Why humanity is good for the natural world

Matt Ridley

Greens are suppressing the plentiful good news about the environment. Over the past few years, we have been subject to endless media reports on the devastating impact humanity is having on the global bee population. ‘Climate change is presenting huge challenges to our bees’, claimed the Irish Times last year. ‘Where has all the honey gone?’, asked […]

We are losing the war to save red squirrels

Matt Ridley

Two years ago I watched a red squirrel climbing a pine tree at my home in Northumberland. I fear it may be the last time I have that thrill. Twenty years ago they were everywhere in our woods and regular visitors to my bird table. Then in 2003 we saw the first grey squirrel. Almost […]

Bringing back the dodo

Matt Ridley

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll brought the dodo back to life. The extinct, fat, flightless pigeon arranged a famous running race in which “all shall have prizes”.   Now an American tech entrepreneur, Ben Lamm, plans to bring the dodo back to life for real, along with some other extinct species like woolly mammoths, […]

What’s killing the birds

Matt Ridley

If you are a bird, any kind of bird, the current pandemic of avian influenza rampaging through your kind is far more terrifying than anything the hairless apes on the ground below experienced in 2020 and 2021. Britain’s seabirds – guillemots, gannets, gulls, kittiwakes and skuas – have been hardest hit because they breed in […]

Bat surveys benefit only one species — bat surveyors

Matt Ridley

Last week my business demolished a derelict brick building used by glue sniffers and fornicators. It took several years to get planning permission to do so and predictably the last hurdle was bats. We had to wait till the summer to do two costly bat surveys, which as expected found no bats, let alone rare […]

Eco-extremism has brought Sri Lanka to its knees

Matt Ridley

An obsession with organic farming ‘in sync with nature’ triggered an unsustainable but predictable economic crisis My article for The Telegraph: Sri Lanka’s collapse, from one of the fastest growing Asian economies to a political, economic and humanitarian horror show, seems to have taken everybody by surprise. Five years ago, the World Bank was extolling […]

The madness of our worship of wind

Matt Ridley

They despoil our glorious countryside, add £6 billion a year to our household bills and are arguably the most inefficient solution to our energy crisis. So why is the Government planning to make it even easier to build them? My article for The Daily Mail: Take a wild guess at how much of the UK’s […]

How Putin spent millions spreading fake news about fracking

Matt Ridley

My article for The Sun: When Lorraine Allanson spoke up in favour of drilling for shale gas in her part of North Yorkshire, activists cut off her internet, called her a “whore” and linked her to a fake crime number. “Shouting, abuse, public defecation, intimidation, hijacking lorries to stop deliveries, blocking the village street, this […]

Plains of plenty

Matt Ridley

The Masai Mara has defied gloomy predictions of decline My article for The Critic: When I was ten years old, in 1968, my parents took me and two of my sisters on a safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Having lived there when they first married in the 1950s, they wanted us to see the wildlife […]

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