How the world sees Greece
Farmers Protest, Seamen's Strike Vexes Greece Greek Reporter ferry strike Having crushed a Metro workers strike with riot police, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is treading a more careful line with protesting farmers and seamen who walked off the job and may extend their job action. The farmers, upset over ... |
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 Greek Reporter | Greece Offers Tourist Charms Year-Round Greek Reporter santorini99 Whether you like the islands or the mainland, a picturesque village or the big city, the sea or the mountain beauties, visiting Greece is a wonderful experience praised by many tourists, itinerary and travel agencies around the world. The ... |
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 IBTimes.co.uk | Greek Neo-Nazis Golden Dawn Target Teenage Recruits IBTimes.co.uk They use ancient Greek history as a camouflage to hide their true identity: that they're fans of Hitler, anti-Semitism." Over 50 teachers, parents and teenage students from schools in Athens have backed up his claims, telling The Independent that the ... Greece's neo-fascists are on the rise... and now they're going into schools ... UN Monitors Detention Conditions in Greece |
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Esther Woolfson focuses on conservation at a local scale and finds a mood of oncoming loss
There's a slow sea change taking place in how we view nature. Gradually, people are beginning to realise that cherishing the exotic and the rare is not necessarily the most helpful kind of conservation. Often, what we really need to do is learn to appreciate the local, the common and the unfavoured.
The same tendency is becoming apparent in nature writing too, that unlikely boom industry of the new millennium. From Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts's Edgelands to Kathleen Jamie's Findings, from Jean Sprackland's Strands to the grandfather of them all, Richard Mabey's The Common Ground, writers are increasingly shifting their attention from virgin wilderness to the urbanised and polluted world we ordinarily inhabit, and to the kinds of species that live cheek by jowl with humans, so seemingly ubiquitous that most of us regard them as pests, assuming we bother to see them at all.
An example would be the magpie, that egg-stealing bandit of urban mythology. Back in 2008, Esther Woolfson published Corvus, a delightful ode to the maligned crow family, many of which she'd adopted over the years. She possessed a naturalist's loving attention to detail, combined with a likable fondness for demolishing superstitions. An ideal candidate, then, for a larger take on urban wildness, and why it's so important for our wellbeing, not to mention our continued survival.
In Field Notes, Woolfson turns her beady eye to the muddled and fascinating ecology of her hometown of Aberdeen. Her diary begins on a day of uncommon snowfall, the harbinger of a period in which the entire city shivers to a standstill. Finding a wounded pigeon flailing in the lane, she takes it home to nurse. The weather is off-kilter, and the bird "seemed to symbolise the fragility that suddenly I felt was there, at the heart of everything".
Over the course of a year, her sense that something has gone awry intensifies. It's too wet; the winter's untimely and summer barely lasts a week. Is this androgenic climate change, Woolfson wonders, and her growing anxiety infuses the book with a kind of hyper-attentive urgency, a desire to record exactly "the lives and time and place" among which she finds herself.
The Aberdeen she unearths is a beguiling city. Woolfson borrows a key to investigate an otherwise inaccessible strip of wilderness between two rows of houses, where a Victorian botanist once led his students on summer expeditions. Behind a chain-link fence, she discovers the largest quarry in Europe, out of which much of the granite for Aberdeen's houses derived. Abandoned in 1970, it filled with water to form a vast lake. "More than part of the city unseen, it seemed like the city's secret; a strange irony considering that it's where most of the city came from."
Though her hidden city extends back through time, it's the living inhabitants that capture the larger part of Woolfson's attention and enthusiasm. There's nothing mystical about her enthusiasm for spiders, worms, shrews and foxes, but rather a kind of bustling curiosity about their strange and purposeful lives. Some slugs, she reports gleefully, mate by way of what is known even in scientific papers as a "love dart", a small blade of chitin or cartilage that may have provided the Greeks with the inspiration for Eros's arrow. Rats, meanwhile, have been proved to refuse to take food if by doing so they cause pain to other rats, a sign suggestive that they, like us, experience empathy.
Little in the world of conservation is simple, and this is particularly true of the vexed subject of invasion biology. After spotting a red squirrel crossing a road at a traffic light, Woolfson begins to ponder the odd and often tortuous logic by which so-called native species are regarded as inherently superior to "invaders". One list of the world's worst invasive species includes foxes, rabbits, mice and pigeons. Even Himalayan balsam, that aggressive coloniser of riverbanks, seems potentially less lethal than was once imagined. "To which moment might we wish to retreat, pull up our drawbridge, erase from memory what we ourselves, or the processes of nature and time, have wrought?" she asks, pointing out, too, the uncomfortable rhetoric of nationalism and violence that often accompanies the debate.
Though Woolfson maintains a spirited sense of inquiry, the overwhelming mood here is of oncoming loss, and bafflement as to how we've managed to make such a poor fist of stewarding our inherited Eden. Writing on the subject of sparrows, those once abundant, now critically endangered residents of our cities, she writes movingly: "If we lose sparrows, everything will change. Our lives will change, even if we don't at the time fully appreciate how… As with every loss, our lives will be thinner, lesser; the future not only of the physical but our mental world will be diminished, the world of our history and legend where the life of all cultures resonates with all we've seen and all we've lived with, plant and animal, stone and cloud."
She's right. It can only be hoped that books like this play a part in making us both notice and value the lovely creatures we stand to lose, before the wild portions of our cities have been entirely swept and tidied and paved out of existence.
Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate (£7.99)
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 Kathimerini | Greek FinMin expects upturn as early as October, slams ex-PMs for failing to ... Kathimerini Greece will begin to recover from five years of recession and the repercussions of an unprecedented debt crisis as early as this October, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras told Kathimerini during an interview in which he blamed former premiers George ... Greeks have cautious optimism for economic recovery |
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Greece Press: Concerns on rising Euro, and Securitizing Privatizations ForexLive (blog) Greece Press: Concerns on rising Euro, and Securitizing Privatizations. By Eamonn Sheridan || February 2, 2013 at 14:12 GMT. || 0 comments || Add comment. Some weekend Greek newspaper articles for background reading: Rise of euro threatens to stem ... |
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Greek police link 2 bank robbers to terror group WNCT THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) Greek police say that two of four suspects arrested in bank and post office robberies are wanted members of a domestic terrorist group. They say four more suspects are on the run. The suspects, whose names have not been ... |
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REFILE-Italy, Albania, Greece to sign TAP gas line accord Feb 13 Reuters UK 13 in Athens an agreement that seals their support for a natural gas pipeline project to cross their territories, a spokesman for Greece's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday. The intergovernmental agreement is a condition to build the Trans-Adriatic ... |
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 FRANCE 24 | Greece strike halts ferry services FRANCE 24 A man sits in front of a docked ferry at the port of Piraeus, near Athens, during a 48-hours strike on February 2, 2013. A strike by maritime workers has suspended most ferry services in island-dotted Greece in the latest action against austerity cuts. |
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Greek Prime Minister visits Pearl-Qatar AME Info (press release) The Pearl-Qatar, United Development Company's (UDC) multi-billion dollar offshore Island and one of the largest real estate developments in the country hosted on Wednesday Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and an accompanying delegation of ... |
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 Aljazeera.com | European authorities still punishing Greece - can they be stopped? Aljazeera.com Tsipras notes that Greece's fiscal problems could be resolved if the rich paid their taxes. The IMF's latest numbers [PDF] concur on this: according to the Fund, "annual uncollected net tax revenue [is] at 86 percent of collections in Greece, against ... IMF to send mission to Greece in February Europe will get its money back says Bank of Greece Troika in Greece |
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On a recent Thursday night, seven teenage boys in the central Greek city of Larissa decided to have what they described as “fun”. Armed with rocks and wooden batons, the group of 15-year-olds attacked the shop of a Pakistani resident. His son was treated for head injuries.
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Greece Applebee's to auction off decorations Rochester Democrat and Chronicle The new look will include customized wall murals reflecting the Greece neighborhood around the restaurant's location, new flat-screen televisions and updated wall coverings. Additionally, new awnings, signage and lighting are on tap for the exterior ... |
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Football: Karagounis returns to Greece squad GlobalPost Fulham midfielder Giorgos Karagounis was among the 20 players called up by Greece coach Fernando Santos Friday for the February 6 friendly against Switzerland at the Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus. The 35-year-old midfielder makes his comeback after ... |
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Greece gripped by strikes The Voice of Russia The decision to extend the walkout, launched on Thursday came just as medics called a similar strike in Athens protesting against salary and other cuts being effected as part of the government's austerity plan. Transport workers joined in the action on ... |
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 MARCA.com | Míchel's odyssey continues in Greece MARCA.com José Miguel González Martín del Campo, Míchel, did not take long to find work after being sacked as the Sevilla coach. The former Real Madrid player has signed up with Greek side Olympiacos, which he will manage for the rest of this season, followed by ... |
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 CBS Local | Thasos Brings Greek Chic To Ft. Lauderdale CBS Local FORT LAUDERDALE (CBS4) – “Thasos,” named after the the Greek Island, is a 260 seat restaurant embracing the spirit and sophistication of the Greek Islands. Call it Greek Chic. Sophia Mylona and her husband opened the restaurant off Oakland Park ... |
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Greek Key opens in Endicott Press & Sun-Bulletin The menu features Greek staples such as gyros, dolmades, spanakopita and mousaka, and other adventurous items, including its Saganaki dish, a specialty Greek cheese set aflame. Other offerings include grilled items, burgers and an array of salads and ... |
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 The Independent | Greece's 'Nazis' are on the rise... and now they're going into schools: How ... The Independent The potential to tap into this dissatisfaction and win over Greece's future voters has not been lost on the controversial Golden Dawn party: an investigation by The Independent found the neo-fascist party gaining ground among the country's youth ... Greece under pressure to defend democracy Human rights watchdog says racist violence in Greece 'a real threat to democracy' |
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