On 10 January, as fires raged across Los Angeles, local portrait artist Asher Bingham made an offer via an Instagram reel: “ To anyone that has lost a home in the #LAfires I will draw [it] for free.” She had already drawn the house of a close friend that had burned down; by offering her services more widely, she hoped to help others grieve for what they’d lost. She wasn’t prepared for the response. So many people sent in photos – 1,300 and counting – that she had to recruit volunteers to keep up with demand. For Bingham, it’s all about the small details: wind chimes, potted plants. “Anywhere I can see people put love into their home, I draw it,” she says. “I’m trying to recreate a memory that only lives in their minds of the beautiful time they lived there.”
See more on instagram.com/asherbingham.fineart
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
02/08/2025 - 12:00
02/08/2025 - 11:00
Scotland’s botanic gardens suffer ‘unimaginable’ loss of rare specimens
For more than a century, whenever winter came to Scotland, they stood tall against the wind and rain and snow. But last month, battered by Storm Éowyn, hundreds of rare and historic trees in the living collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were lost.
The charity has four sites in Scotland. Its tallest tree in Edinburgh, a 166-year-old Himalayan cedar, fell during Éowyn’s gusts of up to 80mph, while Benmore Botanic Garden on the west coast has suffered “unimaginable” devastation.
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02/08/2025 - 11:00
The Siċaŋġu Nation in South Dakota is building community and climate resilience through traditional foods
On a Wednesday summer evening on the Rosebud Reservation, members of the Siċaŋġu Nation arrange 12 tables to form a U in the parking lot of a South Dakota Boys & Girls Club. The tables at the Siċaŋġu Harvest Market are laden with homemade foods for sale: tortillas, cooked beans, pickles and fresh-squeezed lemonade.
The market is one of many ways the non-profit increases access to traditional and healthful foods that also happen to come with a low climate impact. The Lakota, of which Siċaŋġu is one of seven nations, were traditionally hunters and gatherers, but today, the Siċaŋġu Co non-profit is building on both new and old traditions to fulfill its mission.
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02/08/2025 - 10:41
President said he will sign an executive order next week despite global plastics crisis
Donald Trump has said that he will reverse Joe Biden’s plan to phase out plastic straws across the US government, complaining that paper alternatives don’t work and that a move is needed to go “BACK TO PLASTIC!”
Trump said in a Truth Social post that he will sign an executive order next week “ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!” The US president added in a separate post that Biden’s “mandate” for paper straws was now dead. “Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!”
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02/08/2025 - 10:41
Nine in ten traditional orchards in England have been lost since the second world war. Farmers and cider makers are now fighting for their survival
They are a symbol of the bucolic English countryside and a staple of the West Country landscape, but since the second world war, 90% of traditional orchards have disappeared.
Defined as a collection of five or more fruit trees planted in permanent grassland and managed in a non-intensive way, traditional orchards have suffered from neglect, been razed for development and converted to intensive bush orchards or alternative crops.
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02/08/2025 - 03:00
Developing countries urge biggest polluters to act as Trump’s return to the White House heightens geopolitical turmoil
The vast majority of governments are likely to miss a looming deadline to file vital plans that will determine whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown.
Despite the urgency of the crisis, the UN is relatively relaxed at the prospect of the missed date. Officials are urging countries instead to take time to work harder on their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and divest from fossil fuels.
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02/08/2025 - 00:00
Exclusive: Analysis suggests development in flood regions result of Labour push for 1.5m new homes in five years
More than 100,000 new homes will be built on the highest-risk flood zones in England in the next five years as part of the government’s push for 1.5m extra properties by the end of this parliament, Guardian analysis suggests.
Building on areas with the highest risk of serious flooding is supposed to be discouraged. Experts say development should be avoided unless absolutely necessary because there is a significant chance of regular deluges, which will flood the properties, cause hundreds of millions of pounds of economic damage and make homes uninsurable.
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02/07/2025 - 15:27
A scientist has discovered a hopping treasure trove -- 16 new species of grasshoppers living in the thorny scrubs of U.S. and Mexican deserts.
02/07/2025 - 14:00
Highway agency ordered states to no longer spend funds allocated under Biden’s EV charging station program
The Trump administration has ordered US states to suspend a $5bn electric vehicle charging station program in a further blow to the environmental movement since the president’s return to the White House.
In a memo issued on Thursday to state transportation directors, the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) ordered states not to spend any funds allocated to them under the Biden administration as part of the national electric vehicle infrastructure (NEVI) program.
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02/07/2025 - 12:26
New research using publicly-shared DNA barcodes and citizen science images have provided new evidence on the establishment and spread of a biological control agent used for the control of the major invasive shrub Lantana camara.
