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Volcanoes and Wine: Why a match made in hell tastes like heaven

2 October 2019

From Etna to Vesuvius, Santorini to Stromboli, volcanoes have long been linked to excellent wines. New book Volcanoes and Wine explores this unlikely terroir

Britain’s hedgehog population has fallen 66 per cent in 20 years

12 June 2018

Britain only has 58 wild mammal species to start with, and many have declined sharply in number since 1995 – with hedgehogs suffering a particularly severe fall

Half of life on Earth has vanished since we arrived on the scene

21 May 2018

The biomass of living organisms on the planet has halved since human civilisation began, and humans now outweigh all wild mammals tenfold

A third of ‘protected’ nature zones are quietly being ruined

17 May 2018

The world’s nations have set up 200,000 protected areas in which nature is supposed to flourish, but in many cases the protection is pretty much theoretical

Harsh: Europe's cannabis died just as the first farmers arrived

17 May 2018

Cannabis – the source of the drug marijuana – virtually disappeared from Europe just as farmers arrived, so they didn’t get the chance to grow it for another 4500 years

The European Union has decided to ban bee-killing pesticides

27 April 2018

European Union member states have voted to ban the outdoor use of neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been linked to declines in pollinating insects

Almost 1500 bird species face extinction and we're to blame

24 April 2018

One-eighth of the world’s 11,000 bird species are now threatened, and in most cases farming is the biggest threat thanks to our increasingly meat-rich diets

Lost villages from centuries ago found in the Amazon rainforest

27 March 2018

Even some of the more remote parts of the Amazon rainforest, far from major rivers, were once densely populated – centuries before the arrival of Europeans

Our lust for tastier chocolate has transformed the cocoa tree

27 December 2017

Ever since we domesticated the cocoa tree over 3000 years ago, we have been breeding them to make tastier chocolate – but in the process we have made them vulnerable