03 June 2010

World Environment Day is approaching. Events will take place across the world on June 5 to promote environmental awareness and to pressure political bodies to take action on important issues.

2010 has been declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations. Biodiversity is not only important for preserving individual species and habitats, but is also essential for maintaining the ecosystem services we rely on, such as food, clean water and fuel.

The UK has a Biodiversity Action Plan to monitor and protect our biodiversity. The latest figures from it estimate that over a third of the high priority species in Wales are declining or have been lost since the last assessment.

Economically, biodiversity loss is also a bit of a nightmare. ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study’ could well be the most influential report since ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ by Lord Stern in 2007.

The study was undertaken by leading economist and senior banker, Pavan Sukhdev, and the resulting report is expected to announce that the ratio of costs of conserving natural ecosystems to the benefits of doing so range from one to ten, up to as much as one to 100.

Natural ecosystems play an essential role in supporting human civilisation, but we’re currently living in the age of the sixth mass extinction. The last time Earth experienced one of these was roughly 65 million years ago, when a meteorite collided with the Yucatan Peninsula and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

However, this mass extinction is due to the destruction of numerous habitats faster than species can adapt to suit them. If they can’t adapt to altered habitats, the only other viable option is to move, but the corridors that once made this possible are now largely absent or blocked. The remaining path to take is extinction.

The silver lining is that, because this mass extinction is largely caused by us, it is not an unpredictable event that we can do nothing about. Reversing the biodiversity crisis is one of the biggest and most complex challenges to face our generation, and it will take global participation and skills from all walks of life to solve.

World Environment Day has been celebrated on June 5 since 1972. In Cardiff, the National Museum of Wales is holding an ECOfair on the day to celebrate it, which includes an informal Q&A session at 2pm. The theme this year is ‘many species, one planet, one future’. It may be clichéd but it’s all we’ve got.

- as published in the latest issue of gair rhydd, Cardiff's student newspaper

Medical Students

Cardiff University has a new publication dedicated to healthcare students to join the student newspaper gair rhydd and magazine Quench in our successful little student media world.

Parklife is to be printed every two months and the March edition features piece written by yours truly, dedicated to 'my medics' who I've had the pleasure of living with for the last few years.

Here it is for those of you who dont have access to the facilities at the school of medicine:

Medics verses Non-Medics
I’m quite fond of medical students.

Words such as ‘cliquey’ can be banded around the outside world when talking about medics, but having lived with two for the last four years I can’t say that I’ve found this to be the case at all. They do, however, seem to come from another planet. Before I’m lynched, let me explain...

1. The acronyms. I imagine that this is the main reason that there’s any kind of perceived distance between medics and non-medics. There’s no chance of ‘us’ keeping up with ‘them’ if they insist on speaking gobbledygook. I get around it these days by making sure I’m only talking to one of them at once. The last time I made a cuppa for both of my medics the conversation was “NSTEMI, Lap and dye, BCC, HCOM,” Seriously, WTF?

2. Medics drink us under the table and live in the Live Lounge. In a few years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if stethoscopes came readymade with a built in wine glass.

3. If you sustain a minor injury, medics will talk about it using long words, leaving you with the feeling that they know something you don’t. This is probably what leaves people with Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (fear of long words) to Iatrophobia (fear of medics).

4. I feel stupid watching medical programmes with them on telly. My Mum, who’s a nurse, used to do it watching Casualty and Holby City, a friend who is now in her final year of medicine used to do it to ER on the school bus and now my housemates do it whilst we’re watching Scrubs. I really don’t care if in reality ‘he’d be dead by now’ or ‘it actually looks more like ’ to you, I just want to relax in front of the TV! The final straw came whilst watching Glee earlier in the month when a medic friend started a conversation by referring to “the woman with exopthalmos”. I’ve come to the conclusion that medics shouldn’t be allowed televisions. End of.

There are some things I’m envious of though; medics tend to have some idea of a career path for post-graduation, they get five years at university rather than the majority of us who are unemployed after only three and they don’t seem to be a bad lot really. Nevertheless, biology students are better...

Robin Stalking

Whilst standing in the centre of Gabalfa Roundabout at 01:30 am, in the freezing cold, waiting to hear if an insomniac blue tit would respond to our bird-impersonating calls, I momentarily envied humanities students. Actually, I envied anyone on the planet who was tucked up in bed, sat in a pub, drinking tea, or doing anything slightly sane or warm.

The thirteen other people, standing silently whilst listening to pre-recorded blackbird sounds, looked like they might be thinking similar things at Cosmeston Lakes two hours later.

We weren't completely bonkers though, we were testing out the perfectly reasonable idea that some birds will respond to simulated intruders in their territory, even at night-time. Some researchers (Fuller et al., 2007, spring to mind) have looked into the possibility that noise pollution in the daytime is causing robins to sing at night. There's also the possibility that street lighting in urban areas confuses their body clocks.

We tested out a few things to see if four species of songbird were more or less likely to sing at night in different areas, with various degrees of light and noise pollution. It looks like robins and blackbids are quite prepared to sing at night, whilst great tits and blue tits are somewhat reluctant to wake up from a good night's kip. The light pollution verses noise pollution debate still rumbles on and is causing one of my current coursework headaches.

Insights into animal behaviour aside, the 'moment of the evening' was at approximately half past midnight, outside The Woodville pub. Fourteen people were silently stood, dressed in woolly hats and welly boots, in a circle, with red-light head torches focussed on an enormous megaphone-shaped speaker playing bird noises at quite a loud volume. We were already feeling quite conscious of strange looks from passers-by, but it was impossible not to break the silence with a giggle when a group of students returning from the pub stopped to ask our lecturer if we were performing a ritual as part of a satanic cult.

For the record: We weren't.

13 DEC 09

Sunday

It’s been quite hard to accept, but it turns out that I am the ultimate Blagging Failure. I can cope with the little things (vouchers, universal freebies, student discounts), but when it comes to the real, skilful art of blagging, I’ve finally found my position at the bottom of the pile. As I spend my Sunday afternoon trying to blag writing this feature however, I realise that I have had a useful insight into the Blagger’s World, from which I’ve drawn the following conclusions:

1. Blagging should be spontaneous. Pre-planned, thoroughly thought-out blagging not only takes the fun out of it, but also verges on the borders of organised crime.
2. The victim shouldn’t be aware of The Blag. The lady at the bar almost gave over a free drink, but her manager wasn’t sympathetic to my quest. All I acquired through honesty in this respect was a safety pin from a pitying friend.
3. Blaggers need to blend in OR have the ‘gift of the gab’. If you come across as a blithering idiot dressed as a pirate you won’t get anywhere in life. Unless you’re on a pirate ship.

11 DEC 09

Friday

I decided it was time to take the blagging on tour, first stop Reading. There wasn’t much blagging to be done on the train, but I tried out the ‘trick or deception’ criteria for a bit of harmless practice. The poor woman sat next to me now thinks she travelled to Reading with a trumpet-playing pet shop assistant who couldn’t think of one real pet shop in Cardiff to claim a link to. I blagged nothing from the conversation. I suppose I could really clutch at straws and say I blagged a glass of water at my brother’s house, but the fact that it was offered in a shot glass, as the only drinking receptacle without things growing in it, almost certainly nullifies any positive blag-points.

We were due to join a pirate pub crawl in the evening, but a friend of my brother had misplaced her ID card somewhere. I was just mulling over the blagging possibilities this presented for the evening, when I noticed that my brother had disappeared. Ten minutes later and he appeared at the doorway having knocked on various doors in the street and blagged a passport from a deluded and/or insane stranger a few houses down the road. He managed to do this dressed as a pirate. Amazing.

Misplacing forms of identification seemed to be one of the girl’s favoured hobbies and having rescued the passport from the floor of several bars I eventually pocketed it for safe keeping as a sort of second-hand blag.

I had a lovely chat with the girl behind one bar who agreed that I was proving to be a pretty poor blagger and offered to give me a lime and soda water. The retail price was only 15p, but beggars can’t be choosers. Sadly, the manager overheard and told me to go away. Another fail. I cheered myself up by blagging a drink from my brother, who probably owes me several anyway, and taking today’s newspaper with me. It didn’t appear to belong to anybody, and on the grounds that you can’t steal from nobody I figured it might be morally acceptable.

Our final destination was a quirky little club underneath a railway bridge. Determined to avoid the entry fee, I informed the bouncer that I’d just popped out and that the other guy said it would be fine to re-enter. It could have worked; I don’t have a particularly memorable face. It was another fail, probably not helped by the fact that the place was almost deserted on arrival, I was wielding a newspaper and dressed as a pirate.

09 DEC 09

Wednesday

I didn’t feel like blagging today. My confidence remained shot from yesterday’s failures. I did, however, seriously need a coffee after my nine o’clock lecture and whilst locating my reward card realised that I’d previously consumed enough caffeine to claim a free hot drink. Further clarification with the coffee-man revealed that despite having always purchased the least costly option on the menu, I could in fact have any drink as my reward. I walked away with a super-mega-large hot chocolate with marshmallows, a mountain of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. They wouldn’t let me drink it in the library.

08 DEC 09

Tuesday
I got up unnecessarily early for lectures this morning and logged onto Studentbeans.com. Orders for free (albeit somewhat useless) objects were in place and the day’s blagging pressure was significantly reduced.
I thought it might be worth asking the lady in the post office to reduce the cost of my stamps for a parcel to Germany, but it wasn’t. I did manage to acquire a free Cadbury’s Flake from someone dressed as a chocolate bar in the St. David’s Centre though.

The time had come to test the part of the blagging definition that mentions deception. This was not something I felt completely comfortable with, but figured that if push came to shove then any guilt could be slyly passed from my conscience to gair rhydd. Unfortunately I was sadly lacking in inspiration, and walking up and down Queen Street too often just makes you more susceptible to being pounced on to donate £2 a month to well-meaning charities, which would be somewhat counter-productive today. I then spotted a man, whom everyone seemed to be deliberately avoiding, holding a collection of books. I composed my blagging motives and adopted nerves of steel. I approached. I talked with him about the Hare Krishna movement and managed not to buy a book. I listened to his pleas to help the homeless. I still managed not to buy a book. I started looking for an escape route, but none was forthcoming. I gave him my small change to help out his community projects and sloped off home to come to terms with my first Anti-blag. Exchanging an e-voucher for a free loaf of bread at Co-op did little to improve my mood.