My local football team, the mighty Rushden and Diamonds is currently 8th in the Blue Square Premier League - that's 8th out of 24 teams.
Seeing your performance in the context of others is always informative and sometimes really useful.
So did you know that the UK is 4th place in the EU (out of 27) for the highest rate of income tax? and 12th, out of 15, EU countries in the proportion of our energy coming from renewable sources? and top of the EU cocaine using league? and top of the EU asthma suffering league? and we were 8th in the EU days lost to strikes league table back in 2006. This gets a bit addictive!
In terms of farmland bird population changes, the UK is 11th worst out of 40 European countries over the period 1990-2000. And we were even closer to the bottom, as I remember it, in a previous analysis which covered the period 1980-1990.
Farmland birds declined in most European countries (but increased in just a few) and I wonder what we can learn, maybe nothing, in terms of how the league leaders, Austria, practise their farming? In Austria, farmland birds did pretty well apparently. And Austria is top of the league, it seems, and if you ignore Liechtenstein (which we all do!), in terms of organic agriculture. It can't be that simple can it?
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Blimey.....I spend a lot of time on climate change issues and have concluded there are two types of deniers, those who are just obsessed with some kind of world conspiracy , and those who have clear motives that put them in opposition.
To the former I keep saying that if climate scientists were any good at conspiracy we might have made more progress on fighting dangerous climate change, to the latter I just ask them to be honest!
So Essex Peasant - what kind of denier are you?