This Friday sees the launch of a series of lunchtime webinars about a topic that affects all of us: sustainable food systems. From farm to fork, what does it mean for our food to be sustainably produced, processed, distributed and consumed? As consumers, what kinds of products and ingredients are Read more…
This post is by Dr Timothy Kuiper, a postdoc in Zoology at the University of Oxford who studies elephant conservation in Zimbabwe. I am a natural doubter – in my faith and in my work. Sometimes it’s healthy skepticism, at other times I think it becomes a kind of cynicism in which Read more…
Today I want to share a fascinating story of Christian celebration of biodiversity. In the highlands of Ethiopia, circular church buildings are surrounded by patches of the forest that once covered the landscape. Varying from less than a hectare up to thousands, these forests host a wide diversity of both animals and plants, Read more…
Last year a FiSch working group that I led published a paper entitled “Beyond ecosystem services: valuing the invaluable”, which we hope will be part of a trend towards more transparent approaches to environmental policy. So we were excited when a paper appeared last month that echoes our primary concerns – coming from a much Read more…
In the first of our occasional series of perspectives on the creation/evolution controversy, Abigail Motley reflects on the growing harmony between her faith and her ecological research. ‘Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.’ Undergraduate biology lecturers love referring to this quote, the title of an essay written by Theodosius Read more…
It was thanks to a conference called “Laws of Nature, Laws of God?” that I had the invitation to join a project of the International Society for Science and Religion about holistic biology – where I was to bring expertise in the science of ecology. So perhaps it’s no surprise that my main contribution to this Read more…
The Faith-in-Scholarship working group on ecosystem services is starting to have an impact! Twelve of us started meeting back in February to work on a challenge in conservation science (read about the basic rationale). Now we’ve presented some of our work at an ecological conference in Rome and are working on Read more…
I’m excited to tell you about a FiSch research project. The Faith-in-Scholarship Working Group on Ecosystem Services (FiSWES) draws together fourteen Christian thinkers (mostly academics) to explore new perspectives on a specific problem. We’ve already had two meetings in Leeds this year, with a third one planned. Ecosystem services (ES) Read more…
Although I was trained as an archaeologist, over the years I have slowly moved towards research that can more accurately be described as palaeoecology or palaeoenvironmental science, i.e. ecology and environmental science applied to the past. As with archaeology, one of the things that attract me to environmental science is its Read more…
What do you think of when you hear the word “ecology”? The discipline of ecology may be unique among the sciences in that its name has become strongly associated with a political agenda [1]. Indeed, “ecological” has connotations of “sustainable” and “environmentally-friendly”. What we call “green” translates in many languages Read more…