it brightened up my otherwise windswept morning.

The music is a special treat. (Listen here)

The Express meanwhile plunders new depths.

Doing a trawl on Copenhagen I was pointed to this ‘debategraph’ by the Independent.

I’d like to give it top marks for being, no doubt, chock full of valuable information, but cunning enough to hide it under a super web of clicking confusion.

I like what this guy’s trying to do, but my worn-out brain got too tangled in the click-fest. Harumph!

World Toilet Day is on it’s way. The big day’s Thursday but why not start the celebration early, fellow toilet lovers?

One of our local charities, CORD, has launched the world’s first toilet twinning project - a nifty little scheme to link up local loos with bogs in Burundi. (more…)

Oxfam’s Gabura hive reminded me to post about Shorbanu.

I met Shorbanu earlier this year when Oxfam brought her from Gabura to Britain to speak to people about her personal experiences of climate change.

She’s a good spokesperson because her life has been affected by the changing land, changing water and of course cyclone Aila.

She and her husband used to be farmers but because of the rising salinity in the water their crops failed. He, like many of the men featured in the Gabura videos, went into the forest to gather honey, but was attacked and killed by a tiger. (more…)

Oxfam has compiled a hive of video footage, pictures and interviews from Gabura, an island in south west Bangladesh that was hit hard by cyclone Aila earlier this year.

It’s a nifty resource that you can dip into for as much or as little as you want, and is as close as you’ll come to being there without, well, being there.

Touching stories come from Hasmot Ali, a man living with disfigurement after being savaged by a tiger; Fatemah Khatun, a young girl who worries a rash caused by salt water could ruin her chances at marriage; and an elderly woman who is left scouring the river banks for mud bricks to build some sort of stove with.

I entered the Earth Journalism Awards in the hope of winning the chance to report from the climate change summit next month and found out a couple of weeks ago I’d made it past the national judges, past the Europe judges and to the last 60 or so entries going to the international panel.

Not a bad result for little old me from the local rag, but as I haven’t made the winning 15 I’m still on the scrounge for my golden ticket to Copenhagen.

We don’t have a UK winner among the 15, but do have a winner from Europe, with this three-minute video about how the changing climate in Macedonia means farmers are ditching tomatoes and growing tropical crops instead.

Whilst freezing my derriere off in my uninsulated home I’m reminded how lucky I am not to have to deal with the carnage that’s hit El Salvador over the weekend.

So far, more than 120 have been killed by mudslides and floods, and more than 7,000 are living in shelters.

There are reports of entire families being buried alive (more…)