Duncan Porter
@misterduncan.bsky.social
Environment, nature, tech, music, bikes. Bristol based and born at 330PPM
Just finished reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghihara. A story about the boundaries of friendship & impact of trauma. I was a bit intimidated by this book given some of the reviews. It's beautifully written, but I did have some difficulty fully connecting with it. #booksky 1/3
The entire team has been out this summer checking up on all our woodlands, across England, Scotland, and Wales. Here are some quick shots from the very first woodland I ever planted five years ago, looking strong and glorious. With surveys in see how your local sites are doing. protect.earth/sites/
What were your tipping points? A book? A flood? A kid? A headline that finally landed? Everyone engaged with climate/ecology/sustainability has one or several moments where their perspective shifted. What were yours? Reply or quote-post - I want to hear them all. 1/5
Just finished reading War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I loved this extraordinary book. It feels like Tolstoy was grappling with a unified theory of humans. Whether he achieved that or not is hard to say, but it's fascinating & thought provoking. For such a dense tome, it rarely... #booksky 1/
Just finished read We Will Not Be Saved by Nemonte Nenquimo. A recommendation from a good friend - the memoir of a Waorani from Amazonian Ecuador whose community was threatened by oil extraction. After witnessing the loss of neighbouring communities, she created the Ceibo Alliance. #booksky 1/4
Just finished reading Klara & the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Am interesting & thought provoking read, but I never felt a connection with the characters, so the emotional aspects of the story didn't have much impact for me. I loved the writing & the idea though. #booksky
The false widow that lives behind our post box is having a good day.
Just finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Wow, what an incredible piece of literature! The writing is beautiful & almost supernatural. The story itself is fascinating & never dull. There's allegory that went beyond my understanding. #booksky 1/
Our river is low & stagnating. The hart's tongue ferns are shrivelling, the hazels & hawthorn are reducing their leaf count & a wild service tree has decided it's autumn. Urgent: please send rain!
UK peat bogs store as much carbon as all the trees in the UK, France & Germany combined. Only 22% of UK peatlands are in a near natural or rewetted condition. £47m was pledged by the gov for peatland restoration - a mere ~£15 per hectare. carboncopy.eco/takeaction/r... www.gov.uk/government/n...
Dave Vetter@davidrvetter.bsky.social · 3w agoI join you from the Blaenavon wildfire in Southeast Wales, brought to you by BP, Shell and Equinor. Though it does not look dramatic, the fire has been out of control for days - for a very particular reason. 🧵
1/ A year ago, I decided to more often pick up a book instead of my phone & read at least 30 pages every day. A habit formed pretty quickly & in the last year I've read 161* books, two thirds fiction. * including a few audiobooks Here are my absolute favourites of the year in no order. #booksky
Just finished reading My Friends by Fredrik Backman. Sometimes the right book at the right time can broadside you emotionally. Some of the characters are clichéd, but that doesn't matter when the narrative & emotional foundations are so extraordinarily observed & written. #booksky 1/
The Trump administration is hosting a sixty day public comment period but only one person is allowed to comment www.postguam.com/news/local/1...
1 governor, 60 days: BOEM sets American Samoa mineral lease sale for November
The federal government moved forward Friday on a plan to sell mineral leases in the ocean off American Samoa, and under the rules governing the process, only one person in
postguam.com
Just finished reading Lolly Willlowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A tale of a spinster bailing on society, patriarchy & familial expectations to live a rural life & is gradually seduced by nature, witchcraft & Satan himself. A charity shop find & an interesting short read. #booksky
I was laid on the sofa reading & this woodlouse landed on my face. It must have been trying to cross the ceiling.
We had a very productive tree maintenance day in Somerset yesterday. Great volunteers & ideal weather meant we got loads done, clearing competing plants, removing guards from the bigger trees.
Just finished reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. In a remote Polish village, a real humanist & animal rights whodunnit. The pacing is slow, but enveloping. The characters are fascinating & the writing beautiful. Loved this book. #booksky
It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23
Was spending my book voucher in Sodbury Book Garden today & another customer bought me the second book I wanted 🥲 She wouldn't take no for an answer. I gave her a massive hug. People really can be amazing sometimes. Still slightly shellshocked. The good kind.
I've dropped in on a Somerset reforestation project with 5000 trees we planted over two years. This site is my favourite -the trees absolutely love it here! Every tube I checked had a live tree - almost unheard of! Kudos to the legendary @philsturgeon.com & his tenacity with @protect.earth 1/4
Just finished reading Gliff by Ali Smith. I love her books. There's always a serious undercurrent to the playful ambiguity. This feels like it should have a plot, but it's more thematic than structured. Some good characters. If you like closure for your characters this isn't for you! #booksky
Sometimes terrible Twitter posts can be so bad, they're almost art.
It turns out I still have the capacity to be shocked.
Kirkdale Bookshop@kirkdalebooks.bsky.social · 3mo agoAlice Walker's choice of book was er a surprise
Just finished reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. A series of short stories about or connected to Olive in Maine. This book is excellent. Olive isn't instantly likeable, but her complexities, family & environment slowly make you sympathetic & understand her. 1/2
Just finished reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Or as it should have been called: "Men are terrible". My first Hardy. I kind of enjoyed it, but the prose is so verbose. I'd love to know more about why he wrote this. It's relentless for poor Tess to the very end.😭 #booksky
Why do the animals in this shot from the new Spielberg trailer look worse than Red Dead Redemption 2 from eight years ago?
Just finished reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Effectively a series of short stories, but generationally linked by two sisters separated in Ghana in the late 1700s. One sister marries a wealthy slave trader & the other is sent to America as a slave. Each story is a new generation... #booksky 1/3
Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion, Alien Earth) writing about Vonnegut's best novel: Cat's Cradle. Well worth reading to the end. archive.ph/fNfIb
archive.ph
Plot twist: Farage is Polanski's landlord!
Peter Walker@peterwalker99.bsky.social · 3mo agoQuite the story from Sky – Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m property *in cash* after getting the £5m gift supposedly intended for his security. Reform say, very specifically: "The offer and process for purchase of this property commenced before the gift". news.sky.com/story/nigel-...
