philippajacks.co.uk

My feature for Australia and New Zealand magazine on eco-volunteering in the Antipodes is in stores now….

Thanks to Biosphere Expeditions, Conservation Volunteers, Reef Check Australia and everyone else who helped out!

Click here to read it as a PDF

I’ve blogged it before and I’ll blog it again: I love a good environmental iPhone app , so I was interested to read Adam Vaughan’s Top 10 list on the Guardian site last week.

There are several wildlife-identifying ones which might have come in handy on my Big Garden Birdwatch a few weeks back. There’s one called Pollution which tells you how badly the air around you right now is polluted. Adam also recommends GoodGuide – a buyer’s… Continue reading

Battersea is not well-known for its hotels, and certainly not eco-hotels. In fact, you’re much more likely to associate it with power stations. So opening an ‘environmentally conscious’ luxury hotel here is a rather brave move.

Hotel Rafayel is not an eco-hotel in the log-cabin/treehouse sense of the word. It’s a five star hotel with all the trappings – a spa, a gym, a steam room. Even its own patisserie, MyChelle’s Baketique, with a tantalising display of freshly-frosted cupcakes… Continue reading

I’ve finally submitted my results online for last weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch.
I decided to borrow a friend’s garden in the end, as I’ve never seen a single bird in our courtyard. She also supplied me with tea and chocolate digestives which was nice.

I made a little spread of seeds and over-ripe fruit out on her wall but the birds didn’t exactly flock to it. They need more than 20 minutes notice that the food is out, I… Continue reading

Yesterday I was volunteering for the RSPB at one of their Date With Nature events on Hampstead Heath.

Down on Pond 10, we mostly kept the telescopes trained on a heron, and four cormorants sitting one on each corner of a jetty in the middle of the pond. There were also heaps of coots which spent most of the day having wing-flapping fights and trying to drown each other – hilarious to watch.

Over the course of the weekend, all the species… Continue reading

I was out in the Caribbean last week at CHTA Marketplace, an annual trade expo for Caribbean tourism, and attended a press conference by Green Globe – one of a burgeoning number of eco-certifying bodies for the tourism sector.

CEO Guido Bauer revealed the difference that a Green Globe certificate can make to a hotel’s bottom line: having the certificate lets hotels increase their room rates by 3-7%, reduces their operating costs by 3-11%, and adds 1-3% to the property’s value.

It’s great that they have… Continue reading

A story about aquaculture on a North Carolina news site gave me food for thought. The journalist visited a research facility which is developing methods of artificially cultivating saltwater fish (aquaculture has been used more for freshwater fish to date).

In many ways, I think aquaculture sounds like a sensible idea.

• Natural fish stocks around the world are now dangerously low because of overfishing. By farming fish in giant tanks, we can reduce the pressure on

I attended a brilliant series of lectures last weekend, as part of Biosphere Expeditions’ 10th anniversary celebrations. Biosphere Expeditions is a conservation organisation which runs scientific research projects on which lay people can volunteer.

In the afternoon, we heard about big cat conservation Tessa McGregor, who heads up Biosphere’s snow leopard project in the stunning Altai Mountains of Central Asia. We also heard from Chris Gerrard of the Wildlife Trust who set up the Great Fen Project in Cambridgeshire (see my… Continue reading

I was pleased to hear that Cancun has devised an underwater museum as a new tourist attraction. Not because I thought the world necessarily needed an underwater museum (more on that later) but because this is good news for the threatened coral reefs in the Cancun area.

The massive expansion of tourism over the last 40 years has led to the rapid decline in the quality of the… Continue reading

I’m in Marrakesh this week and had an eventful, if rather stressful, first day in the famous square.

We managed not to get run over by the marauding motorbikes (no mean feat), and also managed to snatch our wrists back from the henna-wielding women before they could begin a tattoo on us.

We enjoyed delicious tagines at Restaurant Marrekchi overlooking Djemaa el-Fna; there’s been a religious feast with lots of lamb this weekend, so it’s a great time to here (unless, of course, you’re a lamb).

We did get conned into spending 20 quid on dried figs… Continue reading