Archive lectures and events

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hello everyone hello from Manchester or it's a very sunny day so thank you very

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much for joining this lecture this is my first lecture for the workers

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educational Association so I'm very happy to be doing this as Fiona said I'm

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a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Manchester I teach ancient Greek and Roman history

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and Greek language there at the University in particular my area of

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research is ancient Greek history and culture and in particular I'm interested

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in the way that inscriptions play in helping us understand the ancient world

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so this lecture is called a Greek legacy in writing ancient Athenian inscriptions

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and sculptures in Britain and Ireland and in this particular lecture I'm going

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to talk I'm going to be concentrating on the Athenian inscriptions at Lime Park

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in Cheshire so first of all an introduction to the broader subject a

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great way of engaging with the history of ancient societies is through studying

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their inscriptions and I'm gonna try and show you a picture of some inscriptions

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there they are some inscribed feet from ancient kazakh s' of the 3rd century AD

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now kept at the world Museum in Liverpool preserving pieces of writing

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thousands of years old they give an insight into the lifestyles and beliefs of ancient communities some 200 thousand

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ancient Greek inscriptions survived once though giving a unique perspective into

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the achievements of the ancient Greek world and particularly lucid views of the ancient city of the Athenians in

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this lecture we'll explore the implications of these inscriptions for

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how we understand ancient Greek culture and modern collectors of a Greek artifacts focusing upon the

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Athenian inscriptions on display at line parking Cheshire

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before I start this lecture I'd like to ask you a few short questions about your

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prior knowledge and experience of the subject of this lecture and I'm not just

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being nosey want to ask you these questions and but I'm genuinely interested in in who my audience is

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partly so that I can tell my funding body the Arts and Humanities Research

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Council who my audience is and what type

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of people I'm talking to so I think Fiona is now going to make available the

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for the first set of questions so shall

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I give you a few minutes to answer those I'll give you this live question so I'll

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give you half a minute to just look through those and click on your answers

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okay so we've got some resorts coming through I'm asking you then a bit about your educational background so whether

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you studied ancient history before

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whether you've got prior experience of the study of ancient Greek history and

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what do you know what experience have you had of collections of ancient Greek

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artifacts in in the UK and how far are you previously thought about

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inscriptions in our understanding of ancient cultures so give you a few more

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few more minutes I'll just wait for the majority of people to cast their votes

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so we'll have this this poll as as Fiona said about halfway through we'll have a

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time for four questions and then at the end we'll have another poll okay so we

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that's that's the poll as the first ball thank you very much for answering those

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questions so I'll go on to the subject of my lecture now so in my research I

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were particularly closely on the history of the ancient city-state of Athens

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located in the Attica region of Greece and particularly famous for this view

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the view of the Parthenon on top of the Acropolis arguably the most importance

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of city-states in the history of the ancient Mediterranean its era of achievement stretches for the period

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between the eighth century BC and the 3rd century AD the Athenians were famous

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for many things democracy for tragedy comedy and oratory but one of the most

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exciting products of their civilization was the inscriptions that they made at

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least 20,000 inscriptions survived from ancient Athens alone and one of the

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research activities to which I contribute is the ongoing development of a website directed by Steven Lambert

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who's professor of ancient history and a pig Revere Cardiff University which translates these inscriptions from their

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original ancient Greek and offers them free of charge to anyone with access to

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the Internet and this website is called Patek inscriptions online

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today and in future lectures I'll be focusing upon Fenian inscriptions which

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are kept in collections in the UK more than 220 ancient Athenian inscriptions

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on stone are currently housed in British collections they consist of official

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documents such as decrees and financial accounts religious documents such as

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inventories or sacrificial calendars inscribed leases dedications and private

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funerary monuments they date to the period from the early 5th century BC to

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the 4th century AD these inscriptions are a resource of great importance for

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historians archaeologists and linguists and they're dispersed across private

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public and institutional collections in the UK so with Steven Lamberton

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professor Polly Lowe of the University of Durham and involved in an Arts and Humanities Research Council project to

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publish editions translations and countries on all these inscriptions on

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the open access attic inscriptions online website making them accessible to

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a wide audience you can download the PDFs of our publications there and you

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can see the most recent publication was of an object in the Great North Museum

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Hancock in New Castle of the

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inscriptions which during the 18th and 19th centuries came into the hands of private collectors many had been

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transferred to major public collections including most importantly the British

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Museum but also the Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean museums in Cambridge and

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Oxford and the British school at Athens a handful have been lost others have

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been sold on the private market some remain in the hands of the families whose ancestors took possession of them

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and a few have been transferred to the management of the National Trust

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we're aware of four Athenian inscriptions in three properties currently managed by the National Trust

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all four are on display in these properties of these one is a decree of

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the Athenian assembly of 108 seven BC honoring the girls who were the famous

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ancient artwork in the shape of the cloak of Athena literally presented to

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the goddess on the Acropolis of Athens on the occasion of her most important

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festival the Paneth Nile the inscription is currently kept in Padua house in West

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Sussex where it's built into the modern base of a statue of Artemis in the

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marble hall since been brought to Petworth in the 19th century it's been

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the subject of great interest embellishing an aristocratic house of art including a significant number of

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Hellenistic sculptures and appearing for instance in a painting of the sculpture

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gallery made in 1865 and this inscription and the collection of

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Petworth house was the subject of Stephen Lambert's attic inscriptions in UK collections volume worn and an

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Associated video the second inscription in national international trust property

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is the one at Mount Stewart in County Down the ancestral home of the Marquess

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of Londonderry it's a unique funerary inscription which

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appears to commemorate five individuals perhaps three generations of the same

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family he was published first for the first time by David Whitehead professor

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of ancient history at Queen's University Belfast in 1995 received probably by the

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owning family in the late 18th or early 19th century it's officer offers a

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legacy a great esteem in which this Stuart family was held in recognition of

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its activity in international diplomacy in that era but in this talk I focus

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upon the two Athenian inscriptions on display at the National Trust property at Line park in Cheshire near Stockport

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the subject of volume 5 in the Attic inscriptions in UK collections by Polly

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Lowe and myself both inscriptions are funeral monuments with relief sculpture

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I'm going to explore their commemorative function their historical context the

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history of their discovery in the 19th century and their current display

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context alongside an an inscribed sculpture perhaps you marry or a dedication the

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earlier of the two inscriptions is dated to the early fourth century BC on the

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basis of the style of its letters and decoration it appears on a funerary

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inscription for a woman named are cases above the inscription the ste marker

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known as a steely sari beneath the inscription sorry above the inscription

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the steely is crowned with an unfilial elaborately decorated with foliage

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beneath the inscription is a relief panel which depicts a young woman holding a swaddled baby as she gazes at

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it the name of the deceased and her representation indicates nothing firm

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about her status one possibility is that she was a wet

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nurse and that the depiction reflects her labor in that role but it's perhaps

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more likely that our cases was a woman a mother who died in childbirth

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the depiction of a deceased brother interacting with an infant would serve to underline her contributions of family

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and community than such a monument which was probably set up in an enclosure the

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Greek word is parables commemorating the deceased alongside other family members

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might serve as a source in context where information about family history was

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deemed to be important ancient Athenian funerary monuments

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often commemorated more than one individual indeed the second inscription

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at line Park commemorates two named individuals it takes on the shape of a

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nice cos or a small building and depicts three figures two of whom are carved in

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high relief the inscription on the architrave reads meliss toh daughter of

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Hagia Stratos of oil a pigeon ease some of my Creon of a useless oil and o uses

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our place names indicating the village or deem in which the deceased person had

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their ancestral origins this alongside the patronymic or father's name

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indicates that these individuals were Athenian citizens but given that these

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are not rare names nothing more firm can be said about their identification

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as with the previous example of our cases the iconography of this relief

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contributes to our interpretation of the monument we assume that the young woman

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represented as seated was MELAS tall she's depicted clasping hands in a nap

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that we call exe osis or the ancient Greeks called XE osis with a bearded

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mature male who was probably the man a pidgin 'is this act of hand clasping all

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decks theosis is common in Athenian fury release and it indicates an expression

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of intimacy and harmony the female figure in the background sculptured in

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lower relief is likely to be a slave as melis though clasps hands with a

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pigeon ease she appears to be about to remove her veil with her left hand and

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this gesture known in ancient Greek is anneka Lipsey's can like exe osis often

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be a signifier of intimacy but it may also evoke the act of marriage or

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married status given the iconography this inscription it's likely therefore

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that this two principal figures represented on this inscription were married

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in ancient greek world-- Wellborn men and women were regarded as citizens of

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individual city-states but only men possessed political rights and even the

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economic rights of females in terms of possession and lifestyles were very

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limited in classical Athenian practice it was usually the case that the

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guardianship of a woman shifted from father to husband once she'd married

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therefore it's striking that Mellie Stowe here is referred to in the inscription as the daughter of her

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father even though she was apparently the wife of a pigeon 'yes this suggests

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an ongoing connection of this married woman with her paternal family boycotts

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perhaps to demonstrate melis tours citizenship qualifications another

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possibility is that Melissa was an Air s whose father had died without leaving a

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direct male heir in that case her father before his death may have betrothed her

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to a pigeon ease a pigeon ease then would have administered her wealth until

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they produced a son who had inherited and this possibility is perhaps supported by the fact that the third

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figure in the representation probably a female slave there's a box possibly a

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jewelry casket which might represent the wealth brought to the household in the form of

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molesters dowry whatever its precise significance this depiction represents a

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display of economic resources reflecting the wealth and aspiration of the family

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of a pigeon YZ and Marisol moreover the size of the inscription and

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the quality of the representation suggests that considerable expenditure had been invested in this Monument

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the letter forms of the inscription and the spelling of the names suggest a date

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of the inscription in the middle of the 4th century BC modern discussion of the

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dating of this monument has brought in a third piece of sculpture kept at line park in 1995 a German scholar identified

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the epiphanies of the inscription with a fourth century comic poet who bore the

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same name this scholar andreas shawl suggested that he was commemorated also

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on a piece of an inscribed sculpture which is in line which is also in line park and depicted a seated male holding

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a scroll and gazing as a comic mask while a second comic mask hangs above

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him the iconography of this piece indeed suggests an association with comic

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poetry but the lack of inscription on this monument means that it's impossible to tell whether it's a few monuments or

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a gift to the gods in the form of a marble dedication

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moreover the identification of the appearance for inscription as the comic

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poet excuse me is very reliant on Scholz assertion that the pieces were

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discovered in the same location and may have been part of the same monument however there is nothing more in the

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brief reports of the discoveries of these inscriptions written by Thomas Lee in 1817 to support this bit more on that

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author Thomas Lee Shirley but a little

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bit about their ancient historical context before we break briefly for questions the two inscribed monuments of

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line park reflect Athenian ideas about the appropriate way to commemorate the

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deceased with both words and images as already mentioned Athenian funerary

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inscriptions were often set up in the context of family enclosures or Perry

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boy were they served as repositories of memory as foci for commemorative

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activity expressing both family and city-states ideology these enclosures

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were rectangular and sometimes circular walled areas which enclose sculptural

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monuments the ancient physical context of our inscription is largely lost but

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we would expect that they would have originally been set up among other sculptures and commemorative

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objects in the shape of vases as part of the wider family commemoratives

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commemorative space and I'm just showing you an image of a funerary enclosure and

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drawn by an archaeologist showing the

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reconstructing the tomb of a man called Heracles from the Athenian village of

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rammnews okay so at this point um I will

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turn to talking about the history of the discovery of these inscriptions and but

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before I do so I'm happy to try to answer any questions

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that people might have about what I've said so far about these inscriptions

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well we've got one question pizza and it's from Duncan McNeil and he is asking

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was reading and racing widespread in Athens at that time well thank you

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that's a very good question and I think

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that to a degree probably was at least

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on on it well in a at a limited level of

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complexity so what I mean is that what there would have been some people who

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would have been able to read and write very fluently and there would have been

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others who maybe would have recognized a name or would have been able to sound

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words that they had read it probably would do would vary upon many things

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there wasn't a sort of a community based agreement that everybody should be

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literate so probably people would pick up aspects of literacy not only in their

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education and what they read but also through their work if they had to work

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with documents if they had to work with lists of names for instance they would have developed a fall of literacy it's

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also argued that in ancient Athens levels of literacy may have been comparatively high for the ancient world

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because so many citizen males were involved in democracy and the processes

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and administration of democracy would have repaid a an amount of literacy

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being able to read laws and decrees being able to recognize the names and

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other citizens to

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okay we have another question from Jim Duggan and we're people buried with

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their funerary monuments or worthy chromatids from ation was quite common

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burial was a possibility too in the Greek world but in this period cremation

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is more common one thing to stand to remember I suppose is that sometimes we

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have monuments which are clearly sin attacks they commemorated individuals

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but not necessarily at their place of rest so we know for instance that there

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is a priestess from the late 5th century BC who had too few remarks one in the

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Athenian countryside in close to her home village and one in the central cemetery at Athens the Kara Michaels and

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so one of those those markers must have been a Senate anthem an empty commemorative an n-well of a description

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marking a place where she wasn't buried

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okay and we have another question thank you from Norman Newton and who's asking

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is Britain ever mentioned on any of the 200,000 inscriptions I could buy the

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road there are ways that I can interest a very interesting question I've never never thought of that question before

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there are ways of finding out actually there is a there is an online sort of

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index of Greek inscriptions which you would be able to access and and and and

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find out the answer to that question well most in ancient inscriptions which

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mention Britannia would have been written in Latin rather than a Greek you

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think have been the products of the Roman Empire so most ancient mentions

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would have been made in Latin however there are a small number perhaps 20 or

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so ancient Greek inscriptions that have been discovered in Great Britain because

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they were originally set up there there's a there's a couple in Chester for instance I'm not sure whether

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whether any of those mentioned Britain but for certainly are indigenous what we

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could call indigenous Greek inscriptions in in the UK

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okay thanks for that pizza and I don't think we have any more questions right now and so if you want to to carry on

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I'll carry on then so the next thing I want to talk about is the history of the

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modern discovery and display of these inscriptions for three pieces of

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Athenian sculpture then displayed at displayed at line Park a real legacy of

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Thomas Lee 1792 to 1857 who inherited

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the line Park Estate and with it a significant fortune upon his father's

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death in 1797 in 1811 he spent two

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months in Athens during which time he undertook what he described as expensive

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excavations but his account of them in the book his narrative which I showed

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you before provided few details either of the locations or the result of the

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locations of his excavations or their results the only discoveries on which he

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dwelt at any length were both found in the excavations at McCarran Lycos the

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burial ground at Athens were described as a terra cotta vars

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at extreme beauty he said in a and in a state of perfect preservation and the

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curious marble bah so relieved you and the former object is a is the red

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figured Pella care which I'm showing you now depicting Zeus and Nike on one side

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and here're and he bare these are all Greek deities on the reverse side now

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kept at the British Museum the lateral object he described was the

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onion scribed funerary monument or dedication of the playwright to try alluded earlier

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Lee reports also that his excavations also yielded numerous parties

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inscriptions and bass railings we assume that these included the two funerary

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monuments which I've discussed before but Lee's narrative gives no information

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which allows us to confirm this or to pin down that place of discovery or

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purchase the VAS that you're looking at now formed after it was discovered part

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of the collection of a certain dr. William McMichael 1784 - 1839 who is

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known to have been present with Lee in Greece in 1811 it seems possible

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therefore that McMichael played a more active role in the discovery of these

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ancient objects than Lee's account leads the reader his narrative to believe this

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possibility is made more likely by the fact that the traveler Edward Dodd well in his 1819 book a classical and

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topographical tour through Greece reported as follows approaching the gate

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dippie long that's one of the main gates of the Kerameikos the Athenian burial ground the traces of settlers burial

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burial areas are seen many of which have been lately opened the five following

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inscriptions were found there by dr. McMichael - whose French define indebted for their insertion in this place

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after this assertion he gives us a list of inscriptions and included in this one

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is what is described as an inscription of obsesses you can see that it's the

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third one from the bottom on that list as the Greek scholar Angus Mateo points

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out dodd wells publication reported his visits to greece undertaken in the early

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years of the 19th century sorry thee yes the 19th century it's possible therefore there his reference

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to a same inscription of our Casas now at lime Park it is made so McMichael may

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have acted as an agent in the retrieval of antiquities and their sale and export to England through his networks yet his

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role in the discovery of the antiquities online pub may well have been under played on their arrival in Britain the

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three pieces of Athenian sculpture were set up in blind halls library as part of

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the refurbishment of the house which was undertaken from 1840 under the direction

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of the architect Lewis Wyatt the fact that they're still in their original

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locations or original from 1814 means that they're important to our

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understanding of the reception of classical aesthetics in the 19th century

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the steel of Metis the inscription of MELAS though and a pigeon ease was set

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above the fireplace and the two other pieces were placed in an alcove to its left there is good reason to think that

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their decorative role was thoroughly enhanced by their function as souvenirs

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and perhaps advertisements of his early adventures this is a theme that can be

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detected elsewhere in lime hall casts of the frieze of the temple of bas i in the

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Peloponnese in southern greece the removal of which from the temple of apollo lee had played a minor role were

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placed in the right gallery his house and they're still there today moreover Lee commissioned and displayed

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a striking portrait of himself dressed in Ottoman costume moreover his

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published work in the shape of the narrative demonstrates that he was interested to some extent at least in

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attempting to understand both the ancient and modern contexts for things that he saw and collected although his

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published work does not mention the inscriptions that we discuss in this

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talk it does include transcriptions of some Greek inscriptions which he saw in Egypt

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and even takes a position on the use of ancient Greek letter forms namely the

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appearance of three and four barred sickness as a criterion for dating Greek

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inscriptions in the early 19th century the collection of antiquities including

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inscribed marbles became popular in aristocratic circles owing both to the

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increasing accessibility of Greek lands for travelers and also as son

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it became an exercise in competitive emulation and ostentatious behavior

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perhaps reaching its zenith in the activities of Lord Elgin and his agents

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at Athens during the first decades of that century yet the line park models do not appear

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to have quickly won fame for themselves or for their collector and for some

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reason the three pieces of athenian sculpture do not appear to have been known to Adolphe Michaelis who published

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in 1882 the very important book in cheap marbles in Great Britain which is still

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today a touchstone for and primary resource for anybody interested in what

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ancient models there are in UK collections however like the inscribed

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marble of Petworth house that I showed you before at least one of the three

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ancient sculptures appeared on in-house artworks of the late 19th century the

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inscriptions first appeared in the scholarly bibliography not until the start of the 20th century however

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through the short article of eugenie strong a British archeologist and art

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historian they were not studied again properly until andreas Cole's

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publication of his 1995 edition of ancient sculpture at Lime Park and other

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houses so we hope that our new online an

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open-access publication of these inscriptions highlights not only the importance of combining text and image

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for the interpretation of a monument but also their importance for understanding

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the history of the collection of Antiquities in the nineteenth century and the claims made about their

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accumulation the marbles were seen annually by fowls or are seen annually

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by thousands of visitors to these National Trust properties and we hope that our war upon them will make a

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better informed experience possibility for the many who see them

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if you like to do some reading about these inscriptions probably your perhaps

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the best place is our own paper our own attic inscriptions in the UK paper on

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the subject I'm giving you the URL of that now but the wider subject of the

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collection of antiquities is discussed in a fuss in fascinating detail in a

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very nicely illustrated work I roof gilding called owning the past not owing

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the past so put there and they're very readable account of Richard Stoneman in

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his book land of the last lost gods

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a hundred years later a German astronomer called vessel Friedrich

0:05

Berlin vessel had a much more superior much more advanced telescope with far far better engineering he repeated

0:11

Bradley's measurements and he came to the conclusion that yes the stars are indeed very very far away the one that

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he studied in the constellation Draco the dragon was about nine point eight light-years away which doesn't actually

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differ that much from the modern value that we've come to lore and expect and you thought it was a long way down to

0:29

the paper shop now alight here is the distance a beam of light can travel in a

0:35

year and if you think that the Sun and the earth are ninety eight million miles

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away from each other separated by a gap of 98 million miles and it takes light eight and a half

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minutes eight and a half minutes to get from the Sun to the earth you can

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imagine how far a beam of light can travel in a year so the star that fruit

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Bessel was looking at was nine point eight light years away in other words a long long way away far further away than

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they actually expected to actually surprise vessel quite a lot so one thing

1:09

that we now know is that the stars are very very distant there are also very very dim which means that they're very

1:15

very difficult to spot so how do you go about finding an exoplanet around a distant star well you have to use some

1:22

trickery we have to use some knowledge of how planets move and how stars move to sort of fool nature into giving us a

1:29

treat and we have to use this phenomenon of the planets make stars wobble so if

1:36

we look at the position of a Sun in our solar system over a long period of time we notice the Sun wobbles it wobbles

1:45

around a common center of gravity that it shares with the other big planets the

1:51

earth doesn't make much of difference but big planets like Jupiter and Saturn's certainly pull the Sun out of

1:57

position and we can determine measure that wobble very very carefully very

2:03

very precisely now the thing is if the Sun wobbles then saw must other start if

2:08

they've got planets around them certainly planets as big as Jupiter we should be able to spot the wobble quite

2:15

readily so how do we stop that but that wobble is in fact incredibly small we

2:23

can do it with modern techniques but 35 years ago that technique wasn't there instead we had to use a technique we

2:29

listen to them using radio waves now a radio telescope is it almost exactly the same as an optical telescope except you

2:36

don't look into it you listen to it if you listen to radio waves took my optical telescope you would look for

2:43

light light and radio waves are very very similar creatures you listen to

2:48

them using a radio telescope think of you a very much larger bigger the bigger version of your sky satellite dish

2:54

that's what it is okay and we're looking for a particular type of star called a neutron star or

3:01

more specifically a non quiet pulsar they make a lot of noise out there it's

3:06

this when a big star when a particularly big star reaches the end of its life it

3:13

explodes it goes bang in a most ferocious where be thankful that we have not been in the proximity of any large

3:19

supernova in the last thousand years I might have been a few other ones but that was still sufficiently far away

3:25

there's not a really concern most big supernovae include one in about the Middle Ages Tycho Brahe and also what

3:31

about the time of the Battle of Hastings which fought all the demise of King

3:37

Harald but these stars when they explored they leave behind them a small

3:42

very dense lump of matter called a neutron star why a neutron star what's a neutron star when the electrons

3:50

and protons which make up the star are suddenly compressed by that explosion it

3:56

pushes the two together so the electrons and the positive and the protons cancel

4:02

each other out they become electrically neutral they cancel each other so what you're left with is a big lump of

4:09

neutron material combining into neutrons neutron means electrically neutral it has no

4:16

residual charge it's very small it's very dense but we're

4:21

original star was spinning and by the principle called the conservation of

4:27

angular momentum that star that little neutron star has to be spinning at roughly the same speed it's exactly the

4:34

same analogy as when an ice skater speeds up and slows down so must the

4:40

star that angular energy had to go somewhere so neutron stars spin very

4:46

very rapidly indeed very very rapidly indeed likewise all of the magnetic

4:53

energy that was stored in that star that is also conserved and because they are

4:58

so dense because there generates such a huge magnetic field any matter that is

5:03

sucked and pulled into the poles of that neutron star gives off an enormous amount of radial wave energy and if the

5:12

poles of that neutron star just happened to sweep past earth and the do lots of

5:17

them do we hear them as a series of clicks click click click click ok some

5:27

of them are very slow but once a second twice a second that sort of thing others very very quickly indeed but are the

5:34

most circumstances that interval between clicks is very very precise great

5:40

wonderful and we can hear those clicks with a radio telescope now the famous

5:45

inventor Discoverer of radio Nikola Tesla he heard these clicks of

5:52

one of the radio receivers he was developing for the US government he pointed his telescope radio telescope at

5:58

space and he heard these clicks and he was utterly convinced that he was listening to aliens sending us

6:04

intelligent message intelligent conversation they were trying to contact us unfortunately Tesla was wrong a Betty

6:11

wish he hadn't gone to the New York Times and met such a bold statement because he wasn't actually wrong we now then or them to be these objects called

6:17

pole stars now if you think about when a police car comes speeding towards you

6:24

you hear the pitch long way off the pitch is quite little but as this police car passes you or an ambulance passes

6:30

you you hear the pitch gets slightly higher and as the ambulance recedes from you the pitch gets lower and we call

6:39

this the Doppler effect it's very well known it quite easily demonstrate that outside okay when we started looking at

6:46

some of these pulsars with very very precise radio telescopes and good solid precise equipment we started notice that

6:53

some of the pulses were not as regular as they should be in fact so what the pulse has seemed to speed up and then

7:00

slow down and this is the tell-tale signature that something is pulling that

7:06

neutron star and position it's not sitting stationary in space it is

7:11

actually moving back and forth so what we'd expect to see there was something pulling that neutron star out of spec

7:18

position we would expect this pulses to speed up as the neutron star comes towards us and then slow down as the

7:25

neutron star moves away from us and if we measure the full range as the pulses

7:32

get close together what we have one extreme of the neutron stars orbit we

7:38

then when we hear the Pulsar speed up a second time we have the second extreme which is the distant part of the pulsars

7:44

orbit and then we're back again we see this cycle repeating over and over again

7:49

in a limited number of pulsars and this is the tell-tale sign that something big

7:55

something is pulling that neutron star out of orbit and it's an exoplanet it's

8:01

another planet around a distant pulsar and the gap between those double where

8:08

the pulses get closer together that indicates it's a good suggestion of how long the exoplanet takes to orbit the

8:14

star so we've used an indirect method we can't see the exoplanet

8:19

but we know it's there because we can hear it and indeed back in 1990 a Polish astronomer Narada you've got to try and

8:25

pronounce that name we're studying a pulsar in the constellation Virgo and he

8:31

analyzed this data and in 1992 he was able to confirm that we had indeed found

8:36

a planet around distant star now there is nowhere that that distant star this pulsar could

8:42

support life so the search continued trying to find other planets around

8:47

other stars but continuing to look at this pulsar PSR b1 2 5 7 + 12 we

8:54

discovered that it didn't have just one exoplanet further analysis revealed that it had another tomb so there's three one

9:02

called poltergeist forbit or drog so these are all strange names - you put

9:07

definitely we've got not just one exoplanet but three so that's an indirect technique for finding life on

9:14

another planet officer as planet around a distant star another technique was suggested by Otto

9:20

Struve a German astronomer he suggested looking for something akin to dubbed the

9:25

Doppler effect Doppler spectroscopy or read your velocity shifts and it sounds

9:31

complicated and it is but I'm gonna have a quick go and explaining how it works we know what stars are made of thanks to

9:37

the work of our old friend Isaac Newton he did a very important convent experiment called experimental Cruces

9:43

and it's why Newton for one of many achievements wine even got his face on the back of a pound Millard for anybody

9:50

who's old enough to remember pound bullets many are what he realized what

9:56

Newton realized was that you could take a beam of white light pass it through a prism and break it into its component

10:03

colors we see this with the rainbow bring it into its component colors but

10:09

what Newton was able to do was you're able to take that

10:15

rainbow of colors and we combine them into white light and that gave him a

10:20

clue that we could use light from distant objects to analyze what they were made from a stop of all truth

10:27

forgive me for this little joke yes it would make some cool artwork for an album cover at some point in time in the

10:33

future yes I'll just skip past that rather bad joke it didn't get a laugh last time so don't know why I include

10:38

anyway we use a device for a prism spectrometer I'm not going to go into how the prism spectrometer works but if

10:44

you point prism spectrometer and a distant star we can put decompose that

10:49

star's light into its component elements we can tell what a star is made from by

10:56

looking at a pattern of lights that passes through the prism spectrometer if you were old enough to remember low

11:02

pressure sodium lamps when every time you went outside at night the light from around you is just as gorgeous sodium

11:09

yellow that's because sodium yellow lights if you got a low pressure sodium inside one of these lights outside at

11:15

night makes everything glow yellow they're almost extinct now they've been replaced by LEDs but at one point these

11:22

sodium yellow lamps were everywhere okay so we use this tempest there's technique

11:28

this prism spectrometer analyzed the light coming from a distance star and those light measurements that we get

11:36

with those bars and stripes the colors that we see I'm very very the correspond very precisely to certain wavelengths so

11:42

if we see this pattern in the atmosphere of a distant star we know that sodium is there and every one of the major

11:48

elements has got their own individual pattern so we can analyze the atmosphere

11:54

of a star we can tell what elements are in the atmosphere of That star now Struve had this idea that if you've got

12:02

a stationary star a star that is not moving and you take a spectroscopic image of That star you see a pattern of

12:09

dark and light planes corresponding to the elements in that planets outer atmosphere if we find a moving star we

12:16

notice that that pattern of bands of shadows of lines and shadows is

12:22

shifted to one end of the spectrum in this case that shifted to the red end hence the term red shift that you might

12:28

have heard we noticed that the big black line in the center there or shifted by a little bit and that gap there that gap

12:35

between the bands between the snare Cherie start and the moving star is a good indication of how fast that star is

12:42

moving so we can tell if the star is moving away from us or coming towards us shift is a good measure of how fast the

12:49

star is moving but what if the absorption lines shift back and forth

12:55

not by much but if those absorption lines shift back and forth then we have

13:00

a very precise measure and a suggestion that there may well be a planet in orbit

13:06

around that star and we use this technique it's been very effective at

13:11

finding distant planets around the world stars the size of that swing is a good

13:18

measure of how fast the planet is moving it's not the full story but it gives us

13:23

some part of the story and the first planet to be found in this technique was called Bellerophon it was christened

13:29

Bellerophon and is a special kind of star called a hot Jupiter in other words

13:34

it's a planet about the size of Jupiter that orbits very closely to its first

13:40

star and consequently pulls it out of position quite dramatically now if you

13:46

can imagine the distance to the planet Mercury that's what we call a relatively close to the host star some of these hot

13:53

Jupiters orbit the inside the orbit of mercury very very close indeed how they

13:58

stay there how they've managed to stay stable how they've evolved is a bit of a puzzle we don't have all of the answers

14:04

to that but we found a significant number of these hot Jupiters out there

14:09

they're easy to detect so that's probably why we found more of them but we can certainly find these hot Jupiters

14:16

out there in space they're not suitable for life they're too close into the host star but we're getting there

14:22

we're starting to find some other techniques the last technique that I'm going to cover about finding exoplanets

14:28

is another way and it's called the transit method now I don't mean that it's named after a Ford

14:34

Transit I've included this image system issues with anybody still out there in to take attention but what it means is

14:42

that if we study the light from a distant star and we measure that light

14:47

very very carefully indeed very very precisely we might not be able to see

14:53

the exoplanet as it orbits the star but we might be able to detect a dip in the

14:59

light coming from That star as that planet dips in front of the star so if

15:05

we got the star the planet is coming from the left moving towards the right as the planet moves in front of the

15:11

distant star we see a very slight drop and the amount of light coming from that

15:17

stone and as the planet exit the other side the light level recovers and we've got what we call a transit now we're

15:24

talking about tiny tiny tiny amounts of dips and the brightness overall

15:29

brightness of That star but if we measure it often enough if we repeat the

15:35

observations we start to discern some kind of a pattern and a significant

15:40

number of exoplanets have been friend through this method called the transit method indeed the Kepler space telescope

15:46

it was sent it's this that ten years ago with a great big mirror and a great big

15:52

camera is exactly the same camera as you might find in your iPhone or your Samsung device just a huge detector

15:58

specifically to look for my name changes and the brightness of stars it was

16:04

launched into space far away from Earth pointing at just one area of the Milky

16:10

Way not far from the constellation Cygnus in the Milky Way still we can still say

16:16

Cygnus if you know where to look it's the middle of the night at the moment but Kepler was focused on one particular area of the sky and it just simply sat

16:25

looking at that area of the sky for about five or six years and in that time

16:31

it was able to detect a significant number of exoplanets as plants around

16:36

distant stars four thousand of them 4,000 of these things so we've gone from

16:42

thinking that planets around distant stars were incredibly rare - now we know

16:48

that they're actually very very common indeed we can't see any of these planets directly but we can infer something

16:56

about them from the dynamics of their system we can even image some of them with spectroscopes and we can tell

17:03

what's going on within their atmospheres that's how good we're getting into looking for these things looking for

17:08

these astronomers have used Kepler to discover the first multiple planet system using this technique we even

17:14

found mr. Spock's whole planet from Star Trek and the star Epsilon Eridani which

17:20

features in Star Trek and is the home for mr. Spock has been discovered to have an exoplanet in orbit around it

17:27

it's not habitable so you can forget going out there to the Scott's if mr. Spock is there it's not the slightest

17:33

bit habitable but it shows how good we're getting at detecting the icing of

17:38

the cake of course comes with Kepler 19 when it discovers a solar system which is almost identical to our own rocky in

17:46

planets in the interior big gas giants on the exterior so show us that our

17:51

solar system is extremely common out there remember Kepler is only looking at one particular area of the sky but

17:59

Kepler turned up some really really interesting results this star a strangely named kic 8 for 6 to 850 now

18:08

remember that number cuz I'll be asking questions later on otherwise known as tabby star

18:13

Kepler pointed at this star saw some unusual light patterns they made the

18:19

public announcement that they found something unusual around this star and of course it was picked up by all of tabloids who immediately announced the

18:26

destroyer must have discovered an alien mega-structure around this star breathe a sigh of

18:32

relief and smile because that's not what happened some of the artists impressions that began to spring up we're really

18:38

quite fanciful and we have no basis whatsoever to imagine that these alien mega structures are out there just don't

18:46

please don't imagine that that's what's going on it's not the case what we did we straightaway we sent radio telescopes

18:52

around world to listen to this star tabi star after the lady who discovered it did so

18:58

much for the early investigative work and we looked at this star through a radio telescope of a period of weeks and

19:04

we saw no activity whatsoever that might suggest alien life so sorry to

19:10

disappoint you we have not yet found et the most likely explanation that we've got is that there is an only even dust

19:17

ring around that star and exactly the same way is that we have an uneven dust

19:22

ring around our Sun we have two uneven dust rings around us on the asteroid

19:28

building not and the Kuiper belt which is the very edge of the solar system so tubby star is exactly like ours on

19:35

our solar system it's not massively unusual 2018 the Kepler space telescope

19:41

had to be retired it ran out of fuel it was unable to keep its men in Merritt and its optics cool it also run into

19:47

problems of trying to keep it stable so we could point it in the right place so it was gracefully retired and it is

19:53

still out there in space so if you fancy claiming the salvage rights off you go I

19:59

want to talk about now some of the state-of-the-art techniques that we've developed since Kepler was put into

20:04

space for finding exoplanets and we've been incredibly successful at finding planets around distant stars the Gaia

20:12

satellite was launched some years ago it's using a variation on Bradley's technique called a stroma tree to

20:19

measure the Stars and the positions of stars very very accurately and trying to determine if they're a wobble or not and

20:27

it has been very successful at finding stars that wobble we can use a technique

20:32

called occlusion where we put an object between a star and our eye it's a very

20:40

simple technique and we can use it to see details that would normally be

20:45

invisible to us for instance if we look at the star called formal hot it's an

20:51

old Arabic name for star that's been it's in the Southern Miss or some part of the sky it's not too easy to see from

20:57

this particular part from absurdly for my latitude those of you further south might fare better but if we use this occlusion

21:03

technique we could start to detect like a dust ring around formal hot we can detect exoplanets former Lord beef

21:11

in fact we now believe that former Lord bee has been struck violently by another

21:17

object in that star solar system in that solar system and is currently disintegrating when we first

21:23

photographed former Lord bee in 2004 it seemed to be a bright point of light but

21:29

ever since then we've noticed that it's getting bigger and bigger and more spread out and the implication is that

21:34

it has been struck and is disintegrating so this technique is very very positive there's another technique called a

21:41

vortex coronagraph I don't intend to explain it to you but it's another way of removing the central star from our

21:48

field of view and if we remove that star's light from a field of view we can see exoplanets directly now when I was

21:55

at university 40 odd years ago it's my tutor Jarek McCartan said we would never

22:01

ever be able to do this you should never ever say that to a bunch of physicists because they will go out there and prove

22:06

you wrong but we've started to see exoplanets out in space nearly everywhere we look exoplanets are the

22:13

norm rather than the exception we're getting better and better of processing signals from outer space we can use this

22:21

enhance signal processing technology to really get a good look at what stars and

22:27

what planets are made of we can determine elements in a star's outer

22:32

atmosphere and with any of the at within any of the extra planets in orbit around that stuff we can get a good handle on

22:38

what's there and what they're made of and what's in their upper atmosphere like things water and oxygen and methane

22:45

and that's what we've done we've istana detect these critical elements that are essential building blocks for life out

22:51

there in space April 2018 we launched the successor to

22:56

Kepler the transiting exoplanet survey system otherwise known as Tess Tess was

23:02

extremely effective within the first few months of its launch going into the right orbit it started to find

23:08

exoplanets as well so more and more evidence is building that stars have planets there the norm rather than the

23:16

we stopped long ago we found the first EXO moon the moon orbiting a distant

23:22

planet around a distant star it goes to show how clever we are as a bunch of

23:27

people little astronomers were very getting very good at finding close detail but less and nurses let's look at

23:34

them the analysis of the space telescope what Kepler actually showed us let's talk about some of the actual numbers

23:40

Kepler gave us a clue and it goes like this we think there is minus 40 billion

23:46

rocky earth-sized exoplanet swith in the Milky Way 40 billion and of that 40 billion

23:53

about 11 billion of those planets are found in the habitable zones around

23:58

sun-like stars so those 11 billion planets that are almost the same conditions in their solar systems that

24:05

we find earth in and those would be good candidates for finding life wouldn't we

24:11

expect to find life wouldn't we have started to see life out there in space by now and yet we see nothing

24:19

the skies are completely silent we hear nothing we've tried sending a message in

24:26

a bottle with Pioneer 10 with its little plaque stapled to the side pioneer 10 is moving extremely slowly

24:32

it's not like the Starship Enterprise where you can cross vast distances very quickly pioneer 10 is positively

24:38

pedestrian left the solar system about 20 years ago or possibly dead but it's

24:44

moving very very slowly it will be millions of years before five pioneer ten reaches any kind of inhabited planet

24:51

we've tried to say hello we've tried to send messages out into space that we

24:57

think et might be able to one day interpret or intercept or cache we've

25:02

not had any kind of response to that message we've also tried listening listening and analyzing the search for

25:10

extraterrestrial intelligence has been running for a lot of years now they've

25:15

had an awful over there listening over to amateurs who can lesson use their home computers to sort of download vast

25:21

amounts of data and listen for any sign of et and thus far in 20 years not a

25:27

single message has been received we've had a few red herrings we've had a few possibilities but we've not heard

25:34

anything we think are some slight evidence but back in 1977 we received a

25:42

small message wasn't very long about 76 seconds it was called the Wow event dr.

25:48

Jerry ehman who was using the big years radio telescope big ears as its nickname

25:54

Ohio State University Ridge of telescope 15th of August 1977 was the letting the

25:59

radio telescope just sweep the sky more or less unattended and he came back the following morning check the printout and

26:05

he saw this rather characteristic message here and it says 6 eq u jf v and

26:13

that's an encoded way of hey we've got a signal there's something here it's

26:19

exactly the same the same characteristics as a carrier wave without a signal as if he would tend

26:26

into your favorite radio station like classic FM radio 4 and the presenter was

26:31

silent and that's what it was we think we were there was into something there

26:37

it's never happened before it's never happened since there were some theories

26:42

going around about a few years ago that this was a pair of comets in the sky that was somehow interfering with the

26:48

radio telescopes those two comments kept and back through the same region of the sky we weren't able to conclude that

26:55

they were the source of this WoW signal so perhaps we were contacted and we

27:00

missed it case is not proven we still don't have enough information but as of

27:06

today we still have no evidence of any kind that there is life on other words

27:12

why haven't we found et is et rare is ET

27:17

plentiful we use a technique developed by an astronomer called Frank Craig it's

27:23

a tool for estimating the number of alien species intelligent species that might be out there so called Drake

27:30

Equation it's complicated far more complicated that we can go into here but basically

27:35

what it tries to calculate is looking at the information that we've got putting it into equation and trying to

27:41

the number of civilizations that might be in our Milky Way and it's complicated

27:47

so I'm not gonna go into it right now but we're gonna plug in some numbers we're gonna say that perhaps birth is

27:52

rare and if the earth planets like the earth civilizations capable of radio

27:59

communication are extremely rare we plug those figures in the earth turns out

28:04

that the earth-like civilizations are almost undetectable very very difficult

28:11

to detect so we shouldn't see many of them but if we're a bit more optimistic and we plug numbers into that table my

28:17

numbers have curiously vanished from the table this is some kind of conspiracy if we're a bit more optimistic and we

28:23

change the length of times the civilizations release detectable signals the number of planets of a solar system

28:28

in the habitable zone the rate at which stars form that sort of thing we suddenly get this enormous number if we

28:36

are a bit more optimistic we should see more far more millions 14 million

28:43

possible civilizations at work in the Milky Way and yet we see none of them so

28:48

which model is right we believe the Drake is a good starting point it's a good position to start so hi haven't we

28:55

found et and this is a subject of another lecture the Fermi paradox say

29:00

okay the great Simon's it was developed as an off-the-cuff remark from a physicist Enrico Fermi who'd been

29:06

studying the principle the problem and he said my minimun if you're going to predict that we've got 14 millions

29:12

civilizations that nowhere can't we see them why aren't we we should see something maybe we're not recognizing

29:20

that particular form of life is a living organism maybe it's the kind of life that we don't not we don't see maybe

29:26

it's some kind of machine intelligence remember we haven't found et because we

29:31

don't have their technology we don't have the technology to build great big

29:36

great big structures out there in space many faster-than-light signaling is not possible or it is possible we just can't

29:44

do it yet we're not able to read signals from ET because we certainly haven't got there yet

29:50

maybe one theory is that we live in a huge zoo that we have been quarantined

29:55

off from the rest of the universe because we are such a bunch of awful by barbarians

30:01

maybe the communications between eighty and these fellows are deliberately disguised so those without the mats

30:08

those without the smarts or the technology can't understand them it's kind of like a press sport you have to

30:15

have the technology to be able to figure out what's going on okay so this leads us into the next question

30:22

this is the really interesting bit this is where it really starts to get interesting because there were a number of scientists around the world now that

30:29

think we are only pretty much on our doorstep of finding life evidence strong

30:36

evidence powerful evidence of life on other planets we're going to do it with

30:41

bio signatures and technical signatures that goes like this a hundred years ago it was a great but debate in astronomy

30:47

about the scale of the universe and to commemorate back to bed 100 years later

30:53

mass are organized as simple as iam online so that we're obeying social distancing rules between all of these

30:59

experts in the field and ask them to contribute some kind of a pair for some kind of discussion as to where we think

31:05

we might find life because we've pretty sure we're gonna find it a lot of

31:12

theories a lot of good money is on finding bio signatures from the interior of icy moons probably around the

31:18

europoor on Jupiter and solidus around Saturn we've already detected some unusual compounds in the interior of

31:26

these icy moons we've done it with space probes we can see these space probes blasting material out into space we

31:33

measured what's there and we figured out that there's something going on within Europa with interns and sella desks that

31:40

makes it all the more intriguing bio signatures on the surface of Mars the

31:45

little Curiosity rover I said little it's about the size of a Range Rover and it's also nuclear-powered as well as discovered

31:53

all of them are many of the basic building blocks for life and we think

31:58

that quite probably lurking below the surface of Mars as yet undisclosed but there is microbial life left over

32:05

from wallet when Mars was a far more habitable planet at the moment Mars is completely uninhabitable for life like

32:12

us but we think just below the surface we might find life we've started digging

32:17

around underneath the surface as yet we found nothing but we found a lot of evidence that suggests there was running

32:23

water on Mars a million years ago or more the geology suggests that Mars was far

32:28

more habitable back then we started to find evidence but of what we call bio of

32:36

forming where biological organisms possibly have started modifying the

32:41

atmospheres of an exoplanet the evidence is rather slim but it is there we've

32:48

started detected gases that might come about from respiration and in some quantity as well so there's a suggestion

32:56

that we may well have life in some of these exoplanets and we're just on a

33:02

point right now of detecting it seth shostack the astronomer who set up the

33:07

search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI claims and this is a rather bald

33:12

clam and I can't find any evidence to substantiate this he records that within the next 20 years we will find large

33:20

scale structures out there in the cosmos that are exactly analogous to the

33:25

pyramids that we see in Egypt these days your records that we'll find them and that will give us clear-cut evidence

33:31

that life is out there we're not alone but the Lord we still have no kind of

33:37

life any evidence of life over the words right now that might change if I come

33:44

back to you and say two years time until about the same lecture it might be entitled how we found life on other

33:49

planets but there's no evidence just yet but we come up with a tantalizing

33:54

possibility that maybe we've already been contacted maybe when we contacted as recently as the summer is 2017

34:01

because in 2017 an unusual object entered our solar system it was unusual

34:07

because if we traced its orbit back we discovered that this object called Oh

34:12

mwah mwah it's the name of a Hawaiian God I think

34:18

definitely didn't come from our solar system it came from another star entirely we've traced it we only saw is

34:25

it and as a long after it entered the our solar system we sort of caught up

34:31

with it as it was leaving the solar system and something strange happened as it left the solar system this long

34:38

cigar-shaped object about four thousand meters long and about three thousand meters of three 300 meters across very

34:45

long cigar-shaped tumbling through space it did something very unusual it started

34:51

to speed up and we have no good explanation why it would do that and a

34:57

number of astronomers notably IRA with very low but very well-known very well-respected astronomer said that there's all the characteristics of an

35:04

alien probe and those are others who are familiar with Star Trek we'll go yes we're familiar with this this looks very

35:11

much like an alien probe possibly maybe we've got evidence for et all along and

35:17

we just didn't know it was there we didn't know what to look for if you go

35:22

into the safe room the Carnegie observatories right under the Observatory South go down into there's a

35:28

door mark this door must be kept kept closed at all times if we go through all

35:33

of their archives if we look in these drawers which contain photographs of spectrograms

35:38

taken over a hundred years ago we look at this spectrogram taken October the

35:44

24th 1917 if we look at the spectrum of

35:49

this star and we look at it very very closely we see a double dip in the

35:55

spectrogram remember the dark lines I was talking about this is a negative we see a double dip where there should be

36:01

not we have no good explanation for this this double dip so-called vampire teeth

36:07

here unless there is a planet around that this is stuff so many all of the

36:12

evidence for exoplanets has been lurking in our drawer in a drawer some use

36:18

that's all for me to say it's been lurking in cupboards for a hundred years and we didn't know it was there and

36:23

maybe we just have to go back through the archives and have another look to see what's going on there are teams of astronomers now going through archives

36:30

look exactly this kind of data so the last question is to sum up before a finish is

36:37

we found distance stars with planets in the right orbit we found planets that

36:42

are capable of hosting life we found the basic building blocks of life on planets like Mars I've every

36:49

reason to expect that we'll find it on moons of set of maybe tighten around Saturn and under the oceans of Enceladus

36:56

and Europa will find building blocks of life to there as well so I think it's a

37:02

case that the evidence free team may have been there all along and maybe

37:07

we've already been contacted but maybe we are alone after all and it's a

37:12

sobering thought to stand out on the stars under the stars late on a cold crisp money too much light last night

37:18

look up and think Hammerman what if we are alone how does that make you feel if

37:24

we are alone it's a bit scary really perhaps we should say look slightly more care of the planet and of ourselves and

37:32

that our own kith and kin I'll leave you with that thought because that is all I

37:37

have to say 45 minutes not bad going right questions get a drink of water and

37:48

answer the questions rights to those that have questions on so I will put

37:54

them to david on your behalf so patricia Powell had the first question are all the exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone or

38:01

are they further out we have a fair number of planets in the Goldilocks zone

38:06

there seems to be a good solid distribution more of the hot Jupiters we're finding more hot Jupiters because

38:11

they are easy to find because they all been closed in because they disturb the planet the Sun the star quite a lot more

38:20

they are easier to spot not all of the planets are in the Goldilocks zone some

38:26

are a long way out so a very long way out some are very close in is comparatively few though we have found

38:33

that are in the Goldilocks zone but it is still a significant number in that particular zone so there are all the

38:38

Goldilocks zone they're spread out over some considerable distance there Thank You Sula harpies asked formal

38:45

hooked dust drink center not at the star because of the planet or because of a

38:50

near object it's just the way we photographed it the dust ring it's

38:56

possibly or it's just the way it's it's slightly angled to us if you it's the

39:02

effect of perspective in that particular image yes so it it looks slightly offset you're not looking at it straight on you

39:09

were looking at it from an angle because the just the dust lanes all bit in one

39:14

particular plane around the solar system if you look at all of the planets in our solar system all but in something we

39:21

call the ecliptic that's the path of the zodiac where your astrological constellations come from all of the

39:26

planets move in that particular pattern it's exactly analogous on formal horse where the planets and the dust ring all

39:33

sort of sitting in one particular plane called the plan of the plan of that particular solar system so what's

39:39

happening is that we're looking from a slightly oblique angle so that's why it looks slightly off to one side okay

39:46

thank you Richard Bayly Gibson's asking Brian Cooke seem to suggest that the chances

39:51

of the right conditions for life when a planet was extraordinary as so many things had to be right what do you think

39:57

he's exactly right he's very right but I

40:02

would go so far as to say that Earth evolved life on Earth evolved so it is

40:08

very likely you can't just turn around and say if there is one planet out there in the universe because statistics

40:14

doesn't work like that it is a very unlikely I would say but we have the statistics of numbers on our

40:20

side because bear in mind that we found 40 billion stars in the solar system and the Milky Way are capable of hosting

40:27

rocky planets so we are one in 40 billion one in 40 billion seems a very

40:34

very small number you better remember that Milky Way is a big place so there

40:40

may be life on us distant solar system that's on the other side of the Milky Way maybe some considerable distance off

40:48

we may well take a million years billion years to even know that each other is there

40:53

so I am more optimistic than mr. Cox professor Cox I am much more optimistic

41:00

but he's got better haircut than me so Paul Bowles is asking how can we detect

41:06

which exoplanets are most likely to support life their orbit the so-called

41:12

Goldilocks zone every star has its own particular Goldilocks zone we are

41:18

sitting exactly in the Goldilocks zone for our Sun it is exactly the right

41:23

balance based on the temperature the amount of energy that that star gives off the other conditions whether the

41:32

star is old enough whether the star is giving it a stable our Sun is

41:38

particularly stable and has been for a number of million years billion years so all of these conditions combine to

41:44

create what we call the Goldilocks or around each particular star it's different for other safe Prince's

41:51

Proxima Centauri has it's already gone Goldilocks zone but it's a it's a very

41:57

different system to our own that's nothing like we think there might be a planet but we know there's a planet

42:02

around Proxima Centauri but whether or not that star is capable of providing the right kind of conditions for life to

42:09

evolve at the moment we don't think it is so each Goldilocks zone varies according

42:15

to the stars temperature and its age under the prevailing conditions like how much junk there is left flying around in

42:22

the solar system after it formed because we're in a very stable safe period in our solar system most of the biggest of

42:29

the nasty stuff is being swept up by Jupiter right duncan McNeil's asking are

42:38

we assuming that life on exoplanets will have to be identical to us all the old Star Trek the idea that everybody is

42:46

very much the same you only have to look at the diversity of life on earth to

42:53

figure out that if we find exoplanets we life on an exoplanet we're gonna have to adjust our we are looking at what we

43:01

call life for instance look at the top the black sea Angela should look it's as simple as as simple as a cuttlefish I was studying

43:08

a cuttlefish at our local aquarium about four or five months ago now strange how

43:14

the time moves on but it demonstrated all of the signs of being intelligent certainly signalling communication

43:20

passing messages looking after it's you all that sort of things so maybe life on another planet could look like a

43:26

cuttlefish RS Darcy angel or remote possibility that it might look a lot

43:33

like us but we have so many different forms of life on the planet the birds for instance reptiles left

43:39

over from the dinosaur era we've still got fish a lot of the flea aquatic mammals for instance live in the

43:46

sea and are very intelligent we've got insects insect-like may one

43:51

day take over if we become extinct and stop killing the bees you know there might they might take over

43:58

final question there's a quick one from Linda's all killed actually it's an or is M do you know I'm just saying to find

44:06

it and they've got a branch astronomer in the Grimsby branch called Paul money she's just asking if you know him I

44:12

don't know him but I've seen his work all over the place we have a weather

44:17

forecaster called Paul money Paul Mooney boulogne he works for BBC local Tim Reid

44:23

he's the weather guy and I met him a few times and we got of two muddled up frequently very familiar with all right

44:37

final question why have we not found cities on other planets because we have

44:43

found life probably we've not found any

44:49

artifacts now remember szostak you try saying that with it Seth Shostak he thinks I'm not sure he

44:58

gets this information from that we will find something like say the remains of the pyramids on another planet we might

45:05

find some artifact left over from a previous civilization great that's marvelous that means the acquired intelligence

45:11

they maybe didn't acquire the ability to send radio communications or voyage into space but a

45:18

that they were able to build structures and have some kind of civilization that's very very promising that would be

45:24

absolutely brilliant there's such a bald thing for mr. shutter stack to actually say that it makes me wonder has he got

45:31

something under his belt that he's not telling us have they actually found something are some sign that they're

45:37

keeping quiet you know sometimes take a long time to if I

45:43

scientist find something and then they need to find a lot of evidence to corroborate those findings and then

45:48

those findings have to be peer-reviewed so you might get a discovery that's announced but then it's it appears on

45:55

archived org or something like that but it then disappears for a long time before it's discounted maybe we don't

46:02

know but at the moment we have not found anything hard physical that would show

46:09

that there is some kind of intelligence civilization had existed on a distant planet there is some technology being

46:15

developed now called the hyper telescope is a fantastically powerful tool the

46:22

telescopes on the ground are limited by the atmosphere so we send space telescopes into space they are limited

46:28

by the size of their mirrors and the idea with the hyper telescope is proposed by a French inventor is that

46:35

you make two telescope mirrors and you put them a hundred miles apart that will

46:40

give you the resolving power of a telescope that is 100 miles across but it would have the light gathering

46:47

capabilities it'll just have the resolving power and this French astronomer whose name escapes me at the

46:52

moment wish I'd written it down claims that if we use this technology if we developed the hyper telescope to its

46:58

logical extreme we might be able to see structures on distant exoplanets we

47:05

might be able to see cities that is a fantastic possibility that's where this

47:10

technology is going us where our own technologies like the ability to see that far away as tantalizing and it's

47:17

real technologies it's going to happen within 10 or 20 years so long live the

47:22

Hubble telescope David thank you again that they've comments that we're coming through as brilliant I'm just going to

47:29

launch the pool well I thank you saw if those are still on the coke and and how you can give us some feedback we can

47:36

obviously feed that back to David but thank you again David for coming on disability I know you're coming back

47:42

again aren't years a couple of weeks time I think so yes I hope so yes for

47:48

myself but yes so David will be coming

47:55

back and as usual just a plug this is part of your member benefits we're really delighted that we've got people

48:02

the caliber of David that are coming on to give us a range of different talks on different subjects so please em you guys

48:10

that are on are using the benefit please talk about it till friends relatives colleagues about the membership benefit

48:16

and we will continue to get people late David on to talk to you about a variety of different topics a quick reminder for

48:23

those that are on that we've got a couple of sessions next Wednesday on the 13th and 1:00 in the morning with team

48:30

Carol black in conversation with Simon Parkinson and then in the afternoon we've got a session with council trustee

48:38

and representatives and the leadership team and you can ask them whatever you want so please feel free to register for

48:45

both of them sign up I am signed up to register it's exactly as you've done for

48:50

today and we look forward to seeing you on Wednesday David thanks so much again and I will see you in a couple of weeks

48:57

okay a couple of weeks thank you very much thank you

49:12

ng yeah I'm here I can't I can't take

49:20

part in the poll for some reason is that cuz you're the coolest is that can I

49:27

only take Oh cuz I am but I just it's the first time normally I do it I can't let mute I can't I can't get my

49:37

mouse back well I'll stop your sheet and screen there D bet oh okay right that's

49:45

fine thank you thanks again that was great it's a pleasure right I'm gonna write

49:51

that's me done what do we got here what we got oh poor and then registered right that's the lecture start time that's not

49:57

my fault yeah we've-- goodness it's not your your stuffs great is the lecture start saying much I think we're gonna we're going to

50:03

have a review of okay all right take care then T but I'll just end the

50:09

meeting

0:00

we'll just start with a little look at it I'm not going to launch in too quick

0:05

so gentle easy introduction but the reason I wanted to do this lecture is

0:12

because for me the periodic table is such an iconic graphic image and there's

0:18

a lot of emphasis today on using infographics to convey information and

0:23

really the periodic table can phase so much information about everything that

0:31

happens in the world around us in terms of sort of natural processes and you can

0:37

tell so much from it if you start to unpick it and mostly you see it as a

0:42

block of colored squares without really thinking about what it's telling you so this kind of tour around it is going to

0:50

be a little introduction to what you can tell just from that single image but I'm

0:59

going to start really about why I think

1:05

it's such an amazing image and why it tells us so much and this here for

1:12

people who probably unfamiliar with it but Primo levy was an industrial chemist

1:18

in Italy and he wrote this book back in the 70s it was published in the in the

1:25

80s in English and you can see that's when I bought my dog-eared copy when I was still working as as an industrial

1:32

chemist and is the sort of book that if you go into somebody else's living room

1:37

and you see this on the bookshelf you know you're going to get on with them really well he writes very poetically

1:45

and beautifully about his life really so this is his autobiography but he writes

1:51

it in 20 chapters with each chapter the title of one of the elements that has

1:58

some kind of connection to that particular period in his life I say he was raised in Italy and trained as a

2:05

chemist but he was sent to Auschwitz during the war and he survived and

2:12

returned to Italy and took up his career again but sadly committed suicide later in

2:20

toward towards what would have been his natural life I guess so he had quite a

2:25

long life but you know a difficult life but he writes so beautifully about stuff

2:31

and this quote here just really conveys for me everything that I see in

2:36

chemistry and in the periodic table it happens in chemistry as in

2:41

architecture that beautiful edifice is that is symmetrical and simple are also

2:46

the most sturdy ensure the same thing happens with molecules as with the couplers of cathedrals all the arches of

2:53

bridges and that's what I'm hoping to kind of convey to you today that people

2:59

can think that it's it's very complicated we will have to look at a little bit of more technical information

3:05

but actually it is the beauty and the simplicity that is in the natural world that is so amazing and something that

3:13

it's really a joy to share so you may have heard of Dmitri Mendeleev and he's

3:21

the person who gave us the periodic table pretty much in the layout that we

3:28

have it now although back in the 1860s and 1870s when he was working on it he

3:36

you know they knew very little about the structure of elements atoms they kind of

3:44

knew that there were atoms and that they combined in in certain proportions with each other but there's a proper full

3:53

story that you know had this dream and he woke up and he had to write it all

4:00

down as quick as he possibly could to get it all down on the table and a

4:06

number of people had been working on things like this in this or late 1860's

4:12

but I think about Mendeleev was he saw those patterns and he he wouldn't force

4:19

things into the wrong place he could see that things belonged together and so when he wrote out his structure

4:27

left gaps and that was his great achievement really because leaving those gaps encouraged other scientists to go

4:34

off and look for those elements and when they found them then that validated his

4:40

his work even even further so he became known as the father of the periodic

4:45

table because you know that it wasn't all there when he laid it down but

4:51

gradually it has been filled up over time so he's a very influential figure

4:59

and somebody that is much remembered and it may well have passed you by but last

5:06

year 2019 was declared by the UN as the International Year of the periodic table

5:13

and that's because it was a hundred and fifty years since Mendeleev first laid

5:18

it down and in celebration of that the Royal Society of Chemistry has developed

5:24

this really wonderful interactive periodic table and we'll be looking at that in a in a minute but this is where

5:32

I want to just launch the poll and so I think I've got the questions on my

5:39

screen but I'll stop sharing and hopefully and we'll launch the poll here

5:46

we go so there's just just select one that most describes you so it's just

5:53

helps us find out what kind of level of knowledge is in the room but also what

5:58

your attitudes to science are and also particularly interesting important in

6:05

these days of misinformation where you get your information from because

6:13

actually that sort of the critical thinking around understanding data and

6:20

accuracy with all sorts of topics whether that's coronavirus or climate

6:28

change having that ability to look at scientific data and know what its basis

6:34

in fact is is really important so yeah okay thanks and you want me to

6:52

show you well I can just just see that you know that what's really gratifying

6:59

is the Neary of everybody thinks that it's something we should engage with and

7:05

a bit of a mix on previous knowledge about equal distribution on knowledge so

7:11

that's great so thanks we'll stop that there and I'll go back to sharing my

7:19

screen I've lost my share button

7:32

there is and we were here probably's all

7:39

these toolbars get stuck in front of what you're trying to show

7:49

right so we are going to start to think a little bit about some of the

7:55

technicalities if you like so the first thing we need to do when we looking at the it is the periodic table of the

8:01

elements so we need to think about what exactly is an element how do we define an element and for that we need to think

8:08

about atoms so in Mendeley erste as i say he knew nothing about subatomic

8:14

particles so this would have all been completely foreign to him but the turn

8:23

of the 20th century so I don't know about 1912 1913 Rutherford did his

8:30

famous experiments passing radiation three through a gold leaf and he

8:37

discovered some interesting things either it was mostly space and B that it

8:43

obviously had some big lumps of something in it because his radiation bounced back due to collision and that

8:52

really sort of developed this very basic simple model of the atom which is that of a heavy nucleus in the center which

9:00

consists of protons and neutrons and then these electrons that are orbiting a

9:07

bit like you know sort of planets around a star so the protons are positively

9:14

charged particles and they are what define the atomic number of the element

9:22

so an element is something that consists only of atoms with that number of

9:30

protons within its nucleus and those positive charges are balanced by an

9:36

equal number of electrons that are orbiting around the atom in these shells

9:41

and as the atom gets bigger we get more shells and more electrons the nutrient

9:49

the neutron are neutral particles of similar kind of mass to the to the

9:57

protons so that's a sort of basic structure of an atom this is a very simple model

10:03

and those of you who are familiar with with the subject will will know that

10:10

electrons aren't can't really entirely be viewed as single little particles

10:16

flying around like this and there's a lot of quantum mechanics and all sorts

10:21

of stuff there as well but the good news is that for chemistry we're just interested in the electrons in this

10:28

outer shell so this is a carbon atom it's got four electrons in its outer shell and that kind of determines most

10:36

of the chemistry that we're going to be interested in today so just coming back

10:43

to the periodic table for a minute as a sort of bit of an overview this line here separates the metals from the

10:50

nonmetals so you see that nearly all of the elements are metals apart from

10:55

hydrogen sitting up here with with this group one sometimes they get different

11:02

layouts so sometimes hydrogen might just be sort of sat in the middle because it's not really a metal but the vast

11:12

majority of the elements are metals and then we have a few gases over here these are called the rare gases and fluorine

11:19

and chlorine er a gases and obviously oxygen and nitrogen and then there's a

11:24

few solid nonmetals and there's a standard 20 degrees Celsius there's just

11:32

two liquids bromine and Mercury a liquid but quite interesting to sort of see

11:39

that as as as the layout and of course

11:45

very few elements we find in the natural state as the pure element they're all

11:51

combined with other things and one of the things that we'll be looking at as we go through is why things combine the

11:59

way they do and that is the basis of of all chemistry

12:06

so I'm just going to zoom in on on a little section of it so you can see that

12:14

each element has its own box and when Mendeley first set set out the table the

12:22

only thing they could measure was how heavy the elements were so they were set

12:28

at set out in in atomic mass but now it's set out in atomic number which is

12:35

as I said before the number of protons so this number here at the top is the

12:41

number of protons in that particular element so we can see one in hydrogen three in lithium twelve in magnesium and

12:51

that means that there's the same number of electrons in a neutral atom you can

12:58

always also form ions which are basically that same atom where it's

13:04

gained or lost an electron and they would have a a charge so the atomic mass

13:14

is the hydrogen is the protons and neutrons added together so that's the

13:21

total mass that sitting in the nucleus and for a for a single atom that is the

13:28

the protons plus the neutrons but you'll see that these numbers at the bottom tend not to be whole numbers and that's

13:36

because you can you can get what we call isotopes so hydrogen it's nearly all

13:43

hydrogen with one proton and one electron but you can see that it's it's

13:48

a bit it's mass is a little bit over one and that's because there's a proportion

13:54

of deuterium or heavy hydrogen within within that that sample so deuterium has

14:03

one proton and one Neutron in its nucleus hydrogen is the only one where

14:10

the the isotopes are actually named separately generally speaking you just

14:16

call it - as as the deuterium isotope and then

14:25

hydrogen can also form tritium which is radioactive that has two neutrons in its

14:31

nucleus and is fairly unstable not not

14:36

massively unstable but that's formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays

14:42

interacting with with with the atmosphere so if we just come to the

14:50

other side of the of the period you can see I've titled this one relative atomic

14:56

mass and that's because obviously atoms are very tiny things quite hard to

15:03

actually measure them so they're

15:08

measured at a what we call a mole which

15:14

was is a fixed number of atoms and that set against carbon as the standard so

15:24

all of the other elements are weighed relative to a scale where carbon is

15:31

equal to 12 if you like and that's a sort of indication that that carbon is

15:36

the basis of all life on Earth is it's the most important element and we'll

15:44

come on to see why carbon it's sitting here at the top row but pretty much

15:53

firmly within the periodic table defines why it's so able to combine with lots of

16:01

lots of other elements so I'm just going to stop sharing again sorry

16:14

and

16:23

you if I quit

16:32

you

16:38

help and can you still hear me yeah can still

16:45

you yeah sorry I've lost my I've lost my zoom do you

16:52

want to stop shooting for just now yeah but I can't find my I can't find the I

16:59

can stop the shooting if you want oh if you could ask brilliant thank you

17:05

sorry then what happened I just completely lost my zoom screen and I've

17:11

got no toolbar yeah so what I want to share is this Royal Society of Chemistry

17:24

interactive periodic table which is a fantastic resource

17:38

you so as I said this was this was made last

17:46

year for for the International Year of the periodic table and the first thing

17:53

they did was Commission all these images so a new image to represent each element

17:59

and some of the images are around what the elements used for some of them are

18:05

around why it's named what it is who discovered it what the history behind it

18:12

is and you can just sort of hover your cursor over it and you can see that

18:20

calcium has got a picture of a fossil because it's depicting the importance of

18:26

calcium in all living things in our bones if we try another one here

18:34

titanium it's got a symbol around the Titans because it's that's where it's

18:40

named based on the votive figurines we

18:47

won't go too funny ons let's have a look so potassium that some gives it its

18:54

history in in alchemy really and coming out of potash so a lot of these old

18:59

names that we're still so gardeners will think about using potash so a lot of

19:05

those old names still figure within these these symbols and it just kind of

19:13

gives you a little insight into the history behind them and how we've

19:18

discovered them and how we use them and it's fun to play with but if you click

19:23

back on the visual elements images and I do you know do get you if you just

19:29

search Royal Society interactive periodic table you'll get up you can have ages of fun with it but so where as

19:39

I said on our normal periodic table the paper-based version we've got the atomic

19:45

number and the atomic mass on here you get quite a lot more information so again if we look at calcium it tells us

19:52

that we've actually only got one isotope of calcium and that's calcium 40 so it's atomic masses is 40 but it tells

20:00

us what the electron configuration is the density and the ionization energy

20:06

which we don't need to worry about here but it is really important for for chemists so it gives you a little bit

20:11

extra sort of information if we come say to chlorine and we'll see there that

20:18

chlorines got two isotopes of 35 and 37 and chlorines quite unusual in that

20:25

there there's quite a lot of chlorine 37 mostly there's four most elements

20:32

there's very little of the least stable isotope but actually chlorine winds up

20:38

with a relative atomic mass of 35 and a half because there is a significant amount of chlorine 37 in there you can

20:48

also do quite fun things so if we come up here it's got this temperature scale

20:54

so I said that at 20 Celsius you've got mercury and bromine and liquids these

21:01

these are our gases that we looked at before everything else is is a solid but

21:06

you can heat the temperature up you can wind it up as hot as you like and you

21:12

can see where things melt where they vaporize all sorts of interesting things

21:19

you can highlight particular periods and just look at those you can look at the

21:27

nonmetals so it just generally particularly for people who were new to

21:32

the periodic table it's a nice way of getting to know it I'm sure the you know young people at

21:39

school find it you know would have been amazing to have had something like this when when I was first learning chemistry

21:46

so I'm going to stop stop that there and

21:52

we're going to go to the the questions I think right thanks peril no I haven't

22:00

got anybody got a question so far for a parent about what we've seen that in

22:06

tonight's and table looks amazing peril yes brilliant isn't it yeah for something like me to spend the best time

22:12

doing it would be great now Roger price has got unquestioned no for you presumably the Rs temperature

22:18

table as a normal pressure yeah so that's standard atmospheric pressure

22:24

yeah okay and funeral Ethan's asking a question to you what branch of chemistry

22:31

did you work in mainly polymer chemistry and plastics but I say so in my working

22:42

life I was working in in packaging so looking at you know sort of novel

22:51

packaging materials based on plastics not a very PC thing to have been doing now but twenty years ago it was well

22:57

more than 20 years ago 40 years ago it's very exciting thing to be doing another

23:04

one for you pale white Ian Morgan's asking why is mercury an outlier in being a liquid yeah that's really

23:10

interesting isn't it it's I mean it's back down to those electron shells sorry

23:19

and could you just stop the share again because I'm having a real trouble here

23:25

thanks as we we're going to look at transition

23:30

metals in a minute and it's to do with how the the electrons fill the electron

23:37

levels as you you go across those transition metals and you get you get to

23:45

mercury and it really not that keen on

23:50

reacting with other things and giving its electrons away and getting close to

23:56

other mercury atoms and so it winds up sort of staying as a liquid so it's very

24:04

interesting and it kind of it fits alongside Saul things like you know gold

24:09

and silver and why they're relatively interact they're all in the same little area of the periodic table so it's um

24:16

yeah all down to the electrons and from Inspira what the definition of a metal that's a good

24:26

good question I mean generally speaking things that they conduct electricity is probably the the key ones that they're

24:33

mostly sort of pard but obviously not August things like sodium are relatively

24:38

soft and obviously mercury is is a liquid but but mostly they they're hard

24:46

shiny conduct electricity good conductors of heat and ductile you know

24:56

they slide over again this is about having those electrons that are free moving and you know they the atoms can

25:04

slide over one another in in the lattice and what Halon Sinkler what is an

25:11

isotope okay yes or maybe didn't quite explain that enough so so an isotope is

25:18

a different kind of atom of the same element so if you think about carbon people have

25:27

probably heard of carbon-14 dating so carbon-14 is an isotope of carbon the

25:34

the most common form of carbon is carbon-12 which has got six protons and

25:40

six neutrons in it so all carbon atoms have six protons in them but you can

25:48

also get carbon-13 and carbon-14 so carbon-14 is again formed in the

25:55

atmosphere by the action of cosmic rays it's radioactive with a very long

26:02

half-life so about so it takes about five thousand years for half of it to decay down but when something because

26:10

carbon is always being transferred around the environment when it when the

26:15

living thing dies it stops exchanging

26:20

carbon-14 so gradually from the point of death the carbon-14 decays so you can

26:26

look at sort of very old samples of material and work out how long ago they

26:33

were made of of living material and work that out on the basis of the carbon-14 so so it's

26:40

the same element but just with different number of neutrons in its nucleus now

26:46

we've got quite a number of questions peril I don't know what you want to do another couple or do you wanna do them

26:51

at the light yeah sure which because it's it's half-past minutes should we move on and then try and do the to get as many as we

26:57

can group together at the end yeah well see it's everybody as if your question doesn't get answered what I'll do is

27:04

we'll send them all to peer I'll get the answers and we'll put them up on the members website so you'll be able to go

27:09

and have a look at the answers and you'll also be able to obviously hear this again so don't worry if we don't

27:16

get before seven o'clock we will get you the answers from here oh here I'll pass back to you okay right so I've started

27:23

show so I've come back to just my basic picture of the periodic table before we

27:29

go any further I just sort of look it's called periodic and that suggests a sort

27:36

of element of repetition doesn't it and I think it's important that we have a little think about how its arranged and

27:43

why it's arranged like it is so these columns are what we chemists call groups

27:50

so all of the elements in a group tend to have very similar properties so if we

27:58

look at this group here Group one which are the alkali metals these are very

28:04

reactive so you don't find this lying around and that's because it's got one

28:13

electron if you remember back to that that atom at the beginning and the outer shell this has one electron in it and

28:21

it's very keen to get rid of that because it's not very stable just having one electron on its own and then as we

28:29

go across these are called the periods so as we go across we're adding one

28:35

proton into the the nucleus and another electron into that outer shell so we've

28:40

got two and then three and then four as we saw with carbon five six seven eight

28:48

and then we kind of come back to the beginning and we go across and we've got eight so this group down here these are

28:56

the the rare gases and these are really unreactive is really hard to get them to

29:02

do anything you know massive temperature and pressure to get them to do anything they're very very happy just sitting

29:10

around as individual atoms nothing else really exists as individual atoms apart

29:17

from the from the rare gases and they're not interested in doing anything else and that reason is because they've got

29:23

this eight electrons in its outer shell and that's this really stable

29:29

configuration that everything else is trying to to get to so if we think about

29:35

chlorine here with its with this with its seven the reason we have table salt

29:43

that exists so prolifically you know in

29:48

in the ground and we can dig it up is because sodium very happily gives it one

29:55

free electron to a chlorine atom to form a chloride ion which is negatively

30:01

charged and a sodium ion which is positively charged and then they join together and they make this very stable

30:08

sub substance called sodium chloride which is salt and and that's kind of

30:14

quite easy to to think about but in this sort of middle section there's less of

30:21

that sort of swapping of electrons but everything still wants to get it get to

30:26

its eight so these are quite happy to share electron so carbon for instance

30:31

it's got four electrons it's really happy to kind of share those four with

30:38

other ways of of doubling that up to

30:43

eight so it might react with say four hydrogen atoms and it would share one of

30:50

its electrons with each of a hydrogen's electron and that would be methane and

30:58

is this the fact that it's it's quite small and the fact that it's got these four

31:04

electrons that it really wants to make up to eight that makes it the most prolific bonding element so it can bond

31:14

with itself so if you think about diamonds and graphite which different

31:21

forms of pure carbon that bond together in slightly different ways and therefore

31:28

have very different properties but it can also bond with oxygen hydrogen

31:34

nitrogen phosphorus these are all the things that make up life so you know

31:40

carbohydrates that we eat are just carbon hydrogen and oxygen in big molecules and I've said that as we go

31:49

down the groups things have very similar properties because they've got the same number of electrons in the outer shell

31:55

so we come to silicon and silicon can also make polymers but it's too big to

32:01

make polymers with itself so it tends to it can make polymers with with oxygen so

32:07

is the silicones for instance they're still long molecules but they just that

32:14

doesn't have the flexibility of of carbon to be able to bond in in the same

32:20

way so that's why carbon is so so special but everything will sort of join

32:28

on the the same sort of basis so you know aluminium has got five so it wants

32:37

three so it will join with three hydrogen atoms to get a share of those

32:43

eight so getting up to this eight is really the sort of the first step in in

32:49

our basic chemistry so if you'll bear with me this is where I'm just going to do a

32:56

little bit of technical stuff but I have put a picture of fireworks because

33:01

fireworks is the most practical visual expression of explaining that electron

33:10

levels are a real thing so this a slight sophistication of that basic

33:19

Rutherford model that we had right at the beginning which we still got our atom here with our nucleus and then the

33:26

electrons ELLs going out as we go away from from thee from the nucleus and and

33:35

here's like a sort of a 3d so I just put that there to kind of remind you that this is all

33:41

happening in three dimensions it's not really flat like this but as well as we

33:47

go through these levels the each level is split into what we call orbitals and

33:55

each orbital can hold two electrons so in this first period we've just got

34:00

hydrogen and helium so the atoms are small there's only two electrons they're just in that first orbital and then when

34:08

we go into the second period we still got electrons in the 1s but

34:13

then we're filling up the second shell and we still have the s orbitals and then at this level we have I mean you

34:22

don't need to worry about the names that why they're called P orbitals is just a sort of a kind of a historical thing lost in the depths of time but we still

34:30

call them P orbitals and these can hold the three of them and they can hold two

34:38

electrons each so if you've got a full set of s and P orbitals then you've got

34:43

your eight electrons and that's what atoms are striving for when they're when they're reacting when we as we go

34:52

further away from the nucleus we've got more space the atoms getting bigger we

34:57

have these D orbitals and there's five of those and you can get ten electrons

35:02

in and this is where the transition metals sit and then gradually go down

35:08

and we're getting bigger and bigger atoms we need some more orbitals and we've got the F orbitals and the seven

35:17

of those and we can get 14 electrons in so this is this is just saying that each

35:24

shell is divided up into different orbitals which are slightly different

35:30

energy so it's a little bit more complicated than just one level but the

35:36

reason we've got the fireworks is that and really the thing that that helped

35:44

people understand that that the electron levels must be in these very discrete

35:51

levels is if you excite an electron from say the 3s up to the 3p and then it

36:02

drops back down again it gives a very specific frequency of light and the

36:10

metal atoms when you excite them they give out that frequency of light within

36:15

the visible spectrum so that the sodium 3 Peter 3s transition is that lovely

36:23

yellow light that you know you're familiar with in sodium vapour lamps and

36:29

that's what manufacturers of fireworks

36:34

use to make all those colors so if you're looking at the Reds then you're probably looking at strontium salts the

36:43

Greens you're probably looking at barium salts the yellows sodium salts the Blues

36:48

copper salts so you know a kind of test from for metals is a flame test so you

36:54

can see very specifically what metal you've got by that that transition and

37:00

the the energy that is given out when an electron drops from one level to another

37:06

in this very discrete amount of a sort

37:11

of almost pure single wavelength that gives us that color so hopefully I mean

37:18

that's the kind of the most technical thing that I'm going to say but hopefully the fact that you can see that

37:24

so brilliantly within a firework it kind

37:30

of makes it a practical thing you know it's a real thing it's not a theoretical thing the electrons really do transition

37:38

like that and they do give out light so here we are at the transition metals

37:45

so this is like just zoomed into that section of the periodic table the only

37:52

slight complication is that the 3d levels are actually lower energy than

37:58

the 4s so we've come along the periodic table we've got two argon with our three

38:05

P orbitals all full we don't then fill the 3d once we fill the four s orbitals

38:12

first with potassium and calcium and then we start filling the 3d orbitals so

38:18

as we go along with putting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 into those D orbitals as we get over

38:27

to this far side and we're almost filling those D orbitals we're starting to get very stable atoms again because

38:35

it's a kind of a full shell and they're they're less reactive than the some of

38:43

the the atoms that are more in the middle these ones in the middle particularly are really important in so

38:52

many mais they're what we think of as metals aren't they but they can form a

38:59

big array of compounds so because they've got all these vacant orbitals

39:05

that they would like to get electrons in they can do the same kind of reactions

39:10

as sodium and potassium and lose some

39:15

electrons to create an ionic compound but they can also absorb molecules as as

39:23

ligands into that those orbitals as well so if you think about copper salts

39:30

they're they're very beautiful blue colors aren't they and that when they're hydrated the the water sort of is

39:39

bonding into that that compound and

39:45

similarly iron you think about iron in the blood that's because it can accept

39:53

[Music] section you know sort of an atom from quite a complicated organic molecule

39:58

into it as a sort of donor of electrons to fill some of its orbitals and they

40:06

behave very good you know think about catalysts in your car catalytic and

40:14

converters have nickel palladium catalysts don't they rhodium as you know

40:21

another very sort of common catalysts but also that you can mix these these

40:26

metals together and make it a noise so steel is basically iron but you add

40:32

things like cobalt and nickel into it to make steel and you know different

40:37

combinations will give you stainless steel so it's all about how those atoms

40:44

interact and where they've got space in their electron shells that they're

40:49

trying to fill and those are the sort of the energy drivers to to to make

40:57

reactions happen and explains why we don't find them lying around on their

41:02

own because they're much happier in combination with other elements and then the only sort of slightly other thing

41:08

here is that we talked about those F orbitals that the we get to the what's

41:15

called the lanthanides here you can see that these the atomic number here goes from 57 to 71 and that's this what we

41:24

call the f-block elements and we sit those down below the periodic table

41:30

because if it was if we if we just tried to put those into the into the picture

41:37

you would have a very long thin chart so I always think this is a bit like

41:42

Shetland on a map you know it's a long way away and you'd have a lot of of

41:48

water on your map so what you tend to do is put it in a box and bring it closer

41:53

so that it can be on the same scale so these lanthanides are very similar to the transition metals they but they're

42:01

just filling the the F orbitals and again they're they're mostly there is catalyst

42:06

and finally close to the end now a bit of physics you'll see that some of these

42:14

atomic masses are all in brackets that's because they can't actually measure them because they're to radioactive not

42:21

stable enough to actually work out what the number is so it's a sort of average anything really over about 95 is is his

42:32

man-made so when Mendeleev made is his first layout you know he couldn't have

42:37

imagined that these things could be made or existed mostly they don't exist for

42:42

for very long and some of them it you know it says unknown so they kind of

42:47

made them but they don't really know so all of these actinides a man-made sort

42:55

of unstable reaction so some you do find

43:01

trace elements of them so something like

43:07

plutonium it does exist in very trace quantities but it's um it's mostly

43:14

easier to make it if you if you want some so there we go that surf back to

43:21

the final picture so it was a bit of a whistle-stop tour I hope that you feel a

43:30

bit more friendly towards it and that you can see just how much information

43:35

just by knowing and understanding a little bit about it you can work out

43:41

what its properties are how that element might react and how that might interact

43:47

with other things okay so I'm going to stop that thanks pal

43:54

that was very really understand and thanks for taking us round that there are a load of questions we are never

44:00

going to get through them all I don't think can you stop my share again I don't want to either just find my

44:07

toolbar yeah don't worry that's it done thank him okay so I'll just as I said to

44:14

everybody I will pick some oh and ask them if you don't get them answered just now you will get the manse

44:20

so um I've got Andrew Stewart has anyone ever seriously challenged the table and

44:25

suggested an alternative I don't think so because it just answers so many it

44:33

explains so much and and as I said all of these things are a model so the model

44:39

of the atom that you use and the electrons we know that's not the the

44:44

full picture but it's a bit like you know electrons are a bit like light they can be thought of as particles or waves

44:52

they're subject to all the theories of quantum mechanics but when it comes down

44:59

to it you can look at the energy output

45:07

of doing a reaction and you know if if

45:12

the electron structure suggests that that reaction will happen then if you measure the energy change in producing

45:20

it you you know you will see that it will happen so it's just a really good model that that has stood the test of

45:28

time you know 150 years and from Margaret Woodward is the periodic table

45:33

believed to be complete all of the elements still to be calculated or identified well I think we've only gone

45:40

up to the F orbitals and on the periodic table now all of the F orbitals are

45:47

filled and all of those elements have been made but some of them literally

45:52

have a half-life of the less than a second so they don't really exist so

45:58

they they can be identified with a spectrometer and you can say oh yes that was there but it's gone before you know

46:03

it so in terms of the sort of the the stable at elements that Mendeleev was

46:12

was looking for you're really up into the into the low 90s and they were all

46:18

kind of searched out by my reaction and the rest is physics rather than the the

46:27

chemistry okay and would make a nice personal one for you from Andrew Martin

46:32

what event person first inspired your interest in chemistry and how old were you

46:38

oh well gosh well talking inspiring teachers I suppose it was missing Shelley when I was in the third year at

46:46

school that's when I started started studying chemistry you know the first two years at senior schools or general

46:52

science and biology aren't they and third year we started doing chemistry and I did kind of fall in love with it

47:00

really I think it's this precision I love things like doing titrations and you could just add one drop and the

47:06

thing would change color you know it was so much magic in it really but she was a

47:12

very good teacher and she taught me right through to to my a-levels and but then you know also at University and

47:19

being in a lab and seeing people doing things for the first time you know stuff that had never been seen before that's

47:25

you know it's all exciting stuff isn't it Colin Greatorex

47:31

asking are there any additional elements on other planets that's an interesting

47:37

one I think the answer that is not that we know because if we're looking at that

47:43

structure then as I say we feel the forever the the F orbitals so we've kind

47:48

of think we've got as big as we can get with an atom again coming back to those

47:54

the metal colors the way we identify what elements are in other planets are

48:01

by those spectra though the line spectra is gives it's like a fingerprint of of

48:07

what element is there and certainly you know I think all of the elements like

48:12

well I don't know I won't say that definitely but you know most of the elements are out there because they fundamentally they you know they've all

48:18

sort of been whatever wherever you're coming from with you with your big bang

48:24

you know they're they're thrown out of the Sun and collisions and things like that only so earth is just a sort of a

48:32

bit of rock that's flown off from somewhere else so what we've got most everybody else has got I think and from

48:40

Simon are the man-made elements not created from the natural ones and if so why er include them

48:47

I think you know that's where the sort of the physics takes over from the from the chemistry yet they are created by

48:54

bombarding other elements with radioactive particles or other bits of

48:59

atom you know you don't know with these things do you because you know sort of

49:07

getting on a hundred years ago when they first started talking about quantum mechanics and Schrodinger's cat and who

49:17

thought that there could be any practical application to that but now we have quantum computers being built and

49:25

you know actually using something that people thought was just very theoretical and I suppose so it's a bit the same

49:31

with those elements you don't know what they're useful for but knowing how you can make them and what element you need

49:39

to bombard with what particles to make them is the kind of interesting intellectual pursuit I think

English (auto-generated)

0:00

hello everyone and welcome to today's talk on supporting others to be safe online it was this talk was originally

0:06

given in a much longer format as part of the cyber safe Scotland wake affiliate Scotland and today I'll be covering the

0:13

three most important areas of how you can stay safe online and those are making sure you've got secure passwords

0:20

making sure you can identify fake emails and making sure you can identify fake websites and there's a focus on how we

0:27

can stay secure as well as how we can help our others stay secure because the usual security advice around all of

0:34

these three things can create some barriers for people with low IT skills and people with certain disabilities as

0:41

Fiona mentioned this is particularly relevant at the moment because so many of us are spending so much more time online whilst we're all in lockdown all

0:49

on self isolating so

0:55

passwords are everywhere but I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone water password is but obviously useful

1:01

for accessing your email and King your Amazon social media amongst so many

1:07

other things and they keep potentially sensitive data safe for example I might have sent a copy of my National

1:13

Insurance number via email to an employer passwords are also important because they confirm that you're you

1:19

online if a fraud ster had the password to any of my shopping accounts for example they could then buy things using

1:25

my cards if that access to my email password they could send emails 21 they wanted and if they had the access if

1:31

they had access to my banking password they could drain my funds apply for a loan in my name and drain that too so at

1:37

a basic level passwords are important because they allow you to access services access records of how you've

1:44

interacted with services and verify your identity online how can we use passwords

1:52

to keep ourselves safe online there are two aspects of password security that really work together here and those are

1:58

having strong passwords and unique passwords you know strong passwords to

2:03

passwords that are difficult to guess and that's perhaps slightly misleading

2:08

because it's tempting to think of the hackers are trying to guess your password one attempt after another but

2:14

sadly it's much more advanced than that hackers use software to try passwords to the right which a person just couldn't

2:19

match using a standard desktop so the computer though probably most of you of

2:25

your viewing this lecture on today hacking software can easily surpass 2.8 billion guesses per second so the

2:33

question really is how can we keep ourselves you know at least one step ahead of a practice and there are really

2:39

six things to consider when you make a strong password in the first or they they are use uppercase letters lowercase

2:47

letters numbers special characters make sure your password has

2:53

sufficient length um your password should be at least nine characters long but the longer the safer many passwords

3:00

have a minimum length of eight characters and if a hacker was using a brute-force attack so they were using a

3:06

software just to randomly guess that 2.8 billion guesses per second eight

3:12

characters would take just over nine hours to crack so not very long at all using an extra character to make nine

3:17

characters would take four weeks another character from that ten characters would make it six years so that really shows

3:23

you the importance of having a long password and the final thing to consider

3:28

with a strong password is make sure that it's not an obvious password so don't

3:34

use things that are easily guessed like special dates names or places so for example Michael one exclamation mark

3:41

with capital M is quite a weak password despite the fact that it complies with the rest of the above rules because it

3:47

could really be easily guessed now the

3:55

other part of pass see the other half the battle as it were our unique passwords to keep yourself

4:01

safe you must also use a unique password unique passwords passwords that are used

4:06

only for one account using unique passwords means that if an account is

4:12

compromised hackers can't have to have access to your other accounts the average Internet user has over 200

4:19

online accounts and this shows the importance of having unique passwords if you use the same password for everything

4:25

once that's been guessed the hacker would have you know unfettered access to

4:30

your life however it also illustrates the difficulty with password security

4:35

how do you remember 200 unique passwords

4:41

so probably the best thing that I would recommend doing if you were comfortable enough using

4:48

technology is to use a password generator and there are there's lots of password generating software out there

4:54

the overwhelming majority of its free and you can just you can access it via Google password generators can create

5:01

strong unique passwords instantly so these are just a couple of examples that I whipped up this morning or a password

5:06

generator with a 12 character example which is capital K capital T 8 capital G

5:14

lowercase X capital y lowercase Q lowercase C equals to that and then an

5:22

uppercase F but you can you can set the parameters how you want so there's a 16 character one here I'll spare you the

5:28

agony of me reading that out to you but there is a bit of a problem with

5:35

password with generated passwords and that's that people with low IT skills or

5:40

people with learning impairments dyslexia or just generally low literacy skills might all find a generated

5:46

password quite difficult to read and therefore rewrite so how can we balance

5:52

the need for a strong unique password like any archives are those with the barriers that they can create a secure

5:59

way of keeping password safe is to use a password safe password saves a software that allow you to add account details

6:06

such as usernames and passwords their password protected too so it will keep your password safe in the event of a

6:12

hacker gaining access to your computer

6:17

the way of keeping passwords safe is to write them down on paper and keep this in a safe place obviously it's not ideal

6:23

but it is much better to risk your accounts being compromised in this way than just to create weak non unique

6:29

passwords to begin with if you have something securely kept in a drawer that

6:35

is much safer than using password one for all of your accounts online the

6:41

benefit of password safes is you only need to remember one password to access the database you create this password

6:47

will of course need to be strong and unique and it also means that users can use a password generator to generate a

6:53

password and then simply copy and paste this into the password safe and then you can copy and paste this into wherever

7:00

UNIX need it so if your if you have your Facebook details there you can just copy and paste your password and use the name

7:06

from the password safe into Facebook and if you don't have strong strong literacy

7:12

skills for example then actually you're on you don't need to because you can

7:18

just copy and paste and that's that's a simple you know action either with shortcut keys on your keyboard or just

7:25

using your mouse however there's obviously a need to have a strong unique

7:33

password for your password safe so the question really there is how can we over

7:38

how can we do that and I think the main solution to this is to use something

7:43

like a memorable short phrase or a collection of words as a password so for example you could have Keith Elgin foris

7:51

won five percentage or the Jungle Book 88 and with an Asterix these passwords

7:57

have the benefit of being strong and the format can easily be adapted to make them personally meaningful for example

8:03

the first example there are the first three stations heading north from Huntley if you ever take the train from

8:09

Aberdeen to Inverness you'll know what I mean but you could use any three

8:14

memorable points on a journey personally meaningful and then to ensure that the

8:20

this meets all the requirements of creating a strong password add a number or two and a special character at the

8:26

end that pattern of having three words a couple of numbers in a

8:33

special character might be slightly more easily guessed than just everything at random but it does make it much more

8:39

user friendly and it takes a lot of the cognitive load off having three memorable words one or two

8:45

numbers and then a special character so I think that's sort of striking the balance between security on the one hand

8:51

and ease-of-use and accessibility on the other and there's a lovely-looking

9:01

first first part of it the next parts all about fake emails and there are really two or two-and-a-half types of

9:08

fake email scam that we're going to have a look at here malware scams entice you

9:14

to try and entice you to click a link or download an attachment an attachment and this can then infect your computer with

9:20

malware and that could do anything so some malware's ransomware you open an

9:25

attachment it infects your computer and then you have to pay the scammers for

9:32

access to your things or to stop them deleting things but malware really is

9:37

about as sort of insidious as you can imagine if you can think of something bad which someone could eat to your computer

9:42

there's malware out there to do that so it's really important obviously to avoid that as much as possible and the other

9:48

type of fake email scam that we're going to look at are fishing and four one nine scams now phishing scams involve a

9:55

scammer sending emails to you to cry and we try and trick you into revealing your details and the form online scan which

10:02

is really closely related is where a scammer promises you some sort of substantial return either for absolutely

10:09

no F or for a very small fee of sorts so malware scams as I said it's people

10:16

trying to trick you into opening links or downloading documents accordingly malware emails look innocuous they

10:23

usually claim to come from legitimate companies or organizations such as banks

10:29

local authorities utility providers credit card providers big names like

10:34

Amazon they might also claim to be from a small business and it's just something which you've which looks legitimate

10:41

enough and they can also come from individuals either people you've not met

10:48

before or if someone in your contacts list or if you're in their contacts list

10:54

rather if they've been the victim of malware scam it could come from their email to you so you know your boss a

11:01

friend brother if they've been a victim of a scam

11:07

that scam could then be sent on to you and obviously you wouldn't necessarily have you guard up in the same way as if

11:12

it comes from someone with very dodgy scam in the ER in the email address an

11:20

official emails try and seduce us with an offer that's too good to be true or worried us into giving details or

11:26

making payments phishing emails might claim to be from your bank warning you about a suspected fraud and asking you

11:31

to move money into a suspect into a secure holding account sorry or it might be your energy provider or HMRC

11:37

explaining there's being an error with your bill and you're either do a substantial rebate or else you owe their money and in these circumstances

11:44

pressures often quite applied with time limits so we've been trying to reach you and this money is about to be written

11:49

off all the debts about to be passed on to the court that sort of thing that that sort of pressure with a time frame

11:58

for 1-9 scams as I said they're similar there are type of phishing scam really

12:03

you're contacted by someone who claims to be the agent of someone who's fabulously wealthy with a proposition

12:09

for you I've stashed thirty million pounds in a bank account during recent upheavals they can now no longer access it without

12:16

the UN confiscating it for example however if you provide your bank details they can transfer this into your account

12:23

and they'll let you keep a 10 percent cut to the money for your troubles maybe actually you've been lucky enough to win

12:29

the Irish laboratory and if you just pay them a small atom in a fee you can access your winnings four one nine scams

12:37

us or in popular culture known as the Nigerian prince emails which I'm sure many people have come across in one guys

12:43

or another so it's all very well knowing what types of email scams are there but

12:50

how do you recognize them the first thing is is the sender's address right

12:57

reputable companies usually register a domain and it domains the part of the email address after the app for example

13:04

the domain for my work email is at lead or got you K if something's come from an email which

13:10

ends with lead dog that you K then that's going to come from someone at

13:17

lead because we that domain registered if you've got an email which you're not sure about the

13:22

first thing to do is hover your mouse over the sender's email address and make a note of the sender's domain now search

13:28

for the actual company's email address using Google or other search engine do they match if not the email is very

13:34

likely to be spammable and in the email and the picture sorry on the PowerPoint there's an email which

13:42

claims to be coming from Microsoft Outlook but the URL is service.com

13:47

oh so via domain not URL is app service Outlook calm now that's a spoof of just

13:55

Outlook if you ever get an email from Outlook it will come from at outlook.com

14:00

anything else isn't Outlook so this is this is a scam here the next thing to do

14:10

if you get an email which you're a little bit suspicious off is see who it's addressed to does it have a generic

14:16

eye-opening unlike customer or madam or is it addressed to you specifically James McDonald mrs. Miller or however

14:24

you're normally known or referred to by the organization

14:29

is it what you have previously been called by the organization say you were to get an email from Aberdeen City

14:37

Council I used to work for mr. working council tax people get an email from me

14:42

and it's a dear James Smith it would never say mr. Smith customer valued

14:51

however it would always say James Smith or whatever their name was if anything

14:56

came through to someone addressed to mr. Smith mr. J Smith that would be that

15:02

would be spam something which is important to note any organization or company that Siva Blee take you to court

15:08

for non-payment will have your full name and they will use it so if you're

15:14

getting dear customer really do be on guard about that the example on the

15:20

screen here so it's dear customer we regret to inform you your accounts been restricted to continue using our

15:27

services please download the file etc etc so obviously spam email scam email

15:33

download the file and you'll infect your computer with something the third thing

15:39

to consider is are there lots of spelling mistakes if you received an email which is full of spelling mistakes it's quite likely to be a scam companies

15:46

put a lot of effort into appearing professional so if there's poor English particularly poor grammar really do be

15:54

aware a lot of scams originating countries where British English isn't

15:59

spoken as the first language which is why there can be grammar grammatical errors quite often and also if the

16:07

language just seems a bit off if it's originated in a country where English isn't spoken to the first language it'll

16:13

have been put through translation software like Google Translate for example which is why things which look a

16:20

bit dodgy quite often are in slightly stalled English so if the if the

16:25

spelling or the grammars off again it's something to be looking out for and wary

16:30

of next thing links in the email looks

16:36

strange before you click on any links hover your mouse over them it should bring up the destination URL does this

16:43

look right to you again if this looks strange perhaps it's very long all the domain looks wrong this could well be

16:49

spam now in the example on your screen at the moment there's a pop-up from a

16:54

visa offering it you know as a guaranteed credit card if you were to

17:00

click on apply now it would take you to a website part of the URLs there it doesn't look like anything that visa

17:06

would be using visas URL is visa com so the fact that that's not there and

17:12

there's a very very long URL is something which should again be a big

17:18

red flag and make you suspicious about following through with her another thing

17:26

to consider is the email life changing as the saying goes if it seems too good to be true it probably is

17:32

many phishing emails and for 1-9 scams promise you have vast sum of money for minimal effort so in this one it's the

17:41

United Nations contacting you with four point eight million dollars to put into your bank account which is obviously

17:49

fantastic sadly it doesn't happen in real life there are lots of other

17:54

examples of these and like I said the Irish Lottery you've won the Irish Lottery if you could just pay five hundred pounds for an admin fee then

18:01

you're twenty two million euros are available which was something I had this morning um suddenly these sorts of

18:09

things really don't have them and a final thing to consider is the fact that

18:15

you think the fact you've been contacted at all so some organizations such as HMRC and TV licensing will never contact

18:23

you via email about fines charges bills etc etc um if you'd have a look on the

18:31

HMRC part of the DAF website it says as much there if you look on the TV

18:37

licensing website again it says as much they'll never contact to you like that so if you've got an email which is

18:43

claiming to be from HMRC saying you've got a refund it is going to be a scam and you should just delete it so

18:55

any of those things in and off themselves should make you wary and if there's two or more present I would

19:02

really suggest just delete the email the deleting emails can be difficult if you're not it it can be difficult if

19:10

you're anxious about that sort of thing or if you have a low IT if you have low

19:16

IT skills and finding spelling mistakes up here Lera T's and domains can again be difficult if you have learning

19:22

impairments dyslexia gain more low literacy so how can we make this type of email security a bit more accessible I

19:29

think really the thing to do if you have any mail which looks like it might be a bit suspicious the best thing to do is

19:35

contact the person or organization it claims to be from independently however

19:40

obviously don't use any contact details that are present in the email and search the contact page of an organisation so

19:47

again go back to Aberdeen City Council you get an email from Aberdeen City Council saying there's 400 pounds

19:52

council tax she was a refund to you if you could just provide your bank details then we'll process that certainly if I

20:01

was to receive that I would be wary I would contact Aberdeen City Council

20:07

independently so I would look their phone number up on their website and I would phone them and then I could find

20:13

out whether or not that was real people and organizations want to know if

20:20

they're legitimate correspondence is being misinterpreted as spam when I was working there that was initially how we

20:26

were doing that's when that's how we were doing refunds it would send out an email with all the account details on it

20:33

there's 400 pounds or so wanting to be refunded provide your bank details and

20:38

very few people ever responded to that but what they did do is they'd phone up and say this doesn't look right so I'm

20:45

not going to do that we'd verify everything over the phone and then though then they were happy to do that because they knew that they were already

20:51

speaking to Aberdeen City Council at that point so

21:00

yes if you were just to use contact

21:07

details included in an email then you quite likely just be contacting your ass camel

21:14

which is obviously not a lot of use if you're trying to work out whether it is a scam or not and if you're not sure

21:21

about an email never open links or download attachments until you've done what you can to verify it how can we

21:29

avoid scam emails certainly there's no there's no real way that we can just

21:35

avoid scanning emails but what we can do there are a couple of things to make sure that we minimize our exposure to

21:42

them the first thing to do is make sure spam filters are turned on it's not perfect but it can help catch fake

21:47

emails before we have to worry about them and the second thing is to keep our email addresses safe and this means not

21:53

putting them online for example on social media and making sure we tick don't share my deed don't share my data

21:59

boxes when we're filling in forms online and that will just help prevent spam

22:04

emails actually coming to you in the first place faking fraudulent websites this is the

22:12

final part of the talk so fraudulent websites are the website equivalent of phishing emails the fraudulent websites

22:17

try and trick you into entering sensitive information especially card details and fake websites or the website

22:22

equivalent of Malory announced they might try and trick you into installing software that seems legitimate but is in

22:27

fact malware one of the most common and convincing fake website scams are based on pop-ups

22:34

which kranj trick you into installing malware for making payments a particular

22:39

a particularly common example of this is the int supporter scam which starts with

22:46

a pop-up saying there's been suspicious activity on your computer and you need

22:52

to call an IT technician on the phone they provide a number when you find the

22:58

person on the other end tricks you into giving the remote access and in the very best scenario they

23:04

resolve an issue which they found for a big fee and they they don't do anything

23:10

realistically though they'll be installing malware stealing other

23:16

details and stuff like that on your screen you've got a little example of

23:21

what that might look like and again there's a phone number the pressures ramped up do not try to

23:27

manually remove the virus hard disk cafe you may occur certainly if you're not particularly IT competent or you don't

23:34

feel very confident with it that could be something which is really easy to default for how can we identify fake

23:43

unfortunate websites some of this overlaps a little bit with the email stuff but it's it's good to go over

23:49

again anyway so the first thing is is it secure when you load a website look in the URL bar and see if the address

23:55

starts with HTTPS or HTTP the S stands for secure and this indicates that the

24:01

website uses encryption when transferring data encryption protects your data from hackers or anyone who

24:06

might try and intercept it and although HTTPS doesn't guarantee security it's a good start some browsers like Chrome

24:13

don't display the HTTPS just a standard

24:19

that they will display either a little black padlock or if it's secure or an

24:25

error or a warning if it's not secure so I'm keep an eye out for those as well

24:32

the next thing to consider does the domain look right this is a bit like this is a bit like the email on the side

24:39

of it but many fraudulent websites try and mimic the domain of legitimate companies so for example Tesco with a

24:45

zero code at UK and although that could be really easy to see if you're lurking

24:51

if you're not paying attention it's also very easy to miss and they might reference brands like Nike which another

24:59

word in there which one between tights you so Nike discount don't click on links without first making sure the

25:05

domain looks correct and you can do this by hovering your mouse over the link if you're using Chrome the URL will appear

25:11

in the bottom left hand corner and you can just make sure that that is where you want to be going the next thing to

25:17

consider how completes the website legitimate websites usually have extra features on their site like an about Us

25:23

section privacy policies shipping returns information if it's a shopping site and so on make sure these pages are

25:30

fully populated so this is from the online clothes shop free

25:36

people they've got a big long sectional returns and exchanges fact that's there

25:42

you can interact with all those things gives you confidence as a proper sign if however there wasn't anything on the

25:48

returns and exchanges beside that should be something which worries you I wouldn't be buying anything if I didn't

25:56

know how I could go about returning it next thing to consider how secure are

26:01

the payments never buy anything online using non-refundable payment method slot backs

26:07

make sure you use payment systems like card payments or PayPal as these both allow chargebacks

26:13

however charge banks aren't legally required they're part of a voluntary set of rules that banks sign up to and if

26:19

scammers have withdrawn money and closed their account a chargeback won't be successful so you're better off just

26:25

leaving a suspicious website rather than risking your money in the first place

26:30

yes and finally is it too good to be true again this is a big thing to think

26:37

about are you being offered a new iPhone four hundred pounds you can get deals online which farrukh see what you can

26:43

get on the high street especially at the moment but if it seems too good to be true it almost certainly is accessible

26:55

website security again it's similar to fake email security check the domain

27:00

checking domain can be difficult for people with learning impairments poor eyesight who were just on IT competent

27:07

confident sorry a malicious pop-up scams can again cause significant anxiety the

27:14

best advice is to talk to someone you trust about any concerns and if there's still a doubt just don't proceed fools

27:20

just can cause irreparable damage and it's never going to be worth the chance of getting an iPhone four hundred pounds

27:26

for argument's sake fake websites and pop-up scams anything malicious can be managed by simply closing the

27:32

program restarting your computer and running antivirus software and that brings us onto um sort of like how you

27:40

can avoid fake fraudulent websites to begin with first thing is have anti-virus software like a

27:49

spam filter it flags up suspicious websites before you can access them that's a good rule if your antivirus

27:54

software has flagged up something as malicious just don't continue the next thing to consider is keep programs and

28:01

systems updated so this helps again a

28:06

bit like antivirus stuff it'll just help avoid it hope flag up problems and stop

28:12

problems coming to your notice so that you don't have the chance to fall for it the best thing to do with that is turn

28:17

your computer off on your finish for the day rather than leaving it on standby I mean if something says it needs to restart it needs to restart your

28:24

computer and make sure you do schedule that into your day and the final thing to do is to disable popups you can do

28:30

this in your browser settings and this reduces the risk of pop-up scams some websites do need pop-ups unable to

28:36

access their full function but you can whitelist them on an ad-hoc basis so that if you know for example the BBC

28:43

website needs pop-ups enabled so you can access everything that you want on there you can add the BBC to a whitelist and

28:48

it will allow popups on that but still not allow them for the rest of the rest of the internet and then just finally

28:58

I'm going to just talk about a couple of coronavirus scams because unfortunately there are lots of scams already trying

29:05

to exploit people's fear around coronavirus I was reading last week than that police said that nearly a million

29:12

pounds has been lost already to coronavirus scams in the UK so what do they look like and how can we avoid them

29:18

the two big pradhans that I've seen so far are the one off the payment scam

29:23

which is a scam where you get a text claiming to be from the government and

29:29

it says something along the lines of the UK government has issued a payment for four hundred and fifty eight pounds to

29:35

all residents as part of its promise to battle covert 19 there's a link and if

29:41

you follow the link you'll be able to get you get your own you can see on the

29:46

screen there's the text and then there's the webpage it takes you two there are two ways of identifying a system the first

29:54

is that the URL in the text isn't to a doc after UK website and remember everything from the government

30:01

is gov dot uk' this one here is UK - covert - 19 dot web do web redirected

30:10

org which should look suspicious enough to flag up as a phishing scam anyway and again you can see that on the webpage

30:16

I'm on the right of it the other way of flagging this up as a scam is just to

30:21

keep an eye on the news and make sure you're doing that from a trusted news source if the government had announced it is going to be paying more citizens

30:27

it'd be something which you could find out on a news website remember to independently check anything which seems

30:33

too good to be true or unusual and the

30:38

other big scam which I've seen last file is fine scam so this is a scam which

30:44

claims that you've been caught recording you've been recorded sorry leaving your house three times in more than one day and you've now been fined thirty-five

30:51

pounds more information can be found at the link that I provided here it's tricky to identify this as a scam the

30:58

link does look like it could be legitimate especially on a phone where it's harder to inspect the URL to see if it's being spoofed which is where a fake

31:05

website with a different URL mimics having a legitimate URL

31:11

however again you can check this on a trusted news website the government

31:16

hasn't announced its going to be finding people if they're caught leaving their houses so that would be the best way to identify this as the scam something

31:24

which does make it more difficult to identify is the fact that the first text

31:30

here is actually a legitimate text which has come from the government the second

31:37

text is has been sent using identity spoofing it's a massive problem at the

31:45

moment and there's lots of stuff I'm in the news over the last few months about people who've committed spoof scams like

31:53

this claiming to be from banks and people have been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of pounds individually

31:59

because they've believed that they've been contacted by their bank so

32:08

identity spoofing do be aware that legitimate texts in a conversation don't guarantee the legitimacy of anything

32:14

else later on just because you've been sent by a text by the government using

32:20

whatever number they're doing it it really doesn't guarantee that anything else that they send you that this sent

32:26

to you using that number is going to be from the government so just a quick wrap

32:34

up then we've looked at how we can make passwords emails and website security more accessible passwords can be made a

32:41

bit more accessible by removing the cognitive load of remembering dozens of passwords by using a password safe which

32:46

only needs one password but the real take home message is do use strong and unique passwords whenever you can email

32:55

scams and the website scams can be avoided by double checking that everything's right if there's any uncertainty you lose nothing by asking

33:02

either the person the email claims to be from or someone you trust for advice and simply by walking away if you're not

33:08

sure anything without coronavirus do double check using a trusted independent

33:14

news source and there's loads of resources on Citizens Advice Advertising

33:19

Standards Agency and loads of other organizations as well about other scams that I found a lot of the coronavirus

33:25

scams seem to be face to face so not really within the remit of this but if

33:32

there's anything which just seems a bit suspicious citizens of Advertising Standards Agency with the first places to start either

33:38

for

0:00

animals were living in sty world in Galante but gradually they realized that

0:08

this space was becoming very very full and overcrowded they looked over the

0:14

edge of the sky world and they saw water all around underneath they were thinking

0:19

if they could just have some land on the water maybe they could move there after a while they sent Diana sea

0:28

cleavers grandchild this is the diving beetle as we know it today to have a

0:33

look and the diving be today and say goes down and he scatters all over the water looking for land can't find any

0:40

they're wondering what to do and eventually they inside will dive

0:45

onto the water and he comes back up from the from the base of the waters land if

0:52

you want and he starts with a little bit of mud and starts spreading it all over

0:57

and creating the world in which we live today when it had been there for a while

1:07

the people are ready to move the animals are ready to move down they try to fly down and then notice that it's still

1:13

sticky and gooey they can't live there so what they do they send a giant Buzzard this bird here who is the

1:20

grandfather of all buzzards we know today he is huge he's got a wingspan of

1:26

40 50 60 feet a massive mother it's the great Buzzard of all time and what they

1:33

will do they disrupt the giant Buzzard the great buzzer to fly all around the

1:39

world keeping low to the ground so that these wings when they're flapping will create an airflow to dry out the earth

1:47

so they can land on it this he does and he flies all around the world when he

1:52

comes back to the Appalachians of course he's been flying for a long long long time and he's very tired and his wings

2:00

start to hit the ground where they make valleys and then flicker make great mountains the animals realize and scream

2:08

down start stop come back up here we don't have to walk up and down hill all the time but if you go to the

2:14

Cherokee homeland today it is the Appalachian Mountains of the highest melting Issa Mississippi and this

2:22

explains where they come from once that land was dry the animals came

2:27

down and they decided they needed warped and light he was still dark so they took

2:33

the Sun and they set it to move from east to west but the Sun at that's

2:39

height where it was initially was too close and too hot and so scary the

2:47

crawfish he got he's very good and to this day the Cherokee will not eat red

2:55

crawfish they think it was damaged by the Sun gradually over time they

3:00

arranged to have the Sun taken up higher and higher until you sorry next day

3:16

you just were muted we just need individuals commute apologies sorry I think you've got muted

3:22

by mistake there in story that's fine so they got him on the seventh on the

3:28

seventh I'd and each day this is painfully totally amateurish and then

3:38

across the top Oh a night to lead to

3:43

darkness so this is where where they came from

3:49

this is where they lived and the extent of area they hunt wines name

4:07

okay so they lived in this area and then

4:13

main area was here along the Tennessee North Carolina second or border but they

4:18

hunted over a much grander area they shared this land with other people but

4:25

they hunted in that area the Cherokee their homes are divided into three

4:34

primary areas the over Hill the lower

4:39

towns and the middle and valley towns these three areas are mutually

4:46

understandable but they have fairly strong dialectical and linguistic differences over certain things they're

4:53

all inheritable and they marry within each other but there are difference in the language and some of the structures

4:59

in society they're based on seven Klan members seven Klan groups originally

5:07

though eight clans and the eight left the humans to become bears to deal with

5:15

a situation of friction that are dealt up so that is why we are seven clans of

5:21

Cherokee today the paint the bird the blue the deer the wild potato the wolf

5:26

and the long hair they're all represented in different ways whether it

5:33

be a masks or through the animals or through the plants that they come through but everyone is descended from

5:39

one of these Seven original clans the Cherokee are a matrilineal group where

5:47

your descent comes from your mother your clan identity comes from your mother and you can follow down so here

5:54

again we have seven women with the masks above their head showing which clan they

6:00

represent and this led to some interesting interaction and comments at

6:06

a color color or the little carpenter as he becomes known in English was in ago

6:12

she ations with the British in the 18th century and he stated is customary for

6:18

us to have women councils when we're talking to you as

6:23

white people are also born of women wine earth don't you have part of your

6:29

population involved in any negotiations as well a question that isn't possibly

6:34

still be asked today by several people but they are a female lead group the

6:42

center of all life is the council house this is a seven sided building one side

6:50

for each clan and every member of the village or the town they live in would

6:56

be involved in that discussion young too old nobody's excluded so these things could

7:03

become three four hundred feet across for a large village very big at the

7:09

front this area here is where the town's standard I sort of a a marker of who

7:16

they were would be and at the rear of the council house would be the Treasury

7:24

the Treasury house and everybody who grows food corn whatever the crops or

7:31

gets meat would donate it a percentage of it to the council house Treasury and

7:38

then that is there to reserve if anyone begins to struggle or if guests come in

7:43

and they need to be looked after they have this base behind them to use I want

7:51

to go back now to the language nOCO and

7:57

other languages that either words that I began with around 1810 this gentleman

8:04

Sequoia decided that the power of the written word was something the Cherokee

8:09

could could not do without he went off and spent several years alone and came

8:15

back with a syllabary very similar to an alphabet but each each phrase or sound

8:23

would have an identifying mark so very very similar and often called an

8:28

alphabet very slightly different very quickly the entire Cherokee Nation

8:34

to read and write in its own language they began printing a bilingual

8:39

newspaper in English and Cherokee this

8:45

is what the Cherokee alphabet the Cherokee syllabary looks like and I said

8:50

at the beginning that that's cwy was the word to Cherokee we can see

8:56

where this comes and how this comes by following it through we've split up the

9:02

word it's an Aggie for the Cherokee if we split that up into its three breaks forgets our Lackey we look on here where

9:11

the red square is popped up we've got the SI force are you have the W for LA

9:18

and the why is the sound key you put them together you have Szilagyi I also

9:25

mentioned Cherokee for hello-o Co you spit it out like this and this time

9:31

it'll be in green not in red yeah that symbol to the oh the besought a symbol

9:39

for the C and then the H symbol for the yo so if you were to write hello in

9:45

Cherokee that would be the symbol for it so this is how their language works and

9:51

that vein came very quickly they became strong with this and this language is

9:57

still being taught regularly in the schools in fact if you use a word

10:02

program on your PC you can go in and change the language to Cherokee so that

10:10

you can type in the Cherokee language and send messages right documents in

10:16

Cherokee iPhone is also another place where Cherokee is a language it can be

10:22

selected to you so it it stays around and now I want to look a little bit at the historical context beginning a

10:29

little bit further back that I'm going to focus on but beginning and looking at Thomas Jefferson

10:35

in the first treaty that the Americans make with the Delawares after the Revolution they promised to respect all

10:42

the treaties and all the agreements they made but Jefferson is also planning to

10:52

take their land and he's planning in two specific ways to do this first is trade

11:00

secondly is might strength so turning to

11:05

trade first Jefferson will write at one stage that we shall push them to have

11:11

debts in our trading houses because we

11:16

find once they have debts that they can't pay as individuals they will come

11:22

together and lop off land to give us for our use so he's using debt to adapt and

11:31

to pull the whole land into themselves

11:37

the second way he does it is by might on the frontier that are is very little

11:42

violent very little control over violence Lee's often to warfare then the

11:50

army will step in to make peace and as part of the peace treaty there is a land

11:56

session that comes on as well during his presidency using these two methods

12:03

Jefferson was able to take about two hundred thousand square miles off

12:09

different native peoples in about nine different states for the US the next big

12:20

push for moving the Cherokee come to the Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson's born in

12:27

the south he knows these people and but in his State of Union he will say what

12:33

good man would prefer a country covered with forests and range by a few thousand

12:39

savages to our extensive Republic studied with cities etc etcetera can

12:46

trust in the heathen savages who just run around in the forest with the civilize Europeans and

12:54

that because of this reason we had to move the Native Americans he's particularly the Cherokee now these are

13:05

the sort of civilized houses that he's talking about however these are Cherokee

13:12

houses they were not running around in the forest not every Cherokee lived in a

13:18

house like this but many did and Andrew Jackson knows this because he grew up

13:23

around them this is the printing press where they printed the Cherokee Phoenix

13:28

the bilingual newspaper so say Jackson knows this but in order to push them off

13:36

the land he has to portray them as savage so that people will agree with

13:41

him and what we've seen is a through I think Jefferson who thought they were inferior but maybe we could

13:49

improve them where by the time you get to Jackson these people just are savage

13:54

will always be savage and have to be moved the Cherokee reacted to some of

14:02

these changes are coming on they start bringing in written laws they start to

14:07

you some of their time to to match and marry what they see in American society

14:13

thinking this will give them a degree where the white people will accept them

14:20

for who they are they bring in a police force they bring in business and fairies and that they

14:31

can charge to do that they also bring in new laws to control Klan revenge they

14:38

set up bicameral system of government

14:44

they have a judiciary it's very very

14:49

similar but it's all twisted through a Cherokee understanding so symbolically

14:55

looks very similar to the American government but there are slight differences within it which means it's

15:01

still acceptable to the Cherokee there are also other

15:07

factors pressing on to the Cherokee as well as Jackson population increase Ohio

15:15

Tennessee in Georgia three areas that the Cherokee engage and spread with had

15:22

a population of about 40,000 and 1810 by 1830 that's up to about 2 million so you

15:30

do have the real physical presence that people need space and they're putting

15:37

pressure on all of these states as well as the Cherokee had other nations as

15:43

well within them Georgia however becomes the most determined to get rid of Indians

15:49

whenever it can there are short term immediate reasons the Cherokee living in

15:55

good land they do well with farming and other pursuits they also find gold in

16:03

Cherokee land whenever you find gold you want to move other people off it so you

16:08

can have it there are also political reasons that

16:13

relate to the interaction between the state and the federal government all the

16:20

states agree to sell some of their surface surplus land to the government said that government that could then

16:26

sell it on at a profit to make money for the country to have a starting base of a

16:33

financial system Georgia sold all its land and in return the US government

16:40

would pledge to buy all Indian land back for Georgia Georgia is really upset

16:47

because it's not getting this darn land that it's been promised complained and complaints and complains the US

16:54

government says we want to buy it but we can only buy it by treaty we have to

17:03

follow on the respect that Cherokees has of a sovereign state and if they don't

17:10

want to sell it we can't force to buy it and the Cherokees constantly said no we

17:16

wearily it's where we've always lived we make a good living we don't want to sell this doesn't prove to be satisfactory

17:26

for Georgia so Georgia starts pushing and probably and prodding and trying to break the

17:33

cohesiveness of the Cherokee and somehow force them to move initially what they

17:40

do is they gather a number of Cherokee people who are fairly well respected but

17:48

don't represent the whole community and it gets them to sign a treaty selling

17:55

some land in return for other land further west now there is a debate still

18:03

going on to the day about how responsible these people are for the final removal of the Cherokee to a

18:11

certain degree these people believe that it was going to happen there's nothing

18:16

they could do to stop it so they might as well take the best deal for the people none of the people involved in

18:21

this profited individually they got land which they hope the Cherokee would come

18:27

on but the vast majority of Cherokee did not want to move they pushed on this and

18:33

challenged it we're talking somewhere in the region of eighteen thousand Cherokees against moving compared to

18:40

about two thousand wanting to move so the 20,000 in all roughly vast majority

18:47

want to stay there are also a series of legal challenges that the Cherokee put

18:55

in and take all the way to the Supreme Court to try and defend their land they

19:02

get defeated in a couple of cases but

19:08

the final challenge Worcester V Georgia is one they are able to win Georgia

19:14

passes a law that says any non-native person who goes into Cherokee land must

19:21

have a license from the Georgia government in order to do that several

19:27

missionaries in cluding Samuel lost in Worcester who will work in with the Cherokee say we're

19:34

not going to do it you do not have any authority on what goes on in the

19:40

Cherokee Nation therefore we don't need to buy a license of the state of Georgia to be here when they refuse Georgia

19:49

militia right in kidnaps them puts them in Chains and takes them back and

19:55

charges them and what happens the Cherokee realized that now if they can

20:02

take this case it won't be Indian against white person it will be white

20:08

person against white person and that may get more traction in the courts and indeed it does the Supreme Court will

20:18

finally rule that the Cherokee Nation are a separate political nation that

20:24

could not be controlled by the state but had a relationship with the federal

20:30

government that was equal to that at the state relationship with the federal

20:35

government I will be out of the law soon trust me and that the States cannot do anything

20:46

but this didn't suit everybody so the Supreme Court has made a decision Andrew

20:52

Jackson my least favorite president would say to them say to the people in

20:59

Georgia go and light a fire under them they'll soon move he's reported to have

21:05

said George Chief Justice Marshall has made his law now let him enforce his law

21:12

he's the only sitting president to ever ignore a ruling by the Supreme Court so

21:21

and now want to move on to what comes next which is the forced removal or I

21:28

usually refer to it as the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee this is a

21:35

quote from a military officer who traveled with the Cherokee on the

21:41

removal murder and somebody must answer because of the death and destruction that he saw

21:49

because of this move all the Cherokee

21:56

called the Mughal known and all Sunni which literally translates to the trail

22:02

where they cried or the Trail of Tears so it's the Trail of Tears that we're

22:09

going to be talking about the Cherokee weren't the only people to be removed as you can see from this map their cherokee

22:17

are coming from here and moving forward there are other people moving from the

22:22

north and we're the people but the Cherokee with their access of Supreme

22:28

Court with their ability in their become the most well known and almost sort of

22:33

the poster child for every nation every nation has its own horror story to tell

22:39

the Cherokee sort of become the national story in some ways it begins in 1838 in

22:48

1830s where when the assembly begins now

22:55

Jackson has said that there aren't enough army officers to protect the

23:02

Cherokee from the Georgia from the Georgians but suddenly there are enough

23:07

American military to round up every single Cherokee from their homes and

23:13

they're only allowed to take what they can grab and carry on their backs at

23:19

that time there are a few officials who would allow them a little longer to pack

23:26

a few bags if they could but they were very quickly moved on they were then

23:32

taken into what were cattle stockades to wait until the government had organized

23:38

their move the first group go off go off in the middle of a summer it's really

23:44

nice whether they're moving across but word quickly gets back that people are

23:52

dying of summer diseases so John Ross the leader of the Cherokee State

23:57

sin and says please let us organize it and they let him he holds them back a

24:02

little bit and they live in what become terrible conditions in the stockade but

24:08

they're able to avoid the worst of the diseases and they leave a little bit later on in the year in your into the

24:15

autumn plenty of time to move across and travel into their new lands against

24:22

their will but they're still going the

24:28

only problem is nobody could have foretold that this would be one of the

24:33

hardest winters in memory in America they end up getting trapped between

24:40

rivers that are frozen over and have all sorts of problems and difficulties and

24:46

people start to fade and to die one you want England preacher who saw them on

24:52

the Trail of Tears would write about

24:57

2,000 people sick and feeble many near-death one woman was carrying her

25:05

youngest child who was dying in her arms multitudes go on foot even aged females

25:13

traveling with heavy burdens on sometimes frozen ground with no covering

25:19

for their feet except what nature had given them barefoot over ice snow and

25:26

sludge at times the column of people was three or four miles long some people

25:34

were willing to help them when the food started to get low others just increased their prices 10:24 knowing they have a

25:42

captive audience the preacher would go on to say the Indians buried 14 or 15

25:49

people every time they stopped who had died or would die in the evenings

25:55

throughout the day I will leave and the words of a

26:04

modern-day Cherokee to explain how they view this now

26:49

so I'm sorry I'm sorry that sound didn't work perfectly for you but he's

26:54

basically saying that the death was horrendous and that he sustained on the

27:00

history of America that they were prepared to pull away and to drag apart

27:06

these people and referring it to ethnic cleansing the ordeal didn't end on

27:14

arrival as you can imagine if you're suffering now malnutrition and disease

27:19

as you're traveling when you stop you don't instantly become healthy and well

27:24

again and people would be losing their lives for a year or two after is

27:31

directly related to it about oh if we

27:40

look on the long term probably somewhere between six and eight thousand Cherokee in total out of that twenty thousand

27:48

will have died that number is contested people look at the numbers that happened

27:54

on the trail which is down to about three to four but once you add in the fact that the people would be very very

28:00

weak when they get to the far to that location and disease lingers weakness

28:09

would linger and I think it's better to current the upper number on that where

28:15

are we today after this horrible movement and this ethnic cleansing of

28:20

the southeast a much of the places the Cherokee population is about 350,000

28:27

slightly under bigger than the city of Cambridge where I'm sitting at the moment this makes them one of if not the

28:33

largest Tribal Nation in the u.s. today their primary based in Tahlequah in

28:41

Oklahoma that's where the majority of them we're where they were taken during removal there are still a number a

28:49

growing number who live on the Qualla boundary in North Carolina in Cherokee

28:55

North Carolina the Cherokee Nation government and both locations just

29:02

the u.s. still has lettuces executive and judicial like the United States they

29:08

have a lot more authority and power over themselves today than they have for many years in Oklahoma where the majority of

29:17

the Cherokees are who are living on a tribal base they opposite they operate

29:23

Cherokee Nation businesses various different businesses from this the

29:30

standard image of casinos through to manufacturing and other items they

29:35

employ about 11,000 people in Oklahoma and they contribute somewhere in the

29:45

region at two point one six billion dollars to the Oklahoma economy every

29:53

year so they turned round this horrific ethnic disruption dislocation and

30:02

cleansing to now be one of the largest employers in their region and to

30:09

contribute massive amounts of money to the state itself and that's where I'll

30:16

leave you I hope that made sense to you all and I look forward to any questions you may have thank

0:00

she's quite right what what I wanted to

0:02

do today is talk a little bit about some

0:07

of my experiences in the Amazon

0:09

rainforest and some of the some of the

0:12

ideas is given me I chose to call this

0:16

talk indigenous environmentalism because

0:22

I believe that we have a lot to learn

0:25

from the indigenous people of the world

0:27

in particular the example I want to talk

0:29

about today is the H wah of the Amazon

0:33

rainforest and how how we can become

0:38

environmentalist custodians while living

0:42

in the developed world to talk a little

0:45

bit about what I mean by that term and I

0:48

invite you to think a little bit about

0:50

what a lot of how we can do that so like

0:55

I say what I want to talk about first of

0:58

all is I want to share a little bit of

1:01

my story of working with the Amazonian

1:04

indigenous and some of sort of the

1:08

beauty and the fragility of the this

1:12

region of the world as well as some of

1:14

the threats that they face what I want

1:18

to argue is that I believe that the

1:22

indigenous are they true or the closest

1:25

thing that we have to environment as

1:27

custodians the closest to the land in

1:31

some ways the best at looking after

1:35

their environment and respecting it and

1:39

what that means it's not just about them

1:44

though I also want to highlight some

1:47

other positive examples that I've

1:49

encountered both directly personally and

1:52

through my research and to other people

1:56

who I were considered to be

1:57

environmentalist custodians from around

2:00

the world in particular the developing

2:02

world and at the end of my talk I think

2:06

I've thought probably for around 20

2:07

minutes at the end I'm from a little

2:09

task a little discussion for us to think

2:11

about how could we become

2:14

custodians of our world of our local

2:19

area of our community and what what does

2:22

that entail how might we do it so I

2:28

think I'll start off by stating what may

2:32

be obvious some of us here which is my

2:37

belief that from my personal experience

2:41

and my personal belief indigenous people

2:43

are at the most immediate risk from the

2:47

climate crisis

2:48

I would like to dispute the idea

2:54

sometimes of some environments this

2:57

activists that the invited climate

3:00

crisis is something coming in the near

3:02

future is on the horizon it will come to

3:07

future generations perhaps I want to

3:11

dispute that and say that I believe it's

3:13

already started in particular if you

3:15

look at the example of the Amazon

3:17

rainforest you could see the climate

3:19

crisis has already began and has I would

3:24

argue over 500 years of history what do

3:28

I mean by that

3:29

so I think we all remember the wildfires

3:32

that happened in the Brazilian Amazon

3:35

over the summer I think it was in the

3:37

month of July that this was

3:39

international news headlines these were

3:42

most likely almost definitely set

3:45

deliberately by agribusiness in order to

3:48

clear land I think we may some of us may

3:52

also have heard of whole scale whole

3:55

scale oil drilling in places such as

3:57

Peru in particular but also in other

4:00

regions of the Amazon Ecuador is another

4:03

example where we have seen lots of

4:05

resource extraction damaging the forests

4:09

and if you speak to indigenous people

4:13

what you often find is that for the

4:15

climate crisis started in 1492 that

4:20

being the date that marking the

4:23

commencement of the colonialist projects

4:27

are in the in South America in Latin

4:30

America and ever since then they would

4:34

consider themselves to be living in some

4:36

sort of crisis and I want to be quite

4:40

clear here I'm not pointing the finger

4:43

at indigenous people who decide to sell

4:47

out sell their land and sell their water

4:50

to resource extraction to oil companies

4:54

to loggers and to other forms of

4:57

agribusiness indeed I think that in

5:00

areas of extreme poverty by our

5:04

standards at least in which which is how

5:07

many most people would live in the

5:08

Amazon areas with low education

5:12

attainment minimal literacy levels in

5:16

many areas and minimal development as we

5:21

were consider it by which I mean no

5:23

roads no mains electricity and so on

5:26

people will highly surprising that

5:30

people will choose resource extraction

5:31

as an as an option as a means of

5:35

accessing modernity and providing for

5:38

their families in the context of the

5:41

inevitable encroachment of the modern

5:43

world

5:44

I've starts however I would argue that

5:50

too much energy is placed on seeing the

5:53

indigenous as victims of these processes

5:56

and we don't put enough emphasis on

5:59

their own agency they are human beings

6:02

after all they can think for themselves

6:06

and they can act themselves and I think

6:10

they are there are many positive

6:12

examples that they can set for us one of

6:16

those being that they can be considered

6:18

to be custodians of the land by which I

6:21

mean they use minimal resources they use

6:25

only one it's necessary they have a low

6:27

carbon footprint due to the low amounts

6:33

low number of consumer items and sumer

6:37

products that they own they respect

6:39

nature

6:41

than trying to dominate it and they use

6:44

locally sourced materials to meet all of

6:47

their success of these so I think there

6:50

is quite a lot that we can actually

6:52

learn from their example I also think

6:55

there as a side sort of a digression

6:58

from this little bit but I think it's

7:00

worth mentioning as well that in this

7:02

day and age the indigenous are pretty

7:06

well politically organized in the Amazon

7:08

in many areas in particular in Ecuador

7:10

which is example I know best

7:12

they have a very strong political

7:15

movement and a political party they have

7:20

fought and won a blurry National

7:24

Constitution which guarantees indigenous

7:27

self-governance for example in the

7:29

Amazon rainforest areas and some

7:33

indigenous nationalities have forbidden

7:35

the encroachment of resource extractive

7:39

companies onto their lands one of the

7:43

examples of those nationalities is the

7:47

one I know best which is the floor so I

7:53

think you're probably asking at this

7:55

point how did I come to be running an

7:59

education project in the middle of the

8:00

Amazon rainforest with this indigenous

8:02

group well I'll tell you my story little

8:05

briefly I first visited actual territory

8:09

in 2013 my initial interest was because

8:14

I'd heard that they are a indigenous

8:16

group who had decided to expel and

8:21

reject all forms of resource extraction

8:24

all all companies all loggers and all

8:27

usage of their waterways they were

8:30

looking for alternatives to doing this

8:32

so I got involved an education project

8:35

in a jawar territory while I was

8:38

visiting there as a volunteer I was

8:40

invited by a second community to start a

8:43

volunteer project out there as well

8:47

alongside my partner you can see the two

8:51

of us here in this picture inside the

8:54

community

8:54

itself I'm happy say I was back in 2014

8:59

we started the project I'm happy to say

9:01

over the last five years we have had

9:04

around about a total of 50 volunteers

9:07

working in this tiny community and I

9:12

emphasize the tiny nosov it and there

9:15

are motifs of it I mean it has no roads

9:17

has no mains electricity and it is in an

9:24

extremely remote area of the Ecuadorian

9:28

Amazon if I can show you this map

9:33

hopefully you're all is passionate about

9:35

maps as I am because I think this one is

9:37

a good one the community I'm working

9:40

with is one called sewer you can see

9:42

here circled in green if you look here

9:47

you this is the Amazon rainforest for

9:49

looking at this line demarcating the

9:54

yellow and grey zone on a white zone is

9:57

the border of ecuador and peru if you

10:01

look at this red line coming down here

10:03

that becomes the blue line that is the

10:05

river and as I say sewer is the

10:09

community we're working in with a

10:12

population of around about a hundred

10:14

people and all of these are indigenous

10:18

how active are in fact actual indigenous

10:21

territories as around about 70 or 80 and

10:24

total I believe and the population of

10:26

about 7,000 people 4000 and Ecuador

10:31

3,000 in Peru and in no rawness map can

10:36

you see any roads no where can you see

10:38

any cities or any towns these are all

10:40

small remote communities in the middle

10:43

of the jungle and why did I choose to do

10:51

this what inspired me well the only be

10:53

honest when I was out there the first

10:54

time I was really moved by after our

10:58

territory bodies little communities for

11:02

a variety of reasons firstly I was

11:04

interested in their commit

11:07

to maintaining their their assets their

11:13

land their water without any sort of

11:16

resource extraction that would pollute

11:17

their land secondly I think I have to

11:21

say it was beguiling Lee beautiful this

11:23

is my pick for I'd cook I've adorned

11:27

overlooking the main the sort of town

11:30

square of this tiny community I believe

11:33

you could call it I was also very

11:36

interested in their lifestyle their main

11:40

diet is fish from the river here for

11:45

example my friend wild bird has been

11:48

able to catch a catfish from the river

11:52

this will probably feed the community

11:55

for up to a week if they're able to look

12:00

after it well they're probably smoked it

12:02

and read at first and inference for it

12:05

of course there's no refrigeration and

12:09

this this is king in the river in

12:14

addition they when they have rifles and

12:17

enough ammunition they'll also hunt in

12:19

the jungle for wild animals boar and

12:22

deer and other rodents that you might

12:26

find in the jungle I found that quite

12:29

inspiring that their food was stuff that

12:33

they were finding themselves in the

12:35

jungle in addition to this I was

12:37

impressed by their construction which

12:41

was majority local materials

12:43

this was their Foreman form of transport

12:46

his little nose which are quite

12:51

ancestral and historic this is the it's

12:55

traditionally their means that

12:56

transports the only modern addition has

13:00

been a little outboard motor in these

13:04

new canoes the nickname over Peka Peka

13:06

after the sound that they make when the

13:09

motor is running I was also impressed by

13:14

what is I'll show you this picture as

13:17

well this is our local kitchen

13:20

where we would eat our own cookery food

13:24

over a log fire you can see here the

13:28

woods from the from the forest a fat

13:32

truth from bride arm leaves left out in

13:37

the Sun this was the most of and you can

13:40

see the axe I'll show you as well the

13:42

gaps and the walls to allow wind to get

13:45

through you cuz it gets pretty hot

13:46

inside there they need a draught I'd

13:51

also want to show you that they are keen

13:55

gardeners they have a each family will

13:58

have a chakra an allotment a vegetable

14:00

patch here the school had its own one as

14:03

well so here were one of our students we

14:05

were we planted a plantain tree and here

14:10

you can see it's sprouting and will soon

14:13

deliver us some plantains to eat so it

14:20

really was very moving to see people

14:22

living in such harmony with their local

14:26

environment but despite that I think it

14:30

goes without saying that they face a

14:32

number of challenges I've already

14:36

mentioned resource extraction as a

14:40

threat something is on the horizon I

14:43

mean I've said that they have made a

14:45

political and legal decision to expel

14:49

all resource extractors but that doesn't

14:51

mean it doesn't happen and they doesn't

14:55

mean that there aren't dissenting voices

14:56

or people or companies representatives

15:00

of companies who may try and manipulate

15:03

some of the residents the community

15:06

members of this area in addition to that

15:10

I think we should I should be perfectly

15:13

honest of that and say that although

15:16

it's a beautiful area it's a beautiful

15:19

story I'm trying to tell you I reject

15:22

the notion of the indigenous as noble

15:25

savages I want to be quite clear and say

15:28

that the people I'm working with are not

15:29

angels they have their foibles they

15:32

haven't they have their character faults

15:34

everybody else does and some you can

15:38

have friends there but you can also have

15:40

people behaving in ways which are either

15:43

foolish or immoral in particular I think

15:49

the lack of education amongst some of

15:52

the children can influence their

15:54

behavior I'll tell you the sad story of

15:57

this poor he's name I won't mention but

15:59

when playing with his father's rifle he

16:02

was dared by some of the children around

16:04

him to prove that the gun was not loaded

16:08

so he stuck his two fingers down the

16:11

barrel and pulled the trigger I don't

16:14

think I need to tell you what happened

16:16

next there fortunately this picture was

16:19

taken before he lost his two fingers for

16:23

this reason I believe that education is

16:25

so key that's why when we were thinking

16:28

about how to help this community these

16:31

people what we can offer - then it was

16:34

education that was what we could give

16:37

them that would set them up well or as

16:40

well as possible for a perilous future

16:44

so that they can have the confidence and

16:46

the independence with which they can

16:49

take their own decisions so that they

16:51

can resist attempts to manipulate them

16:54

or to keep them so that's why I like to

16:58

Peter because I sitting on the veranda

17:00

of our house looking through someone a

17:02

multilingual sort of children's books

17:05

that we have here particularly nice so I

17:12

want to argue that they are an example

17:15

to follow I believe they are

17:18

environmental custodians they look after

17:21

their land they have a respect for it

17:26

they do not damage it they use what they

17:29

need and they understand it and I think

17:34

I mean they do have met different risks

17:38

there's no the modern world is

17:40

encroaching upon them and very very

17:42

rapid pace I've mentioned that there's

17:45

no roads in our territory

17:48

is true for the time being but in a few

17:50

short years that I've been there there

17:52

have been two new motorways built going

17:54

but further and further into the jungle

17:56

and which means that whereas when I

17:59

first went in I had to spend $400 on

18:01

chartering a biplane now it's possible

18:05

to go the seven-hour boat trip from the

18:09

nearest motorway to the community they

18:12

also now mobile phones are our beacon

18:14

ubiquitous their internet is starting to

18:17

arrive in some communities and as his

18:20

satellite TV which means they're very

18:23

excited whenever the World Cup comes

18:25

around and but but despite that I want

18:32

to think about what we can learn from

18:34

them and what I don't I will get the

18:36

idea that modernity is necessarily a bad

18:38

thing for these people they have their

18:40

right to develop and to embrace parts of

18:44

the modern world as well as we do and in

18:48

fact I think there should be some sort

18:50

of exchange here many people talk about

18:53

what can we do to support the people of

18:56

the Amazon many of concerned people and

18:58

I think one of the best things we can do

19:01

is to think about what we can learn from

19:03

them and how we can follow example

19:08

perhaps I'll also take a little

19:10

diversion here just to show you another

19:12

picture of mine just to prove them not

19:15

that what I'm saying is correct they've

19:17

got their fish and their plantains here

19:19

which they're all eating together using

19:21

banana leaves as plates I'll stop that

19:24

as you now so yes back on topic we stand

19:32

to learn a lot from the result the the

19:38

lessons that people have learnt in many

19:40

parts of the developing world and many

19:42

of the things many of the ways that they

19:44

have learned to become custodians of

19:46

their lands and it's not just in the

19:49

Amazon rainforest that I wish to talk

19:50

about I think we can also look at other

19:53

examples from different parts of the

19:54

world some of which I've encountered

19:56

personally but some of them are

19:59

and you read about one group which I

20:01

have encountered personally is this

20:03

group of where there arose a lot Matias

20:08

in this Rosario Argentina this is a

20:12

really inspiring story

20:14

I met them a few months ago what

20:18

happened is in the year 2000 2001 in

20:21

Argentina there was an economic crisis

20:23

which led to essentially the economy

20:27

collapsing businesses going out of

20:30

action lands and industry abandoning

20:33

their factories people losing their

20:36

savings in the bank and losing their

20:40

jobs which meant we had lots of empty

20:43

unoccupied land and lots of unemployed

20:46

hungry people so what these two men who

20:49

I met what they did was they took over

20:54

the abandoned land with the members of

20:58

the poorest neighborhoods of Rosario and

21:00

they started to cultivate it they

21:03

started to grow fruits and vegetables

21:05

they put the unemployed and the food

21:07

insecure to work originally with the aim

21:11

was for them just to feed their families

21:13

to have food on the table but after a

21:16

while this project was so successful

21:17

that they were able to create a farmers

21:21

market and a city center so that they

21:23

could sell their surplus of course the

21:26

other point to make about these people

21:27

when I met them they were very very

21:29

clear that they were they would only use

21:32

organic produce they were very hostile

21:35

to pesticides they said that the land

21:38

around them had been damaged by

21:40

agribusiness particular soya plantations

21:43

so they were very clear that we should

21:46

only be using organic fertilizer on our

21:50

vegetable patches another example which

21:56

are having cancer personally is the

21:58

great green wall of Africa this is an

22:01

effort to create an 8,000 kilometre belt

22:05

of trees to combat desertification in

22:09

the Sahel in a southern part of

22:12

he saw para desert where the encroaching

22:17

desert is a real concern like I say I

22:21

can come across any of these people

22:22

personally okay I do know a little bit

22:25

about a project in the North the extreme

22:29

north of the Sahara with a similar aim

22:31

in the this is in the southern tip of

22:34

Morocco where they are doing mass

22:38

planting of palm trees in order to

22:40

combat desertification I was also told

22:48

about the Civic ecology movement in the

22:52

US this is somewhere between an academic

22:57

community and an activist movement in

23:02

which people are putting into practice

23:05

ideas of looking after your local area

23:09

looking after your environment and

23:11

making it more friendly to the people

23:13

who live there so some of the examples

23:16

are the things they've been doing there

23:17

are many but some of them are in Chicago

23:20

the Chicago wilderness project where

23:23

they've been educating people about some

23:25

of the wildlife and the green spaces in

23:28

the Chicago area apparently they exist I

23:31

wasn't never thought of Chicago as a

23:33

particularly green space but apparently

23:35

so the other example that really

23:38

impressed me was the NOLA tree project

23:41

in New Orleans which in response to had

23:45

the Hurricane Katrina in 2005 where

23:49

around 2 million trees were uprooted

23:53

local residents and communities work

23:57

together in order to replant and repair

24:01

those missing trees you know because

24:04

we're all imagined we're all well aware

24:06

of the benefits of trees in urban

24:09

environments so these are some of the

24:13

examples that I wish to highlight I'm

24:15

back you're able to share some other

24:19

ones that you know are from closer to

24:20

home I'm coming to the end of my project

24:23

my presentation and I

24:25

to turn over to you now I'd like you to

24:27

think about some of the ideas and issues

24:30

that I've raised and think about what

24:34

you can do how you can put some of these

24:36

ideas into practice for example how do

24:40

we become custodians of our own

24:43

environments and our local community do

24:47

you have any similar examples from your

24:50

local community in your local area which

24:53

are similar to this and of course the

24:56

other question I would like you can see

24:58

there is some of the sort of ideas that

25:02

are around this inevitably we have to

25:05

think about politics and education we

25:08

should probably consider colonialism

25:10

which I mentioned towards the beginning

25:11

of the talk and what is the role that

25:14

all of these ideas play and also

25:18

consumption habits I've studiously

25:22

avoided talking about consumption habits

25:24

because I wanted to think about bigger

25:26

larger scale environmentalist projects

25:29

but what role does consumption habits

25:31

play or do we need to think on a

25:34

community basis like what I've been

25:36

talking about now so I think in a second

25:40

we're going to put you into breakout

25:43

groups and I would love for you to think

25:45

about some of these questions from my

25:48

talk I think how long we kind of get

25:51

them thank you so much Alan you've

25:54

really it's a very interesting

0:00

seven seven o'clock so sorry it's over

0:03

to you when we going to look at

0:05

gardening whatever the weather hello

0:09

thank you for coming and hopefully I can

0:13

give you some clues as to what to do and

0:16

you garden you can do

0:19

running this year over last 18 months

0:22

really we've had almost every extreme

0:25

from heavy snowfall to torrential

0:29

applause and all flooding and then

0:35

periodic extreme temperatures and

0:39

drought that incidentally is why local

0:41

reservoir and the water should be up to

0:44

where the grass not and of course even

0:50

now it's still remarkably mild it's very

0:53

soggy and this mild weather I just

0:57

walked down to the shops today and I

1:00

know if it occurs only after in flower

1:02

which is completely as a sequence and it

1:06

means that the berries for next year

1:09

that the birds will depend on for this

1:11

time next year won't happen because

1:14

those berries are going to be not there

1:15

by next year next days frost and of

1:20

course magnolias which is what the

1:23

picture is for a classic example of this

1:25

they come out too early and immediately

1:30

they get blasted and some plants need

1:36

winter calling in order to flower this

1:39

includes a lot of fruit trees not just

1:43

black currants and rubub things like

1:45

plums and damsels particularly need what

1:48

they call chill factor so many hours

1:52

before below freezing to actually crop

1:55

very well and if they don't get this you

1:59

just don't get fruit the cold a little

2:04

bit as I'm sure you're all noticing it

2:07

causes all sorts of damage it is just a

2:10

couple of typical examples muffles often

2:14

it's very cold at the wrong time we'll

2:18

just go blind they get a form but they

2:20

don't open holes encourage certain

2:25

especially bacterial diseases such as

2:28

black like chocolate spot and other

2:32

vegetable problems and there is very

2:35

little the amateur gardener can do that

2:37

it's because you can even warm the soil

2:40

you can't always drain your soil now the

2:44

jet stream as you I'm sure you know if

2:46

you followed the weather forecast is

2:48

floating up and down at the moment and

2:52

our weather just our weather but climate

2:55

all over the world is influenced by the

2:57

ocean currents is all circulating the

3:01

fact that gets our Gulf Stream is

3:04

weakening its they said on the news this

3:07

morning it was weakening by I think a

3:09

quarter of what it had been 50 years ago

3:13

that some that is going to affect

3:17

currents in the Indian Ocean

3:19

and in return the monsoon so it's not

3:22

just won't have so decent wheat harvest

3:26

but it may be that India will have no

3:28

nice Arvest either it's it's quite

3:32

worried

3:32

oh that's might you do you might have a

3:37

really late spring Frost and this is

3:41

something we're seeing more and more of

3:43

this is a garden where I work and that

3:47

happened on the last day of April

3:50

we can write down to minus six it's not

3:53

ideal for hydrangeas and very good

3:58

Victorian solution to this which is easy

4:00

to do and anybody who's a reasonable cut

4:03

up into it as you can see there's a on

4:07

the screen here you've got a annex palea

4:10

drained fruit tree and a gauge and over

4:14

the top of it

4:33

fake frost all downwards and it's a cold

4:37

air settling so if you can just predict

4:39

something off the top of your wall to

4:42

keep them off even if it's only just a

4:45

few inches and also to possibly hang

4:50

cheetah fleets or some net curtains down

4:52

from the top you've got a little frost

4:55

shelter and that's brilliant very easy

4:58

to do you know doesn't cost very much

5:01

and it could save you peaches plums

5:03

apricots whatever the court is to select

5:08

giver eye feet and they're now starting

5:10

to produce particularly currants for

5:14

warmer weather for milder winters whose

5:20

barista proofing a little more breakouts

5:22

drink but I'm told they are working on

5:24

them and the other thing of course is

5:28

that we don't Bertie hot at the moment

5:31

now this year we had about thirty

5:37

degrees in late May and then we had as

5:42

young sure you all noticed very intense

5:45

rainstorms came pretty better but if

5:52

plants are exposed to heat stress they

5:54

can do all sorts of peculiar things this

5:57

for example is a broad beam which is

6:01

growing in an organic guard

6:03

and was pointed out to me as a possible

6:06

example of herbicide damage and when I

6:09

came to look at the plants I found that

6:12

almost all of them were growing next to

6:15

a wall and a patio and it was only those

6:20

ones which were affected and they were

6:22

in so most of the day and out of

6:24

curiosity we stuck it thermometer there

6:27

and the thermometer stops 120 but if he

6:31

could have gone up the scale it would

6:32

have done and as you know I'm sure you

6:35

all realize it's not compatible with a

6:39

living thing to pick anything at 120 a

6:43

long time the other tomato on the other

6:46

side is doing an equivalent of shivering

6:49

pass a tomato with heatstroke have a

6:53

similar behavior when they're cold but

6:55

they go purple then when they have

6:57

heatstroke like a very pale when you see

7:00

you tomato leaves curling up it's really

7:03

really unhappy need to do something

7:06

about it quick oh he let it eat and it's

7:12

purple coloring on French beans and it's

7:16

equivalent but sunburned as is this

7:19

chlorosis on hibiscus that poor thing

7:22

was growing in the conservatory weather

7:26

thermometer went up to 140 and although

7:30

it's a tropical plant it's not that

7:32

tropical there are limits even in the

7:35

tropics and of course after it gets more

7:42

the soil dries out out of curiosity I

7:45

shoved a stick down one of these cracks

7:49

18 injured and the deepest that man that

7:54

the soil is going to dry out around that

7:58

18 inches heat also known as a soil gets

8:01

drier eat drink and tell you if your

8:05

world can't burrow below 2 thought they

8:08

are in serious danger too as well as all

8:11

the little micro flora in the soil but

8:14

they just can't stand

8:16

that much light and heat last year I

8:19

actually saw potatoes developing green

8:23

in soil and it was purely through the

8:26

cracks in it all and they were not

8:28

buried the temperatures rising so much

8:31

they were producing because of the UV

8:34

level

8:39

dig a channel round your plot if you've

8:43

got something on the down side of a

8:45

slope TPS all covered mulch it can be

8:51

straw it can be compost it can be a

8:54

green manure or crops whenever you can

8:56

try and avoid it bare soil this idea of

9:01

all you know you must dig your garden

9:03

over in winter you can have to say

9:05

goodbye to that you really don't want to

9:09

see bare soil over winter the rain is

9:11

going to compact it it's going to wash

9:15

away all the nutrients you want to put

9:18

soaker ways but Gardens or swales that's

9:22

these little areas where you have plants

9:25

that love damp instead of planting trees

9:30

hollow to ensure that they're damp make

9:34

sure they're on a mound have as many

9:37

water box as you can and you might need

9:40

to think about changing your crop this

9:44

gentleman was in Walsall and he was

9:47

flood and as he's Pakistani

9:50

he decided that he'd better do something

9:53

about it so he started making a rice

9:56

paddy unfortunately no seriously

10:01

unfortunately it didn't work out because

10:03

it was wrong to the right there is a guy

10:06

in mountain right so you can be done

10:16

he's extremely pleased because that was

10:19

right from his village we came rating

10:21

had a far better taste anything to get

10:23

him what can you talk about hot well you

10:27

can trade crops and

10:29

recently they have in tirol cropping you

10:32

have agro-ecological where they they

10:37

have trees and they shade the crops if

10:43

you put and potatoes in make sure you've

10:47

got deep furrowed bottles or lengths of

10:50

those pipe near the roots of trees and

10:52

bushes drip hose pipe is a marvelous

10:56

invention it really really works garden

11:00

trade a lobbying like mad to try and get

11:04

the water companies to say that drip

11:07

irrigation is not going to be under a

11:11

hosepipe ban because it's so more

11:13

efficient than somebody going squirt if

11:17

you want to have a polytunnel

11:19

or a cold frame you can't for

11:21

propagation you can actually buy the

11:24

special plastic which will reduce the UV

11:27

it's absolutely crap for brightening you

11:29

tomatoes but it will mean that your

11:31

other plants will be sheltered and it

11:34

will lower the temperature and again you

11:37

might need to think about cropping

11:39

patterns you might need to think about

11:41

new crops

11:43

something else you could do if you've

11:45

got fruit trees against the wall get the

11:48

old white emulsion out whitewash the

11:51

trunks they do it in the Mediterranean

11:54

we may have to think about doing it

11:55

there this is a an Indian broad it grows

12:05

quite easily here soybeans we're lying

12:09

in an army we're certainly eating more

12:12

of these things to eat lentils lentils

12:18

hardly need any water what they're

12:21

established chickpeas only need four

12:25

range you eat them the recipe and if

12:29

we've got a longer growing season you

12:30

might get a better sweet potato crop

12:33

this lady is growing them in water under

12:38

black polythene as a mulch that's been

12:40

on Sinjin uary and she

12:42

has lovely crops and working great sweet

12:46

potatoes weighing up to two pounder Pete

12:49

never know we might be growing peach

12:53

apricot and they hybrids

12:55

not just loquat loquats are something

13:03

that are native to the Mediterranean but

13:06

we might be seeing tube tubes figs and

13:10

lines and this is a tube it's a very

13:17

prickly tree it's hardly in most of the

13:19

bureau although not in extremes of

13:22

Scotland or impossibly parts of East

13:25

Anglia it may be soon and it has these

13:30

strange round fruit and they're about

13:35

size with large marble and they have a

13:40

stray flavour by pleasant old it should

13:49

be trying as a new prop hey good brie

13:52

for solace Peruvian honor I'm sure

13:56

you've all seen them in the supermarkets

13:57

lightweight roads places like that

14:01

Sainsbury's and they're an incredible

14:04

price for a little bonnet about but

14:10

probably 150 for a little tiny on it

14:14

like that now they are so easy to grow

14:16

if you can grow tomorrow you can grow a

14:19

tree and they crop for ages you if you

14:22

put a conservatory and you put them in a

14:24

pot you can keep them going through the

14:26

winter and they'll keep cropping till

14:28

about now and they'll start borrowing

14:31

again by about April and they just keep

14:34

on and on and on and the nice thing is

14:36

they don't get light brilliant what else

14:41

we like to grow the only yam that's

14:44

Hardy in this country which is a Chinese

14:47

yam they're quite energetic you can see

14:52

this is one escaping from the greenhouse

14:55

winter-hardy ratty cheese needs some

14:57

time sold in the indian chopped as

14:59

pakistani carrots but they're actually

15:01

red radish

15:02

similar to red movie and in may have

15:09

citrus last year I managed to crop first

15:17

pomegranate at I was sown in Leicester

15:22

no seriously it's I planted it 32 years

15:26

ago from a seed and got it going and it

15:32

went into new houses garden and I would

15:36

grow up working in the museums as part

15:40

of the things that were grown by the

15:43

imported into this country by the

15:45

Crusaders if you look if you look at any

15:48

of the medieval carvings you will see

15:51

the pomegranates here almost everywhere

15:56

there are a symbol of fertility and

15:59

everything else and they were also a

16:01

symbol of luxury same it's a sour in

16:04

would you know that Botticelli's Birth

16:06

of Venus and all sort of in a scallop

16:10

shell with angels and things cooking

16:13

flowers after if you look in the

16:15

distance as dart leaf tree they will

16:18

several Orange Street and that was you

16:21

know if you were if you anybody you had

16:23

it's a little industry anywhere the

16:25

pomegranate I it was sweet it was small

16:32

probably sort of a large mandarin side

16:36

it juicy and sadly seeds very fertile

16:40

probably because I didn't until

16:41

pomegranate wonderful self pollinate

16:45

it's not you know I never thought it

16:49

would fruit certainly longing last year

16:51

and just as an example to show is

16:55

possible this it's a great proof

17:00

outside and cropping a fitting garden in

17:05

cropping area for at least four years it

17:10

does not make a particularly nice great

17:13

return let you have a good summer

17:14

does make good marmalade so it just

17:18

shows what is possible now what I would

17:21

like to ask people is and have you ever

17:25

had a crop you've grown before and

17:33

usually been able to rely on have you

17:35

had a crop that for the last few years

17:38

has suddenly failed and if so what is it

17:42

I'm gonna finish the slideshow now if

17:46

that's all right that's great

:00

hello everybody and thanks for for

0:01

joining in the this lecture or talk

0:06

really features episodes illustrating

0:09

something about people's history but

0:12

more especially it looks at radical

0:14

responses to particularly lower levels

0:17

of the social structure to the

0:19

industrial society that emerged over the

0:22

past 200 years in Britain and especially

0:25

in relation to industrialization --zz

0:28

impact on the on the environment so in a

0:31

sense it's an introduction to greening

0:34

history and for me it's a bit of an

0:36

experimental exercise so um certainly

0:40

welcome any feedback later on on on this

0:43

um I suppose it's always difficult to

0:48

know where to begin but it struck me

0:50

that looking at the at the factory

0:54

system that was part of the Industrial

0:57

Revolution as a useful point in

1:00

beginning to connect with the early

1:03

concerns about the environmental

1:06

degradation caused by fossil fuel

1:09

powered technology to clean cotton mills

1:11

and coal mining and and so on

1:16

they were probably familiar with the

1:19

fact that in many ways the Industrial

1:22

Revolution was very liberating

1:23

experience for people it opened up many

1:26

new opportunities and lifestyles for

1:29

millions of people but its effects also

1:34

had their their darker side I suppose as

1:37

William Blake in his poem Jerusalem

1:39

[Music]

1:41

alluded to when he talked about dark

1:43

satanic Mills and for industrial cities

1:46

like Manchester and and several others

1:49

there was a hard reality there that poor

1:52

public health poor housing conditions

1:54

for sanitation for a very long time into

1:58

industrialization and that swiftly

2:00

stimulated both criticism and the search

2:05

for alternative ways of managing the new

2:08

economic system we could begin by noting

2:13

that one of the first significance and

2:15

systematic survey is of the

2:17

environmental impacts unleashed by

2:19

factories and cotton mills was produced

2:21

by Frederick Engels when he was working

2:24

as a we would now call a middle manager

2:26

that's a Manchester mill his book about

2:30

workers lives in Manchester the

2:31

condition of the working class in

2:33

England which is still widely available

2:35

in paperback was published in German in

2:39

1844 by the English translation didn't

2:43

actually appear until forty years later

2:45

in 1887 which limited its immediate

2:48

appeal in in in Britain there were as we

2:52

know many other commentators writing

2:53

about similar experiences of working

2:58

populations and the the dark satanic

3:02

aspects of industrialization Charles

3:05

Dickens is an obvious one who springs to

3:07

mind from the 1840s onwards the angles

3:10

as a close friend of coal Marx and

3:13

involved with workers movements in the

3:14

world's first industrial economy which

3:16

we were note is something distinctive

3:19

namely that the desire to value the

3:22

environment often came from within

3:25

workers movements the sought to direct

3:28

the wealth produced by industrial

3:29

capitalism towards improving the lived

3:32

the natural surroundings angles

3:37

particularly acknowledged the

3:39

revolutionary aspirations of what was

3:41

termed the o'night movement that

3:43

flourished chiefly between the 1820s and

3:45

1830s only nights were largely new

3:49

industrial workers including many women

3:52

who sought to replace private capitalism

3:55

with cooperative communities where

3:58

industry and horticulture could be

3:59

combined in a more appealing lifestyle

4:03

the Oh Knights helped to inspire the

4:05

modern cooperative movement that emerged

4:07

in Rochdale in 1844 and they took their

4:11

clue from Robert Owen who you can see on

4:13

the top left of the screen Robert Owen

4:18

was a managing partner in a cotton mill

4:21

and he rejected

4:25

usual capitalist ways of running

4:28

industry establishing a model mill

4:30

community at new lanark on the falls of

4:34

clyde at the beginning of the 19th

4:36

century as a terrific heritage center

4:38

now what sort of well worth were worth a

4:40

visit the community he created there

4:45

tried to blend improved industrial

4:47

working and living conditions with

4:50

education and care from the natural

4:51

environment and a couple of the pictures

4:58

on the screen show really on the top

5:00

right the an artist's impression of the

5:04

new zanuck mills in the early 19th

5:06

century and you can see it surrounded

5:08

them and indeed still today by an

5:12

amazing countryside you can't quite see

5:14

on there I think we can just see perhaps

5:16

the the waterfalls that distinguish the

5:18

place and the the picture below is of a

5:26

schoolroom that Owen created within the

5:28

community buildings you can see along

5:32

the wall of the schoolroom

5:36

representations of animals from

5:38

different kinds of the world in fact

5:40

nature study provided a major part of

5:43

the school curriculum it's not time to

5:45

go into it in all detail but teachers

5:47

who taught at the school use the

5:52

surrounding environment as an amazing

5:54

teaching results in the school

5:56

curriculum to look at the human

5:59

relationship with the natural

6:00

environment and the need for human

6:03

beings to act responsibly in protecting

6:05

the wildlife within that within that

6:08

environment Robert Owen wrote up his

6:12

experience of his emerging social

6:14

philosophy in a book called the new view

6:17

of society

6:18

which promoted the idea that so-called

6:21

human nature was shaped neither by God

6:24

nor by inherited characteristics but by

6:27

the social and natural environment of

6:29

people experienced in other words if you

6:32

wanted better people who would treat

6:34

each other and the world around them

6:35

better then you needed to institute a

6:38

better social

6:39

and physically environment for them to

6:41

grow up in that became an influential

6:44

view the motion that environment shapes

6:47

personality and behavior was contested

6:51

idea but it also impacted on social

6:53

thinking that you can still find in

6:55

different formats up to the present day

7:01

whereas only nights and angles or the

7:05

revolutionary reconstruction of the

7:07

social and economic order as a way of

7:09

Ballantrae balancing industries

7:12

relationship with the environment many

7:14

middle-class reformers looked to

7:17

Parliament to deal with problems by

7:20

approving new laws or regulations to

7:23

govern industry but they too often had

7:26

to campaign from the grassroots as it

7:28

were to win attention to their demands

7:31

from those who had real power in in

7:35

government and and Parliament throughout

7:39

much of the 19th century environmental

7:41

campaigns also sprang out of a growing

7:44

myriad of what were called steam

7:46

intellect society it was a terrific name

7:49

but it covers everything from mechanics

7:51

and technical institutes literary

7:53

philosophical and scientific societies

7:56

mutual improvement societies many of

7:59

which were directed by middle-class

8:00

professional people or highly skilled

8:03

amateur scientists and naturalists one

8:06

early example of a steam intellect

8:08

society emerged in a northeast of

8:13

England as the Natural History Society

8:15

of Northumberland and Durham founded in

8:19

1829 was one of the earliest provincial

8:22

Natural History societies during the

8:25

middle of the century its members became

8:27

alarmed by the effects of chemical

8:29

pollution on trees especially in the

8:31

1860s as the chemical industry began to

8:34

take hold they therefore campaigns

8:38

successfully to a degree for the

8:41

establishment of a Royal Commission in

8:43

1874 to review the effectiveness of what

8:46

we call the alkali acts that were meant

8:48

to regulate noxious emissions from

8:51

chemical and other in

8:53

establishments and they're getting

8:55

evidence to the Royal Commission based

8:57

on the survey they conducted of two

8:59

hundred and fifty trees backed by some

9:02

of the possibly first-ever photographs

9:05

of the destruction of trees by chemical

9:07

pollution and what you can see there are

9:09

those couple of those early photographs

9:11

from Gateshead and from Washington

9:14

County Durham and showed trees dying as

9:18

a result of pollution from the nearby

9:20

chemical works now the Royal

9:23

commission's impact was slight in terms

9:25

of introducing any regulation but the

9:29

natural history societies use of

9:30

photography demonstrated how you could

9:33

work with the technology that was

9:34

evolving within the industrial

9:36

revolution to create you campaigning

9:39

tools they weren't the only people who

9:45

took a new view of what was happening

9:48

with the environment on the one hand you

9:53

had advocates of social revolution I

9:56

suppose and regulatory reform so they

10:00

were emerging as options in the in the

10:01

19th century but in the Northeast and

10:04

other innovation played into possibly a

10:07

religious tradition or habit of

10:09

organizing people based around the

10:12

principle of encouraging people to

10:14

reform their personal behavior in this

10:17

case as a way of protecting wildlife

10:19

particularly birds man called William

10:23

Edwin Adams a former merch artist as

10:26

part of that other working class

10:28

movement for reform and sometimes

10:30

revolution of the early of the 1830 and

10:33

40s was a radical campaigning journalist

10:37

who edited the weekly version of the

10:40

Northeast highly popular radical mass

10:43

circulation newspaper the Newcastle

10:45

Chronicle Adams was a man of many

10:49

interests and wide contacts he became

10:53

alarmed by stories of cruelty to animals

10:56

in the middle of the 19th century and

10:58

used his newspaper the Newcastle weekly

11:01

Chronicle a sort of news magazine

11:04

to create a children's corner in which

11:07

children can publish their own writing

11:09

and their own views you know in October

11:13

1876 to serve as a basis for a society

11:17

he created called

11:19

the Dickie bird society name was chosen

11:21

by children rather than Tim but it was

11:24

dedicated to quote kindness to all

11:27

living things the Society of little

11:30

people it would help to feed the birds

11:32

in wintertime but also promised not to

11:35

take their nests in spring unlike some

11:38

cruel boys Adams believed that the

11:41

children had joined the society and

11:43

wrote up their good deeds or exposed

11:45

acts of cruelty and some of them did

11:47

should be the voice of the society

11:49

reported in their own words which was

11:51

quite at what a radical departure the

11:54

Dickie bird Society was a vast success

11:58

it began with about 400 members in 1876

12:02

had grown to a hundred thousand members

12:05

of children by 1886 and hit 140,000 by

12:11

1888 and continued to grow into the

12:14

early part of the 20th century and as

12:17

the weekly Chronicle was taken by Jordie

12:19

exiles all over the country and more

12:21

widely the membership wasn't limited to

12:23

the Northeast to consolidate this

12:27

movement for bird welfare Adams I think

12:32

pinched an idea from the Methodists and

12:36

organized periodic huge gatherings and

12:39

parades even in the rain you can see one

12:41

just on the bottom left there and notice

12:44

all the umbrellas it was a very very

12:46

rainy day as this huge crowd of children

12:49

marched to a theatre even do castle

12:51

where they celebrated the Dickie bird

12:54

society and what it stood for it's quite

12:58

cute really fast forwarding a bit to the

13:04

the 1920s we can find her I guess a

13:10

combination of a sort of OE night social

13:12

engineering and also reform this was

13:16

blooming

13:17

in the 1920s and 1930s bourbon C was

13:23

then a very poor densely populated

13:26

London borough with particularly grim

13:29

health and housing conditions located on

13:32

the edge of the London Docks where many

13:34

of the residents worked in 1919 the

13:38

voters elected a Labour council for the

13:41

first time and this one had a well

13:44

worked out plan for improving public

13:46

health but as an adjunct to that plan

13:48

included a community beautification

13:51

scheme as was called in the parlance of

13:54

the time believing that trees and

13:56

flowers were important in improving the

13:58

quality of life the new council film

14:01

creative ways around severe obstacles to

14:05

spending money on beautification the

14:08

town clerk tried his best to stop them

14:10

but they found ways of making it happen

14:13

and they also overcame derision that

14:16

greening the city as we might now say

14:18

would be possible or even even desirable

14:23

we can see in the pictures there

14:26

examples of what they sought to achieve

14:30

a community garden trees in the terrace

14:34

streets and the enormous civic pride of

14:36

planting a tree and doing other things

14:40

when the council took office there was

14:42

barely a blade of grass or anywhere to

14:45

plant but blade of grass in the borough

14:47

over the next few years

14:49

trees were planted in terraced streets

14:51

for the first time most streets

14:53

eventually had a tree line by the end of

14:56

the 1920s which was quite an achievement

14:59

thousands of flowers were planted in

15:01

squares or derelict open spaces and

15:03

imaginatively they managed to get hold

15:06

of disused church yards it's the

15:09

utilised as we were now call them pocket

15:10

parks but they were full of flowerbeds

15:14

and seats for people to sit on and then

15:16

enjoy a quiet contemplation window boxes

15:20

proliferated in some of the terraces and

15:22

and tenements and even a small housing

15:26

development was created on garden city

15:29

principles within the

15:31

within the borough Berman's II became

15:33

that's largely now forgotten but

15:35

Berman's he became in the interwar years

15:37

nationally in the in fact

15:39

internationally famous for its

15:41

pioneering achievements and others

15:44

sought to follow an interesting example

15:46

to municipal socialism in which the

15:49

elected representatives brought about

15:50

something that had been thought

15:53

impossible a 1930 is london county

15:56

council was promoting the berman c

16:00

beautification principles across the

16:02

across the capital that you find

16:04

internationally continuing near legacies

16:09

of this if you if you put Beautification

16:11

Committee council calls had committees

16:14

and had a Beautification Committee which

16:16

drove a lot of this you put

16:18

Beautification Committee in to Google

16:20

you'll find halls of them across North

16:22

America at the moment they are really

16:25

you know just try to plant flower beds

16:27

and they're friends of parks and things

16:29

like that

16:32

Berman's he demonstrated what could be

16:36

done berry form that linked the

16:38

environment with health and where the

16:41

ballot box opened the way to change but

16:44

it was very different where vast tracts

16:46

of open land were in private ownership

16:48

and access was denied to the public here

16:51

you could find tensions both present and

16:53

antagonistic these some of these came to

16:57

a head in the 1930s as young workers

16:59

taking a lead from me young Communist

17:02

League as it happened demanded access to

17:05

the open air and the natural environment

17:07

they wanted to get out of the cities and

17:09

have the right to roam the most famous

17:12

episode in this struggle is perhaps some

17:14

of you know was a kinder scout in the

17:17

Peak District in Derbyshire in April

17:20

1932 four hundred young men and women

17:24

from Manchester and that's what

17:26

photograph of them on the screen clashed

17:31

with the landowners gamekeepers who

17:33

tried to prevent them from walking

17:35

across the Moors several of the

17:37

ringleaders were arrested and then in

17:41

prison for riotous assembly for a few

17:43

months

17:45

but became popular heroes in the in the

17:47

in the process important thing about

17:50

this piece of high-profile direct action

17:54

was that it shifted parliamentary and

17:56

public opinion to a large degree in

17:59

favor of open access and although the

18:02

Second World War

18:03

put a halt on progress for a while the

18:06

groundwork laid in the 1930s by people

18:08

like the kinder scout Ramblers paved the

18:11

way you fer the post-war labor

18:13

government to establish national parks

18:15

after 1949 you can trace the emergence

18:18

of the National Park legislation 1948-49

18:21

back to the kinder scout incident and

18:25

similar incidents of the 1930s just

18:30

lastly I wanted to touch on the clean

18:33

air campaigns of the 19 late 1940s 1950s

18:39

they these were part of its him to

18:42

introduce smokeless zones and curb the

18:45

intense fogs or smog that afflicted many

18:47

British cities the most notorious smoke

18:50

was one that hit London in December 1952

18:54

and was blamed for the deaths of about

18:57

4,000 people which is staggering when

18:59

you think of that that number it was so

19:02

thick that Sadler's Wells abandon an

19:04

opera after the first act as the

19:06

audience couldn't actually see the stage

19:08

for the smoke Birmingham as you can see

19:12

on one of the news cuttings there and

19:14

other cities also suffered from the Fox

19:16

as well air pollution from burning coal

19:24

had been a concern way back to these

19:27

16th and 17th centuries but it grew

19:31

especially more alarming during the 19th

19:33

century with the so much technology

19:36

based on steam and cold power it pretty

19:41

powerful vested interests a lack of

19:43

alternatives to to coal as well as a

19:46

short supply of smokeless fuel as that

19:48

was gradually developed or discovered

19:51

combined to prevent any serious action

19:53

to deal with the problem up to the

19:58

into the Second World War and then

20:00

immediately after the war there were

20:02

moves to again really from the

20:04

grassroots upwards to try to push clean

20:07

air as a feature of the new world that

20:10

many people thought they would get after

20:12

1945 a commentary council in some ways

20:17

pioneered the way by declaring that it

20:20

wanted to introduce a smoke-free zone

20:22

there was opposition to that locally so

20:25

they called a referendum which local

20:27

authorities were able to do in those

20:29

days and won the referendum and was able

20:32

to go on to acquire powers to introduce

20:35

smoke-free zones

20:36

Manchester also acquired powers to do

20:39

that but they were pretty exceptional as

20:41

local authorities there was a public

20:47

desire to achieve clean air that emerged

20:52

at the very end of the 1940s and

20:55

especially during the early 1919 50s I

21:00

think it's an under researched area of

21:03

environmental campaigning you can find

21:08

plenty of accounts of of campaigns for

21:13

cleaning up the smoke problem and the

21:15

fog and smog problem in local newspapers

21:18

around the country but I'm not sure

21:20

anybody has really searched it to to

21:23

bring it all together in one place but

21:25

it underpins the struggle to pass the

21:28

first Clean Air Act in 1956 most

21:33

accounts of the passing of the Clean Air

21:36

Act focus on fairly tortuous

21:38

parliamentary maneuvering is very sort

21:40

of high level in British society and

21:43

very little seems to be focused on the

21:46

role of community-based campaigning but

21:48

that was happening and it was impacting

21:50

on not not only on Labour MPs but on

21:54

Tory MPs to the extent that Gerald

21:57

nabarro who was a fairly flamboyant

22:00

idiosyncratic Conservative MP in the

22:02

1950s and 60s almost led the campaign in

22:06

Parliament to achieve Clean Air Act's

22:09

that would make a

22:11

a radical difference to making towns and

22:15

cities smoke-free he didn't really get

22:19

very far the Clean Air Act was passed in

22:21

1956 but a lot of local authorities most

22:25

of them in fact dragged their feet over

22:27

introducing the powers to set up

22:30

smoke-free zones and government didn't

22:32

encourage them really to to take it

22:34

forward see here this wonderful

22:39

photograph from Paddington in 1956 we

22:42

want clean air on that that banner the

22:46

growing public expectation that

22:49

something should be done to improve the

22:51

quality of the air that people breathed

22:53

it was something that gathered strength

22:56

really throughout the throughout the

22:58

1950s and 60s my my impression is that

23:04

campaigns about the environment began to

23:07

change from the 1960s especially after

23:11

Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring that

23:13

exposed the extent to which the use of

23:16

insecticides chemicals and other

23:18

industrial processes were affecting our

23:21

environment and destroying us aspects of

23:24

it particularly wildlife and insect life

23:27

a nobody knew where that would lead in

23:30

the end campaigns became broader I think

23:34

more focused on seeing human beings and

23:36

human activity as integral together as

23:40

part of the planets ecology rather than

23:43

living in separate universes which had

23:45

often been the view before the 1960s

23:49

even though movements became bolder they

23:52

would still focus on single or

23:55

particular issues to attract attention

23:57

like save the whales opposing motorways

24:00

curbing acid rain or the damage to the

24:03

ozone layer which was a huge concern at

24:06

one point but new organizations emerged

24:09

like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth

24:11

and even the WEA had a had a faltering

24:13

interest in in looking at the

24:17

environment and looking at how we deal

24:19

with it through adult education so in

24:22

1917 the London district

24:25

published this little stenciled pamphlet

24:29

it's quite quaint in terms of

24:31

old-fashioned technology because he

24:33

produced on a duplicator by HJ Firth and

24:38

Morris Goldsmith both staff tutors with

24:40

London University I think who work

24:42

closely with thee with the WEA at the

24:47

moment I think we're reengage in with

24:49

the environmental issue in the context

24:52

of climate emergency Greg mentioned the

24:57

the the green branch that we set up as a

24:59

somatic branch in the Northeast I've

25:03

been visiting some regions across the

25:05

country and there are others still to

25:07

come we've found enthusiasm in certainly

25:10

in Yorkshire and Humber and in the East

25:12

Midlands region and to some extent in

25:15

the northwest for doing establishing

25:18

something like a green branch release a

25:20

green presence within the curriculum

25:22

that can enable us to take on board some

25:25

of the broader environmental issues and

25:28

look at how well adult education could

25:30

be something of a dynamo or catalyst

25:32

sort of helping that that process along

25:35

so so that's something we've got

25:37

underway as an association currently I

25:41

think that's probably brought me to

25:43

pretty much the end of what I wanted to

25:45

say if anybody's interested in following

25:50

up some of the episodes I've mentioned

25:53

in more detail there's a little reading

25:55

list that I've put together the the top

25:59

half relates directly to some of the

26:02

examples that I've quoted earlier and

26:05

the bottom half from Colin wall talking

26:07

green downwards as a number of

26:11

interesting books that are you take the

26:14

whole issue much more broadly I think

26:16

they're all work really well written

26:18

they're quite interesting insights into

26:21

into the history into greening history I

26:24

suppose but also into different strands

26:27

of ideas that come together and have

26:30

been bequeathed to us by people who've

26:34

engaged in environmental campaigning

26:37

over the past

26:38

100 years and there's lots on Google you

26:40

could Google any of these and masses of

26:42

stuff really come up so think that

26:46

that's me for the moment thank Thank You

26:48

Nigel for a wonderfully interesting

26:51

canter through they the development of

26:55

the range of environmental campaigning

26:57

some of the things that were brand new

26:59

to me and I'm certain to to others but

27:01

it's taken us from the OE nights through

27:04

I love the type of this team intellect

27:06

society is great and they the early use

27:09

of photography campaigning when you

27:11

think about the sort of use of social

27:13

media today that kind of draws directly

27:15

from that tradition particularly at this

27:18

time in the in the general election

27:20

campaign and radical radical journalists

27:24

and authors taking us through they

27:27

they're campaigning and about 140,000

27:34

people in in that food so things like

27:37

the blooming Behrman see and escaped

27:42

activities to develop national parks and

27:44

and the the issues of air pollution

27:47

which you we see so much of right now we

27:50

know the parts of they in other parts of

27:53

the world as well as continuing to be a

27:56

problem in in in biggest cities and then

27:59

things ending for us around thinking

28:01

about campaigns around the environment

28:04

colleagues well you know we we are

English (auto-generated)

0:00

so thank you everyone for coming today to listen to me talk about plants from an insect's pointed new and this is

0:06

going to cover some of the more recent research that's come out regarding the field of wildlife gardening in

0:13

particular and I've been a bit look at it from a broad perspective so let's get it stuck right into it so these are some

0:20

flowers from my garden that I've been photographing throughout this year and I hope you'll agree what an attractive

0:25

selection of plants they are which brings me very much to my first point that when we think of plants in the

0:32

garden we've tended to think about them from an aesthetic point of view rather than the functional aspects of the

0:38

plants and that's no wonder because we create our gardens because they give us pleasure and that's obviously a very good thing in fact nature and culture

0:45

come together in the garden and because of this they are described as human-made

0:51

environments but obviously they contain wildlife but their potential to actually support wildlife is long been overlooked

0:58

and it's only really now that the fields of horticulture and ecology are beginning to meet in the middle and we

1:03

can actually begin to understand just how valuable our garden habitats are so

1:09

our Gardens typically typically contain dozens if not hundreds of plant species

1:15

and it's this that forms the foundation of a by a diverse ecosystem so a typical

1:21

garden may contain many thousands of animal species and perhaps not so unsurprisingly most of these are insects

1:28

a couple of interesting facts for you evidence they may contain more wildlife

1:36

than an equivalent size factor countryside I'll let you ever think about that in a moment what why might that be

1:42

London Singh gardens are in fact the better pollinated than those in farmland and we know that crop pollination zin

1:49

fields that are close to gardens enjoy better pollination rays so this comes

1:54

back to the fact that in our agricultural landscape rural landscapes the countryside that we appreciate

2:01

there's actually a lot less plant diversity than you might imagine whereas Gardens because they are

2:06

human-made environments where we're trying to cram in many different species tend to support more biodiversity

2:13

so if we bear this in mind we've got a lot of garden centers in this country we've got all sorts of very good plant

2:19

selling websites how do we decide the right criteria for what plants are good

2:24

for UK wildlife because not all plants are going to support insects in the garden how can we how can we actually

2:31

tell which ones are going to be best well a few years ago the Royal Horticultural Society did a large amount

2:38

of research into this and it's still ongoing as to what plants are supporting

2:44

which insects and some of that research has been very good abused it's a foundation in my own teaching the

2:50

subject but it's not without its criticisms and some of these the things that have come to light is that some of

2:55

the science behind it might not be quite as well investigated as we might have originally thought well one of the major

3:02

problems that's come in with this because this is a commercially used logo and where there's money to be made

3:07

people aren't necessarily always applying it in the most honorable way and so in recent with last couple years

3:14

I think this logo has been moved from perfect for pollinators to plants for

3:19

pollinators note the loss of the word perfect and this is because what garden centres have been doing and of the plant

3:26

retailers is applying the same the same label to different closely related

3:31

plants one of which might be excellent for pollinators and one which might not be very good at all and I'll be looking

3:38

at some of the reasons why that is throughout this presentation so I would suggest that you don't want to be

3:44

toasting a logo you need to develop your own compliant criteria and I'm going to give you the foundation of how to do

3:50

that today so we're going to look at pollinating insects primarily because

3:56

pollinating insects we've got a great deal that we can do to support them in the garden when it comes to the

4:01

herbivores or the plant eating insects we do it's a little bit more complicated and we will visit that later but we

4:08

can't go into great amounts of depth so if we think about pollinating insects what are they doing in the garden well

4:14

we know that plants produce pollen because it's the way of transferring their genetic material from one flower

4:20

to another from plant to plant but pollen isn't just something that coats the animal's body the insect body

4:27

it's also a protein it's a food source so we know that hover flies eat it bees eat some and they also feed it to their

4:34

Lobby because it's high-protein it helps them grow but that's not the only reward that insects gift for visiting flowers

4:42

flowers also produce nectar so this is a sugar rich carbohydrate and this is

4:47

given as a reward for carrying pollen for plant to plant which is a very high-energy activity flying around the

4:54

garden but it's important to know the normal plants play fair and some produce a larger amount of nectar than others

5:00

and this is something we can we can actually determine which we'll look at shortly okay so one of the things that

5:08

people tend to think about when they think of wildlife gardens is that they imagine the best wildlife gardens and

5:13

just filled with all wild or all native species and by native women plants that are originally part of the natural flora

5:20

of this country in a post ice age environment so you could assume that and

5:26

that would be an easy way of creating a wildlife garden but it's not the only story but if we look at our wild forms

5:32

of flowers it gives us a lot of information as to what flower types that insects want to visit so in this selection here we've got a

5:40

wild cherry a dog rose and also a herb Bennett which is the yellow flower gene

5:46

which so annoys people as a weed in their gardens now the similarity between all of these flowers is that they're all

5:53

very open and the pollinating parts the the stamens which bear the pollen are very visible if you look at the

6:00

particularly in the flower in the top left you can see right into the heart of the flower and that's where the nectar is in this particular case if we have a

6:07

look at some comparable cultivated plants and by cultivated I mean plants

6:12

that have had natural variations that have been selected for and interbred in order to produce new flower varieties

6:18

different colors different shapes and so on so when we look at classic cultivated

6:24

plants we often think of double flowers and this is something that garden centers will sell a lot of because

6:29

people are obviously going for the aesthetic quality of these plants but if we have a look at the flower in the

6:35

bottom left there the double cherry you can see that the flower is quite different from this

6:41

single flower and the problem is that the pollinating parts of the flower are actually sacrificed to make room for

6:47

more petals so this is moving away from what is good for wildlife and it becomes more about the visual impact if we look

6:55

at the rows at the bottom you can see that the flower is actually quite closed and some flower forms are so closed the

7:05

insect couldn't get into that flow if they wanted to and so even if there was nectar and pollen inside there they

7:11

might never be able to access it and if we have a look at the G on the bottom right you'll see that this is what's

7:17

described as a semi double flower so it's got more petals than they than the wild form and the reason teams are

7:23

particular interest to me is because I think germs are an excellent wildlife sporting plant for many different reasons there are long flowering they

7:30

are great for pollinating insects but most of the ones that are commercially available or I'm gonna send me people or

7:36

double and they and they should automatically be avoided in the wildlife gardening context so it's really

7:43

important to make sure that you're looking really closely at the labeling of these to make sure you're choosing the one that's best for wildlife so that

7:50

brings us to my first question and this is a rhetorical question our flowers for also pollinating insects I would suggest

7:57

that by applying some criteria which I'm going to show you and also maybe adjusting your expectations a little bit

8:03

that flowers can be for both of us thinking of us folk pleasure as well as being functional another question for

8:10

you and this is a question I think is going to become increasingly important as we fully accept the role that Gardens

8:16

have in supporting and maintaining our insect populations and not just in this country but throughout the world

8:23

consider what the ethics are of selling plants that do not function for wildlife this is a this is a really interesting

8:30

issue because we can fill our Gardens with plants which really do not support wildlife at all and if somebody's making

8:35

money out of that and we know how important Gardens are then this is a serious question that we need to ask ourselves

8:43

okay flower coloration now I'm sure many of you will have seen something very

8:48

much like this before so this is a decade's old research now that we know

8:53

that insects see a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum than we do and we can't actually see butterfly vision

9:01

can't see bee vision because we can't see directly through their eyes but we can simulate what they see by using a

9:06

range of UV filters and that's exactly what's being done here and you'll notice that in these image is that the

9:12

patterning or the striation on the petals of the flower become much more prominent when you're an insect and for

9:20

a long time it was assumed that this was pretty much how insects with finding flowers in the garden it's like a great

9:26

big target and this is a classic example this a lot of the geranium flower genus

9:31

and this is a geranium flower how this feature but it's also one of the plants too however it's not quite that simple

9:38

we now know from much more recent research that it's all about color

9:43

really and truly because bees have their color preferences and other insects have their own preferences but if we look at

9:49

these first and foremost we know that bees really prefer purple flowers and

9:54

this is because they see them more brightly against the background so you've got to imagine that it's just a

9:59

brighter tone against the background green and shortly after that then they will visit blue flowers as the next

10:06

preferable option then yellow and orange and finally the pale colors now the

10:11

observant among you might have noticed that red and pink are missing off this color chart if you like up at the top

10:16

and this is because believe it or not bees cannot see red now it's not to say

10:22

that they cannot pollinate red flowers because they do and I've seen it in my own garden however when a bee is

10:29

cruising over your garden that standard be cruising height they cannot see red against the background it just merges

10:35

with the green vegetation if we have a look at the color preferences for I'm

10:41

hoverflies and also pollen beetles they prefer the yellow orange part of the spectrum and certainly if you've ever

10:47

grown courgette you might well have noticed there will be lots of flies around across jets and hover flies don't

10:53

really get thought about much as the pollinators they lose out to the more popular bees but

10:59

they're an incredibly important part of the pollinators because they are some of the fruit tree pollinator specialists if

11:07

you don't know what a pollen beetle looks like you'd be forgiven because they're very very tiny and I only

11:12

noticed them in a big way in my garden when they landed on my yellow washing so the fact that they prefer yellow is

11:18

based on my own observations around for the scientific study here it's a project

11:27

that was done very recently called the outdoor man project and this is the University of Leeds but it's had some

11:33

other input from different universities and they established that the top ten

11:39

nectar plants based on the kilograms of sugar that each plant could produce per hectare per year this is the top ten and

11:47

they are a range of wildflower species that grow very commonly in the British

11:53

Isles not all of them quite as common as each other but I would imagine and many of you would be quite familiar with quite a few of these plants I would like

12:00

to ask you what is the common factor that links most of these plants I'll

12:05

show you the picture again and I'll give you a little well thing I've just put

12:13

that question into chat Fran so but but

12:19

by all means get typing your answers or we'll see how we go so everyone can find

12:26

chat and see what you think and we can unmute people if you would like to I

12:33

think you can unmute yourselves if you'd like to just click on your microphone don't be shy yes as one factor that

12:44

links most of these plants together I've got some answers here before you before you go and give everyone a minute so

12:51

I've got an odd David thank you very much for responding a lot of them a move a David's observed they are know yeah

13:01

thanks for coming in open single flowers question marks as well anymore for

13:08

anymore something about the hairiness of them I would just throw in I've got off with a

13:16

couple great lots of comments coming in Nigel they're very open to access for

13:21

pollinators Sally most are either UK natives or long-established archetypes I've got to

13:28

say Sally is running our next lecture so that's a very very good high quality

13:33

observation there thanks Sally any more or do you want to move on Fran

13:40

over to Josh no we move on because I think yeah I think several people have got it already

13:45

yes seven out of ten of them over you

13:51

can call it Lila colony like essentially they're all purple sorry seven out attending them a purple so what this

13:57

means is that we know that bees are likely to prefer purple flowers because

14:02

they offer the most nectar and this is why they see them more brightly in the landscape than any other color so we

14:09

don't know that for sure but we can we can pretty much assume because that's how evolution works so this is good to

14:14

know if we are attracting bees we always plant purple if we have a look at the

14:20

plants which have which aren't purple on this list we've got three significant species here and I'm going to look at

14:26

them each in detail we have a gray willow and this is a typical catkin type

14:32

flower that you will find on a an early flowering tree so a lot of our native early flowering trees produce these

14:38

catkin type flowers and catkins are a very dense form flowerhead there's lots

14:44

of pollen associated with it but not all catkins bear the same amount of nectar

14:50

and the reason the Salix genus or the willows produces so much nectar is

14:55

because they are only pollinated by insects whereas the other catkin

15:01

producing species like hazel also are wind pollinated too so this is a good one for pollinators early in the year

15:08

and we're gonna move on to the rank Wirt and this is a composite style flower or

15:13

compound flower and most people will recognize these as daisies and Italy

15:21

acceptable to think of them as days but each of these flower heads each

15:26

separate Daisy is actually comprised of several flowers and it's a little hard to get your head around but it might

15:31

help think of a block broccoli florets under these circumstances tickly when a broccoli floret goes to flower and you see it's got all these

15:37

individual flowers on it and each of those flowers has its own supply of nectar and it's well worth thinking

15:43

about the fact that thistles which also featured heavily on the top 10 list

15:48

the purple thistles are also composite flowers lastly on this list we have the

15:53

humble flowers so obviously humble that has the same root as the word umbrella and it helps

15:58

to think of them in this way and each of these flower heads can contain dozens if

16:04

not hundreds of flowers so one plant can bear many thousands of flowers at any

16:10

one time and we know that each of these flowers has its own egg to supply so this is why it features so highly in the

16:15

list if we have a look at these in detail though and there's no harm and in

16:20

fact it's a good idea to take inspiration from native planting to use in the wildlife garden but the problem

16:27

is is that not all the species that grow in the wild you would want to give room for in your garden and I wouldn't

16:33

necessarily want to give room for any of these and I'll go into the reasons why so gray willow or indeed any of the

16:39

willows they're very large trees they grow quickly but most importantly they are wet woodland species which means

16:46

they have high water requirements even if we plant them close to a building the

16:53

potential for it to cause subsidence and you know this is one of their known features so I would never plant willow

16:59

anywhere near a house or indeed any building rag wert has long been considered enemy number one of the wild

17:05

flowers because it's an agricultural weed and this is because it's toxic to wildlife and although grazing animals do

17:11

tend to avoid its if given half a choice that they got better pasture it can end up being chopped up into silage and hay

17:18

and this is one of the reasons that farmers are very keen on eradicating it from the landscape well this is a big

17:23

problem only because it's the main food plant at the cinema podcasting so you

17:30

could potentially make room for this in your garden if you had a meadow style garden but if you did you'd have to stay

17:35

on top of it you they'd had once it's flowered and before it set seed so that's a huge management

17:40

commitment so maybe it's not the best choice and this is a similar reason why I wouldn't plant hogweed either because

17:47

hogweed is very good at reproducing all those flowers go to seed and then it's got as its seen everywhere so you will

17:53

if you have one hop replant you'll have hundreds and the other thing to consider is as well most people struggle to sell

17:59

difference between our native hogweed which is fairly harmless and giant hogweed which is well known for giving

18:05

people very nasty burns so again but probably best avoided but we can take

18:11

inspiration from these types of flowers and apply it to other similar flowers that are available to us and if we look

18:16

at one of our native species we've got the oxeye Daisy and this is one of my favorites it's the largest of our native

18:22

daisies and it's a great garden plant very well behaved and tends to grow in a variety of soils and will happily grow

18:29

in a little bit of shade if it has to so we're good all-round generally and then

18:35

following that we've got the purple coneflower also known as echinacea this is not a native species this is from

18:41

North America but you can see it's a very good butterfly plant as in that picture and so I would genuine I would

18:48

want to include this in my garden on that basis we also have McComas Daisy another non-native that's almost to the

18:55

point where it's always considered naturalized in the UK landscape simply because it's escaped from gardens and it

19:01

does incredibly well on waste ground or disturbed ground and it's a great addition to our landscape because

19:07

believe it or not we haven't got as many different types of plants as other parts of Europe so having this having this

19:12

escaped from Gardens there's actually a massive boom to the bees in the garden sorry bees everywhere so I will draw

19:20

your attention to the fact that these have different flowering times and if you look at the bottom I've suggested that between these four plants it has

19:27

six months of flowering the next flower in the list the yellow cone flower rudbeckia not to the computer purple

19:34

coneflower are not related at all he's another species from North America and it's another good choice for Lake

19:40

pollinators it also flowers like the mccomus Daisy from August

19:46

so already I'm think about plants that are overlapping in their flowering time and also providing something that's

19:53

purple for certain insects and something that's yellow for other insects so I'm doubling up there next looking at the

20:02

umbels now I mentioned hogweed before you might be well aware over closely

20:07

related plant called parsley it's cow parsley and cow parsley

20:12

looks like hogweed is a very prolific cedar so if you were going to include it in your guards and you would end it with

20:18

a lot of it so it's a it's a management issue that I wouldn't necessarily want to inflict on anyone so I in this

20:24

circumstances I would choose a cultivar so this is where we started to get into the sort of specifics of different

20:30

cultivars and different species because this particular cultivar Raven's wing which has a copper colored foliage has

20:37

all the wonderful beneficial qualities of the wild cut cow parsley it's a very good pollinating plant but it doesn't

20:44

have the invasive tendency so we've made a good compromise there the same with the Achille amelia folium yarrow

20:51

moonshine which is a yellow form of the wild yarrow and wild white yarrow is a

20:57

is a good addition to any garden but it does tend to be a bit unruly so if you've got a small gardening you don't

21:03

want to do lots of management then I would recommend choosing any number of the yarrow cultivars because there are

21:09

many because all of them are attractive to different species because they come in many different colors so plant of you

21:14

in different colors and moving on to choice I possibly not immediately that

21:20

obvious it's an humble flower because it looks quite different from cow parsley in yarrow but it's another compound type

21:26

flower SRECs it's a compound flower but with it within a flower headed shape like this it is a it is a humble I

21:34

always include this in my garden because it's great for bees I enjoy eating it

21:40

and it's one of the few companion plants that actually works so it's very

21:45

effective at repelling carrot fly strike and so I use it around my carrots when I'm growing them last but not least we

21:53

have the ice plant which used to be known as sedum but it's just been reclassified into a new genus

21:59

and this is another non-native species but it flowers very late in the year so it lasts approximately from August

22:05

through to November so there'll be some still just about in flower now and this

22:10

is a good plan we know this this attracts butterflies and this is really important to have butterfly plants late

22:15

in the year because it might not be immediately obvious that we have a handful of native UK species that do

22:21

actually overwinter so they go into hibernation but before they go into hibernation they need these lakes food

22:27

sources so this is a good choice between all these they're seven months of flowering so for plants overlapping

22:32

timings and different colors another thing on flower shapes so we've

22:38

looked at what I be described as quite always can be accessed by most insects

22:45

but some flower shapes require slightly more specialized plant pollinator relationship and it's best described as

22:53

the insects mouth parts are like a key to a lock and this is because various plants have decided an advantage in them

22:59

evolutionary speaking to make it slightly harder for pollinators to get at the nectar and this is so that they

23:05

end up with more pollen and they can put tons more pollen attached to their body so they can transmit more pollen from

23:12

flower to flower but this means you do need to think a bit more about whether these are going to be accessible for

23:19

most insects in the garden whether it requires more specialized mouth parts so peppermint has a narrow tubular spike

23:27

and depending on the depth of the flower it might be that so some bees actually can't get in use their mouths cars to

23:32

get inside it so short tongue bees might struggle Sage is similar there's a lot of different variations on Sage and some of

23:40

these are actually very narrow tubes again and it would require the services

23:45

of a much longer tongue pollinator like a long tongue bee or a butterfly or a moth and lastly on this we've got a bee

23:53

balm which is also known as bergamot and this is conversely represented by a book

23:58

to fly in this image but you can see the butterflies got a long proboscis which it unfurls and then it can get all the

24:05

way into the flower and get the nectar so that requires of all these free that

24:10

requires the most specialized feed equipment in orders field to access the reward at the bottom of the flower so

24:18

this is my first proper quiz for you I would like you to imagine that you are a

24:23

bee and could you please put these flowers in your order of preference I'll give you a minute to think about this

24:32

I've just put the question up on all of which flowers are better the bees on

24:38

chat so see if you can make your way to the speech bubble chat and give it a go

24:44

put your order okay how the answers

24:59

flooding in not yet but I'm everybody's thinking about it don't be shy don't be

25:04

shy everybody on the call so we've got two we've got yes a so the question is

25:12

which are best for bees you need to put them in order based on everything oh I've got got

25:18

we've got some answers that they're rolling in now okay and we don't have any consistent answers yet

25:25

I've got keep them coming

25:31

see seems to be a favorite for the best so far

25:37

David and pearl have all gone for see for the first Fionna think see Elizabeth

25:47

think see is the top one shall we yeah shall we move on yeah well don't you

25:54

want to tell us I'm good tell us the top one and then I will go to the second one which is that which is

25:59

the best let's see well if I tell you I

26:07

sees the best I'll be giving a ready answer for all of them all right okay all right fine so we've got pretty much

26:13

even split between answers so far between B and D secondly we've got a

26:18

couple of C's as well actually so lang very open on which is the second-best

26:23

France so you're gonna prove misery alright then okay so this is the order they go okay it looks like not

26:34

falling for my obvious trap for them which was to put the purple flower first because although a is a purple flower

26:41

and it is a highly cultivated form of flower and it offers nothing for bees

26:47

there's just no pollinating parts left so I'm glad you didn't fall for that so then after that if I was a bee I'd be

26:54

going for the blue ones next is the next best sort of nectar and then followed by D and B because that's the order I would

27:01

see them in the garden in terms of how they were stand out to me within the garden environment okay so first prize

27:07

goes to David David Beasley well done you Arthur of the only person whose odds today you've got it spot-on so

27:13

congratulations well done David okay so let's move on so

27:19

I've talked about plants and pollinators for most parts and we know that because

27:25

plants want to be pollinated they are essentially insects oh sorry let's go

27:34

back the pollinating insects are a generalist because we know that plants want to be pollinated they don't make it too

27:39

difficult for them apart from those instances of tubular flowers that I've mentioned however plant-eating insects

27:46

the herbivores have a much harder time a bit because of course plants it's not in their interest to be eaten at all so

27:52

they've developed all these defenses to stop insects eating them so spines chemicals bitter taste all sorts of

27:58

things that have been evolved over the course of hundreds of millions of years and as insects adapt to these defenses

28:07

then the plants are forced to ramp it up a little in order to defend themselves and this is described as an arms race

28:13

and as I explained before it's been going on for very long time so this is a

28:18

very complex relationship is had lots of time to be evolved and that's fueled the process of specialization so this means

28:25

now that there are insects which only eat one plant or usually more usually

28:31

they only a closely related group of plants so these the relationship between herbivores and plants is entirely

28:36

specialized so how does this affect the plant choices that we make for our guards in

28:43

well we've got some lists here and this is from the butterfly conservation org

28:49

and I think this is well worth having a look at if you're interested in supporting herbivores within the garden

28:55

so the first list we're looking at is for moth caterpillars and there's lots of species that I do include in my

29:02

garden in this but I certainly don't include all because some of them are a little bit greedy and but you'll notice

29:07

down at the bottom we've got yarrow and I've got Campion in my garden Mullens as well mint which we've looked

29:13

at already so we've got the beautifully named mint moth which obviously indicates its main food plants and if

29:20

you want to have a look at this I do recommend having a look at the resources available on butterfly conservation or

29:25

because it's a great website gives you lots of tips for identifying moths and butterflies as well we have a look at

29:32

the second list this is for butterfly caterpillars and I'd like to look at a couple in more detail so we've got the

29:39

humble stinging nettle much reviled plant but important for herbivores

29:44

nonetheless and we've also got thistles which I'll look at after Nettles though first and foremost let's have a look at

29:51

the relationships between nettles and the herbivores that eat them so this is

29:56

just a snapshot of the caterpillars that feed on this plant so we have six

30:03

species of moths and four species of butterflies and it's not to say that they only feed on Nettles but they

30:09

primarily feed on that also it's their primary food plant so if you start taking Nettles out of the garden

30:15

entirely and if every space public space every wild space was managed to remove

30:21

all nettles and the populations of these insects would crash overnight in fact if we have a look at it in detail we can

30:27

see that there are whopping 123 insect species associated with just things one

30:33

plant only some of these are pollinating insects so we have four species of

30:38

thrips and if you don't know what the Freak is you might well have encountered them on your vegetables if you grow them they're annoying little white punks we

30:49

also have 18 species of beetles and weevils nine species of true flies and

30:55

38 species of true bugs but the really interesting group is bottom left we have

31:01

54 species of butterflies moths and micro marks so this is a real stalwart

31:06

this plant and we can tell that it's a well eaten plant because it's evolved very characteristic defenses that also

31:12

no effect of the little barbs that it puts in a skin so it's quite an

31:18

important plant in our native landscape if we look at officials now two of these

31:26

whistles are from the top 10 net to list so we've got a spear thistle and we've got a marsh vessel the spear faithful is

31:33

considered one of the most prolific agricultural weeds there is and this is removed left right and centre from farm

31:40

landscapes and unfortunately at the expense of pollinators and also the birds that tend to eat the flower heads

31:47

the seed heads once they've gone over so not having them in the landscape at all is a big problem but I wouldn't want to

31:53

include them in your garden because they are a genuine verify any weed they are invasive I wouldn't plant them anywhere

32:00

Marsh whistles a little less invasive and it's a specialist as the name suggests it's a specialist of dumper

32:07

soils you could plant it in a meadow type situation if you really wanted to you could probably wait for it to arrive

32:13

by itself self colonization because thistles are very good at doing that however you're

32:19

going to have to manage it you're going to have to remove those flower heads when you've finished flowering because of what your neighbor will have fizzles

32:25

to and they might not feel quite so positively about it so what can we take from this we've got the free plants here

32:32

all within the same genus they're all within the cirsium genus but it's only the one on the left and the right which

32:38

were actually native to this country we've also in the middle got the cultivated form of a plumed fissile

32:45

cirsium regulary and this cultivar is called a trapper pureum and it's another example we're

32:51

choosing the the cultivated form is a smart move because it has all the

32:56

wildlife benefits is great for pollinators its own when in my garden it's in black fly which might not be

33:03

everyone's idea of fun but then I get to watch the lady Birds feeding on the black site and they also the ants which

33:09

come in milk the aphids too so it's a real little powerhouse of the interesting wildlife and you'll notice

33:16

as well in this image that was taken in my garden it's got cook who spit on it and that is the protective sac of them

33:23

for the larvae of a frog hopper and this frog hopper obviously thinks this is a

33:29

good food plant so even though this isn't a native species it is close

33:34

enough it's described as a mere native it's so close to the wild forms that we have that herbivores cannot tell the

33:41

difference in pollinators that can't tell the difference either so the major advantage to choosing this particular

33:47

variety is that it's a non seeding hybrid so it doesn't spread across the garden it's really important to stress

33:54

that it's a shame though because it's such a great plant I wish it did come true from seed and I wish it did germinate well but it simply doesn't so

34:05

a little quiz for you here see if you're still all paying attention I would like

34:10

you to match the plant to the pollinator please and give you a minute to think about this there may be a tick so you

34:23

don't have to type everything maybe just put the first letter so that e goes with whatever it is so you're not having to

34:30

I'm not sure I'd be able to type all of those very quickly so and apologies to

34:36

Elizabeth Gibbs who also got the correct answer in the last round ok so gosh this is quite difficult

34:44

I'll just well I think about it haven't

34:57

got any responses yet is everyone still there I'm gonna give it a go if you want to just do one that's fine as well I

35:07

think okay we've got one coming in now Jill suggesting R equals H Pearl's going

35:14

with the hover goes with the rudbeckia and the bee goes with the action area and

35:23

she's going for easy for B sounds like

35:35

people have been paying attention this is good okay oh gosh we got loads now

36:05

okay okay here we go

36:11

so the logic behind this is the short

36:18

tongue B won't have a long enough tongue to get inside the very narrow tubes of the monarda it's just not possible it

36:25

can access the echinacea because it's compound flower and it's an easy open access flower

36:30

we know that the hoverfly will by preference always find yellow flowers

36:36

first so that's why it's associated with that and of course that leaves the butterfly but it's an incredibly long tongue to deal with the very narrow

36:42

tubes of the menage and so well done if you got that right okay I'm not gonna try and work out who did but that was

36:49

fantastic Thank You Francis to say it's a everything all right I'm just gonna

36:56

wrap up a very quick summary okay so choosing plans for the wildlife garden if you are debating between choosing

37:03

wild or cultivated the question you need to be asking yourself is are the flowers easily accessible are they going to

37:09

contain nectar and bee pollen rich in order to sort that out to single blooms and you should be okay in most

37:16

circumstances if you're looking at flower color is your plant selection your design for the garden have you

37:22

include putting have you included purple and blue flowers for the bees have you included yellow and orange

37:28

flowers for the hover flies or the flies and some of the beetles do include different colors that flower at the same

37:34

time to support the broadest range of pollinators flower shapes is open to all

37:39

pollinators or does it require specialist and proboscis feeding tube to be able to get at the nectar if you

37:45

include lots of daisies fissile like compound flowers and umbels in your guards and you're always doing the best by the pollinators in your garden and

37:53

lastly plants for herbivores ask yourself is this plant a native or is it

37:59

in their native and if you include a range of these along with some of the more exotic species in the garden from

38:04

other parts of the world then you're doing the best you can to support plant eating insects - okay that's all