Green Party peer, Jenny Jones, met campaigners on the outskirts of London last week to see for herself how the building of HS2 is threatening a large proportion of London’s water supply and impacting on local environments.
Category: Ecology and animal protection
People need wild spaces and green spaces and other species need them too. Sharing our world with other species is part of the joy of being alive, when we cage and abuse them, or destroy their habitat, we demean ourselves in the process
Jenny works to increase green spaces and protect animals and wild space
Read on to see her latest posts on this these topics
Save our Oceans
From the great whale to seagrass, the ocean is our greatest natural asset and carbon sink. It is vital that the UK Government secures success for our blue planet at the upcoming COP15 conference.
The CPRE’s Environmental Land Management recommendations
This morning I spoke at the parliamentary launch of CPRE‘s Countryside Next Door report, I said:
The Green Party welcomes moves to improve the stewardship of green belt land and protect access to the countryside for all. These green spaces are vital for the health and wellbeing of those who live in urban areas. Recreation and access to land, which we know are so crucial to human health and well-being, need to be considered alongside what crops we grow on that land. We need to re-localise our food supply, restore the ring of market gardens and orchards that not that long ago surrounded our cities and towns. Instead of vast tracts of monoculture the Green Party wants to see the growing of fruit and vegetables, ideally in a mixed system and managed in ways that are excellent for biodiversity and nature. Continue reading “The CPRE’s Environmental Land Management recommendations”
Action to ban fur and foie gras imports
I recently joined organisations campaigning to save the promised Animals Abroad Bill – which would ban imports of hunting “trophies”, fur, and foie gras as well as the promotion of elephant tourist rides overseas. I joined representatives from the “Don’t Betray Animals” Coalition who launched two enormous balloons, shaped like an elephant and a lion, above Parliament to send a clear message to Boris Johnson that animals need action, not hot air.
No excuse for Bearskin
I have written to the Secretary of State for Defence and the PM as we know now that further tests conducted on ECOPEL’s faux bear fur conclusively show that it meets the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) “five requirements” for the Queen’s Guard’s caps. Continue reading “No excuse for Bearskin”
Minister for the Seas
My oral question today is: “to ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the creation of a Minister for the Oceans?”
We’re a maritime nation. Fish and chips on a Friday night and national icons like Nelson and Sir Walter Raleigh. Our history is connected to the seas and our coastal waters are becoming one vast energy source with wind farms and the prospect of tidal power.
So it seems odd that both France and Portugal both have Ministries for the Oceans, but not us. We have a Space Strategy but not an Ocean Strategy, despite huge under-explored expanse that makes up two thirds of our planet.
The Subsidy Control Bill Committee Stage Day One: Net Zero
The Government keep bringing us these thin Bills that ought to include things such as the ecological crisis and climate change, but do not. The subsidy principle should ensure that all our environmental and climate targets are met. Ecologically damaging, polluting industries should be weaned off public money completely and, ultimately, binned. My Amendment 8 would ensure that subsidies contribute towards limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming. My Amendment 33 would prohibit subsidies for fossil fuels and extend the definition of fossil fuel subsidies to include any government policy that makes fossil fuels cheaper than their true cost. Continue reading “The Subsidy Control Bill Committee Stage Day One: Net Zero”
Subsidy Control Bill
This Bill is really lacking that overarching sense of using monetary and fiscal policy to transform our economy from a dirty, polluting one to a clean, green, high well-being society. The mechanisms in this Bill will not achieve that and lack ambition.
Legal duty to reduce sewage spills
Q. When will the timetable be set for reducing discharges that public can see and monitor?
Final days of Police Bill Committee Stage
If you make protests impossible to perform legally, criminalise non-violent direct action, abolish or restrict the ability of citizens to challenge the Government in court through judicial reviews, turn people against lawyers, gerrymander the election boundaries and dish out cash in the way that looks best for Conservative MPs, that is deep, dark politics. Many of us here are not particularly political and perhaps do not see the dangers inherent in what the Government are doing. It all seems like a calculated ploy to turn all the cards in favour of an unaccountable Government that cannot be challenged in the courts, at the ballot box or on the streets.
Continue reading “Final days of Police Bill Committee Stage”
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 