We're delighted to introduce our first audio documentary, exploring the environmental and cultural history of birdsong. This piece was composed by our very own Hiren Parmar, who reflects on ways these melodies have influenced and inspired humankind. Considered research, music and storytelling make for a stunning audio journey through time and space; you'll be sure think twice next time you hear a feathered friend.

Once a staple of the Ukrainian landscape, Carpathian water buffalo populations in southern Europe dwindled over the last century. In this final instalment of our second season of audio shorts, Kitty Horlick tracks down Michel Jacobi - a self-sustaining farmer coaxing the species back to life - to find out more about his extraordinary vision.

In his Modern Nature diaries, filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman recorded his cultivation of a garden at a desolate, shingle beach at Dungeness, on the UK’s South Coast. When the garden was threatened by private development in 2020, Alexander Harris turned to Jarman’s works, and found a polymath guerrilla gardener who challenged a traditional treatment of England’s ecology, championing ‘deliberate living’ in the face of climate inertia.

Forensic Architecture’s Imani Jacqueline Brown has been researching the health impacts of the tear gas used in the US against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. She traces these toxic chemicals back to the factories in which they’re created, and finds pollution and racism intertwined at every step.

Netflix Reality TV smash hit Selling Sunset treats viewers to high-end homes, glamorous real estate agents and impressive views of the LA skylines – as seen by the rich and famous. But LA has also been the epicentre of increasingly intense summer wildfires. Leila Sackur asks whether luxury property is making the impacts of the climate crisis worse for ordinary people.

Lebanon’s political landscape is dominated by sects of many colours – all vying to expand their power bases. In this article, Ibrahim Kombarji looks at the way that these sects have championed environmental projects as a guise for reinforcing loyalty, establishing extractive economic monopolies and to further increase their geographic influence. In the process, he argues, Lebanon’s landscape has been fragmented into a series of increasingly degraded ‘sectarian ecologies.’

Alexander Harris explores the piazza-fication of our urban areas, finding solace in a little-known branch of green activism.

In 2012, the Rio Verde project promised to reinvigorate Lima’s River Rimac, and to safely rehome the Indigenous Shipibo community living in Cantagallo, along its banks. By 2016, the project had been scrapped in favour of a new motorway bypass, and Cantagallo burned to the ground. Carolina Salazar investigates a story of loss, corruption, and capitalism.

The Bahamas relies heavily on tourism, and more recently Ecotourism. Bahamians must balance the impact of visitors who damage the reefs, and the need for funding to support the natural wonders that they come to see. Christina Ivey reveals that recent ecotourist proposals have proven to be smokescreens for large industrial projects, and that revenue that should be used to protect the island from ecological degradation is being funnelled elsewhere.