A new law coming into effect in Colorado in July is banning everyday products that intentionally contain toxic “forever chemicals”, including clothes, cookware, menstruation products, dental floss and ski wax – unless they can be made safer.

Under the legislation, which takes effect on 1 July, many products using per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances – or PFAS chemicals linked to cancer risk, lower fertility and developmental delays – will be prohibited starting in 2026.

By 2028, Colorado will also ban the sale of all PFAS-treated clothes, backpacks and waterproof outdoor apparel. The law will also require companies selling PFAS-coated clothing to attach disclosure labels.

The initial draft of state senate bill 81, introduced in 2022, included a full ban on PFAS beginning in 2032. But that measure was written out after facing opposition.

Colorado has already passed a measure requiring companies to phase out PFAS in carpets, furniture, cosmetics, juvenile products, some food packaging and those used in oil and gas production.

The incoming law’s diluted version illustrates the challenges lawmakers have in regulating chemicals that are used to make products waterproof, nonstick or resistant to staining. Manufacturers say the products, at best, will take time to make with a safer replacement – or at worst, are not yet possible to get made in such fashion.

The American Chemistry Council said the bill before its dilution would have created “severe disruption for Coloradoans” as well as undercut “the compromises that were reached in 2022 PFAS legislation”. The council said the original bill would have created “broad, sweeping bans before that law [had] even been implemented”.

But the trade group later said that it appreciated “the efforts of Colorado lawmakers to take a more focused approach to the issue”, adding: “Policymakers at both the state and federal levels seem to be recognizing that it is not scientifically accurate to group all fluoro chemistry together and that there are critical, safe uses of this chemistry.”

Gretchen Salter – an adviser with Safer States, a group that says Colorado is one of 28 states to adopt policies on PFAS – told the Denver Post in March: “The more we look for PFAS, the more we find. That makes regulating PFAS really tricky because it is in so many things.”

But the new law does not account for PFAS that are already in the environment. Colorado recently found that 29 of more than 2,000 water treatment facilities in the state do not meet new federal limits on PFAS levels of four parts per trillion.

The ubiquity of “forever chemicals” was illustrated recently by a study that found microplastics in penises for the first time, raising questions about a potential role in erectile dysfunction. The revelation comes after the pollutants were recently found in every human placenta tested in a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential health impacts on developing foetuses.

In Colorado, state senator Lisa Cutter, one of the sponsors of the new law there, has said she still wants a complete ban on PFAS but acknowledges the problems. “As much as I want PFAS to go away forever and forever, there are going to be some difficult pivots,” she told the outlet.

They include balancing the potential cost to consumers in making products PFAS-free. Cutter told CBS News that it was “really hard” challenging lobbying groups that “spent a lot of money ensuring that these chemicals can continue being put into our products and make profits”.

Cutter said had been accused of stifling innovation and industry. She said she believed companies could be successful while also looking out for the communities they serve.

“Certainly, there are cases where it’s not plausible right away to gravitate away from them, but we need to be moving in that direction,” Cutter said. “Our community shouldn’t have to pay the price for their health.”

George Monbiot, whom I generally greatly respect, sounds more outraged by the RSPCA than by the factory farms, or the supermarkets that support them, or the legislation that allows people to torture birds and animals on a mass scale (How Britain’s oldest animal welfare charity became a byword for cruelty on an industrial scale, 18 June). He tries and finds guilty a charity that raises its funds through small shops and donations, and is dependent on volunteers, for not standing up to big business interests. Instead of criticising the RSPCA, dare I suggest that those of us who care about this could join those volunteers, and help support their aims for a cruelty-free country from a place of solidarity?
Sushila Dhall
Oxford

Thanks to George Monbiot for highlighting this iniquitous RSPCA Assured scheme for animal-rearing. It makes me so angry when I see this displayed in places like Marks & Spencer. Chris Packham should condemn the misuse of animals very publicly and resign as its president.
Molly Sendall
Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

A former employee of Donald Trump’s pre-presidency organization has publicly claimed that he once made jokes about Nazi “ovens” while Jewish executives were in the same room.

Barbara Res – a lead engineer on the construction of Trump Tower and author of a memoir, Tower of Lies, about her almost two decades working for the former president – told MSNBC on Sunday that her erstwhile boss would make “ridiculous remarks”.

“We had just hired a residential manager, a German guy,” Res said. “And Donald [Trump] was bragging among – to us executives, there were four of us – about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy – he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled.

“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that. But he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people, and that’s the way he was.”

The Nazis in Germany systematically murdered more than 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and the second world war, and burned the bodies of many in ovens at concentration camps.

Res’s story on Sunday came as both parties are attempting to court the Jewish vote in November’s election, which is expected to be a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden. That vote may be in play over the Biden White House’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Trump has argued that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats hate both Israel and Judaism, saying that he and his Republican party are better placed to help end the Gaza war.

Res, who has been critical of Trump’s treatment of women in the past, said the former president’s “embrace of religion” is “absolute nonsense”. She didn’t elaborate, but at the center of the criminal prosecution which recently led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies was hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor who alleged an adulterous affair with Trump early into his marriage with Melania Trump.

Res offered advice to Biden ahead of his televised debate with Trump, scheduled for Thursday.

“I wish [Biden] would goad him and make him go nuts, because when he goes nuts, he’s really crazy,” Res said.

Res’s MSNBC appearance came after Trump held a weekend campaign rally in Philadelphia. She recalled the Nazi joke Trump once told in part because of his choosing to repeat at the rally a hypothetical situation involving an electric boat that sinks under the weight of its batteries and electrocutes the passengers, who are then circled by a shark.

An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist who was forced into police protection with a panic button round his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded said activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the very chemicals he was investigating. Throw in two investigative journalists who realise not everything is as it seems, then uncover some startling truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.

On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, the husband and wife duo Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor dug into illegal toxic waste dumping in the UK and its links to organised crime. This time, they focus on “forever chemicals”, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and set out to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.

“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they are doing a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series, we don’t just want it to make your blood turn cold, we want it to make you question your own blood itself.”

It all started when Taylor and Ashby were sent a lead about the work of former farmer’s representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967, he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began to investigate strange goings on with animals close to the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in south Wales. He linked them to the dumping of waste by companies including the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which was producing PCBs.

PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to act as a fire retardant, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned since 1981 in the UK. However, due to their inability to break down – hence the term forever chemical – Gowan predicted their legacy would be a troubling one. “I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (a result of years of testing polluted grounds) led his pancreas and immune system to stop working. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be attributed to PCBs,” he said.

However, Gowan wasn’t a typical environmentalist. “A blue-blood high-society Tory and a trained lawyer who could out-Mozart anyone,” is how Taylor describes him in the series. He would even borrow helicopters from friends in high places to travel to investigate farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018 but the pair managed to get hold of his life’s work – confidential reports, testing and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes that aren’t cliche,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and really had to weigh them up. My goodness it’s a murky world we went into.”

The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this murky world is because of the award-winning actor Michael Sheen who, in 2017, came across Gowan’s work in a story he read. He was so blown away by it, and the lack of broader coverage, that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying: ‘Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon,’” says Sheen. “I took a camera with me and spent a couple of days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”

What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some traction in 2007, with pieces in the Ecologist and a Guardian article exploring how “Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”. One was described as smelling “of sick when it rains and the small brook that flows from it gushes a vivid orange.” But then momentum stalled.

Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor stumbled on a recording of Sheen giving the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learning he had conducted a life-spanning seven-hour interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for clout on this podcast; he is invested. For him, it’s personal as well as political. “Once you dig into it, you realise there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor working-class areas. There’s a sense that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”

Sheen even goes to visit some contaminated sites in the series, coming away from one feeling sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To be looking into a field and going: ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s toxic waste.’” Sheen was living a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people were like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. “‘Oh, I went to the most contaminated area in the UK and I think I may be poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen ended up being OK, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was a worry. “We literally had to work out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Have I just killed a national treasure?”

The story gets even knottier. Gowan’s findings turn out to be accurate and prescient, but the narrative around his journey gets muddy. As a character with a flair for drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, riveting story filled with action, which could not always be corroborated. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he’d been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and kept them neatly filed, would we have made this podcast?” asks Taylor, which is a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.

Ashby feels that Gowan understood how vital storytelling is when it comes to cutting through the noise. “We have so much science proving the scale of these problems we face and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. “I think Douglas got that. Fundamentally, he understood that stories motivate human beings to act. But then he went too far.”

However, this is not purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness doubles up as a groundbreaking investigation into the long-lasting impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” says Ashby. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive testing. So we have this commitment to go after the truth in a way that is hardly ever done.”

From shop-bought fish so toxic that it breaches official health advice to off-the-scale levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever recorded in soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we are now realising the scale of this problem. The public doesn’t realise that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still really present in our environment.”

To go even deeper into just how far PCBs have got into our environment and food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood it was a sobering moment. “I was genuinely emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought of this thing being in me that was banned before I was even born and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby adds: “We’ve managed physical risk in our life as journalists in Tanzania and with organised crime, but more scary than a gangster is this invisible threat to our health.”

In order to gauge the magnitude of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they headed to Anniston, Alabama, once home to a Monsanto factory. “As a journalist, you have an inbuilt scepticism and think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a whole massive school that can’t be used. There’s illnesses in children and cancers. It truly was the most powerful vignette of the worst-case example of these chemicals.”

It’s bleak stuff but instilling fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously, we’re really concerned about it,” says Ashby. “And although the environmental crises we face do feel overwhelming, it is incredible how a movement has formed and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson to take from Douglas is that the response doesn’t have to be resignation. It can be agency.”

Find a project …

Get stuck into some slimy stuff with the year-long Big Seaweed Search and help to monitor seaweed biodiversity along UK coastlines, a key indicator of ocean health. Just download the seaweed guide and recording forms and submit your results to
bigseaweedsearch.org.

If tackling plastic pollution is your thing, you can join beach cleaners worldwide to collect and record plastic particles with the Great Nurdle Hunt (nurdlehunt.org.uk); or help the University of Portsmouth gather pollution data in its Big Microplastic Survey (microplasticsurvey.org); alternatively, find a coastal clean-up near you through the Marine Conservation Society database (mcsuk.org).

For keen divers and snorkellers alike, citizen science project Seasearch offers free training to help divers identify and record what they spot underwater, contributing to a national effort to track the UK’s marine biodiversity at seasearch.org.uk.

Seagrass meadows themselves are powerhouses of biodiversity and sequester tons of carbon, too; you can join the movement to help restore the UK’s wild meadows with Seawildling Scotland, which welcomes volunteers to help plant and survey wild meadows at Loch Craignish (seawilding.org).

The Wild Oyster Project is trying to bring back the UK’s once vast oyster reefs, and invites volunteering, school and family groups to visit its restoration sites in England, Scotland and Wales, where you can pitch in to help conserve the fledgling reefs
(wild-oysters.org).

Keen rock poolers, take a look at the Rockpool Project, choose one of three survey guides, and record your finds at more than 70 coastal sites across the UK (therockpoolproject.co.uk).

Surfers Against Sewage has created the Ocean School, aimed at young nature-lovers, with a trove of free resources, classes and activities to get kids engaged with the sea
(sas.org.uk).

Turn your coastal sightings into citizen science by helping to monitor seabirds with the British Trust for Ornithology (bto.org), seals with the Dorset Wildlife Trust (seals.dorsetwildlifetrust.net), cuttlefish with the Cuttlefish Conservation Initiative (cuttlefishconservation.com), seahorses with the Seahorse Trust (theseahorsetrust.org), and even turtles with the Marine Conservation Society (mcsuk.org).

Where to visit …

With a recent £11.6m injection from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Plymouth will soon be home to the UK’s first national marine park, focused on connecting people with nature, restoring local salt marsh and seagrass habitat, and rehabilitating coastal landmarks such as Plymouth’s art deco seaside lido (plymouthsoundnationalmarinepark.com). The project is still in the early phases, but for the time being you can visit the local National Aquarium, the UK’s largest charitable aquarium, run by the Ocean Conversation Trust and focused on marine education (national-aquarium.co.uk).

Down in Devon, catch a wave or just enjoy the view at the UK’s first surfing reserve, established by Save the Waves, a nonprofit that works to protect places where wave ecosystems overlap with hotspots of marine biodiversity (savethewaves.org).

Head to the protected waters of Portelet and Bouley Bay around the island of Jersey, home to rare cold-water corals and kelp forests, and follow self-guided snorkel trails provided by the Blue Marine Foundation (bluemarinefoundation.com). Or scope out the self-guided trails on offer from the Scottish Wildlife Trust (scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk).

A bit farther afield, this year the Outer Hebrides wildlife festival returns between 22 and 29 June, with a fringe festival running throughout July, a celebration of coastal ecosystems with guided beach walks, wildlife surveys, exhibitions, and boat, surfing and snorkelling trips (outerhebrideswildlifefestival.co.uk).

Head to the Norfolk seaside towns of Horsey and Winterton to see one of the largest grey seal colonies in the UK: thousands of baby seals are born here during pupping season from November to January, a spectacle that you can observe from a safe distance on the surrounding dunes. The animals are protected by Friends of Horsey Seals, which can also arrange guided walks (friendsofhorseyseals.co.uk).

Annette Dittert: It’s bizarre that nobody’s talking about Brexit, or challenging Farage

For a German audience currently staring with disbelief at an upsurge of far-right populism on its own doorstep, the British elections are mostly a reminder of where the destructive cluelessness of populist politicians can lead a country. Nothing you want to look at too closely, when you are potentially just at the beginning of such a turn of events yourself.

But then there is something else. It’s not that Labour’s Keir Starmer is boring, as is often complained about here in London. (No, boring is good in Germany. It’s the ultimate German virtue.) The current mix of slight lack of interest and amazement in Germany stems from something different. It is the rather bizarre fact that nobody seems either able or willing to talk about what has happened since the 2016 referendum to leave the EU. Brex-omertà is a fascinating phenomenon, but one that is rather hard to explain in Hamburg or Berlin. It is a cliche, but we tend to acknowledge our problems, then try to develop strategies to fix them. This, however, is not what Britain generally, nor the Labour party specifically, has decided to do. And most of the UK media weirdly plays along.

This leaves the country with a big, problem that can’t be named, which increases the risk that past mistakes will be repeated. Seeing Nigel Farage re-emerge as the anti-establishment figure is surreal, to say the least. With some honourable exceptions, most interviewers are not willing to challenge Farage or break the Brexit taboo. Instead, they accept his deceitful narrative that he is (still) an outsider. They do not hold him to account for having used false claims and promises to lead Britain out of the EU. Instead they give him space to rant, again. It feels like a very British Groundhog Day.

The eerie silence around the issue seems even more absurd given that a large majority of British voters now regret Brexit. Those who would like it to be rectified have to hold their noses at the ballot box and hope Starmer is lying, or at least omitting parts of his plans for Britain’s future. If Labour does prove more radical in power than it currently appears – and to solve Britain’s economic problems it will have to be – others who vote Labour may feel they have been deceived.

Yet this is not a way to restore trust in politics so badly damaged by the populism of recent years. The total absence of a proper political debate on what has happened post-Brexit will also make it much harder for Labour when in office. Starmer might prove us all wrong and I genuinely hope he does, but seen from a continent that is just about to confront its own populist wave, his overly defensive tactics are hardly inspiring.

María Ramírez: The tone is more civil than in Spain but is filling potholes really a promise in a G7 country?

A few weeks ago, I interviewed James Hall, a British countertenor I once saw on Broadway playing Farinelli alongside Mark Rylance. He was on his final days of permitted work in the EU due to Brexit rules, and spoke about missing opportunities to sing around Europe, “maddening” bureaucracy and the sadness of British musicians who are no longer part of a “continental community”. Labour is promising to ease rules for touring musicians and Hall hoped things would change with Keir Starmer. But, talking to him, something seemed broken beyond immediate repair. The limited opportunities at home mean Hall is now singing less and seeking alternative employment as a teacher.

Sadness and cautious hope are common emotions I have found in my reporting from a UK on the cusp of a change that seems long overdue, considering how unusual it is to find voters declaring their support for the Conservatives.

The energy of “cool Britannia” which I covered over two decades ago is nowhere to be found. Promises are as underwhelming as the state of the public finances. I find it puzzling that filling potholes is an actual electoral promise of a national party in a G7 economy.

The tone of this election campaign is more civil, less polarised and more policy-based than what we see in Spain. At the same time, debate and interviews occur within a constrained framework of accepted truths: “net migration” is bad and everyone is tired of Brexit.

Pollsters and political experts keep telling me Brexit is no longer a main public concern as an explanation for why candidates and the journalists interviewing them talk so little about it.

Citizens may be tired of it, but my experience is that Brexit comes up in almost every conversation, especially when discussing broken Britain. No matter the topic, whether it is polluted water, a climate protest chorus, shady university donations, tomato shortages, high-speed trains or conspiracy theories on traffic filters: Brexit just comes up. When people learn that I am from Spain, they sometimes apologise to me as if the Brexit vote was an offence against European neighbours, even clarifying that they didn’t support leave. I take no offence, but I feel sorry for them.

Antonello Guerrera: Farage can smell blood. And Starmer should let his hair down

I have covered several election campaigns here in the UK and abroad, but I have never seen anything duller than this one. The Tories are destined to collapse after 14 tempestuous, sometimes scandalous years. Rishi Sunak, a pragmatic prime minister who toned down the hostile rhetoric and improved relations with the EU, has promised several tax cuts and more benefits for pensioners. Nevertheless, talking with voters along the campaign trail, a substantial chunk of the conservative base say they wouldn’t vote for the Tories this time, not even if they got their national insurance slashed by 70%.

The Labour party knows this well and has been playing it safe for two years. Labour invokes “change”, but there is no bold or inspirational promise. Just a pledge that they will be the good chaps, protecting Britain’s finances and restoring solidity and the country’s reputation.

At least Nigel Farage’s comeback to lead the Reform party has stirred things up, which tells us an awful lot about the state of the UK. Farage can smell blood.

To British friends and voters who advocate proportional representation, I always say: no system is perfect, but so far, first-past-the-post has saved your country from extremism or populist entities like the Five Star Movement in Italy.

I have travelled a lot along this campaign trail and find the British people have an overwhelming sense of disillusionment and fatalism. In Worcester, I met a young man, Muhammad Waleed, and he told me he was not sure if he would vote for Labour because he could not see real change coming. Jane, a GP and Conservative party member in Wiltshire, sounded hopeless: “The NHS gets less and less money.” Compared to other campaigns I have covered, this one has no room for dreams and big hopes, not least because the leaders sound either robotic or artificial.

Yet I travelled with Sunak to the G7, and I can assure you that he is way more entertaining and funny during informal chats than he appears in public. Recently, Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said the same thing about her boss, Keir Starmer. It’s true, we live in a social media age where every little mistake goes viral and this petrifies both Sunak and Starmer. But if both let their hair down, showing more wit and a common touch, it would help them and British voters. Being natural and unpredictable has made the fortune of several controversial leaders, such as Boris Johnson, Silvio Berlusconi and Farage, despite the many flaws in their political records.

Tessa Szyszkowitz: The Austrian right is watching closely: will the Tories turn into a Trumpist party?

After Boris Johnson “got Brexit done”, feverish Austrian interest in Britain died down. When Brexit turned out to be what in Vienna we call a Rohrkrepierer (a dud), a tiny bit of shameful but quite delicious schadenfreude kept my readers going for a bit. But a medium-sized country with neither partners nor plans is only mildly newsworthy.

Now the general election has put the UK back in our news. For one, because Nigel Farage is back. Austrians, of course, like to know that their own far-right party is not the only one whose candidates entertain the public with eccentric views on Adolf Hitler. A Reform UK candidate who thinks the UK should have accepted Hitler’s offer of “neutrality”? Almost Austrian in spirit.

Farage is arguably a lesser threat to democracy than Austria’s far-right Freedom party. But he deserves our attention for a different reason: he could be hugely dangerous to the Tories. If the Conservative party needs a new leader after a painful defeat, the radicalised, populist right wing around Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg could try to crown the Reform UK leader.

Will Brexit, the poisoned gift that keeps on giving, turn the Tories into a Trumpist party like the Republicans in the US?. Austrian conservatives are watching closely since they are still reeling from the legacy of their own baby Trump, Sebastian Kurz, whose forced exit in 2021 left them directionless.

I went to Stevenage to take the temperature in a bellwether constituency that first voted for Tony Blair’s Labour in 1997 and has been Conservative since 2010. In 2016, 60% voted for Brexit. Today, I found no one who still supported it. On the contrary, the town needs foreign workers. Especially big companies located there, such as Airbus. Voters feel betrayed by the government.

After 14 years voters are turning quite naturally away from those in power. That might have happened, with or without Brexit. And now the UK, having delivered the rightwing populist project Brexit, may now get a social democratic government just as most of its EU neighbours are battling the rise of far-right parties. These parties might not be campaigning to quit the EU, but they certainly plan to undermine EU institutions and replace genuine European cooperation with nationalism. Only in the UK is the tide going in a different direction. As a result, with Labour in power, the UK might become more pro-European than some of the actual member states. The irony is not lost on me.

Jakub Krupa: With Trump and Marine Le Pen focusing minds, Poles still care about who runs Britain

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Polish coverage of the UK elections is that there is so little of it.

Despite still being one of the largest economies in the world, a Nato ally, and home to as many Poles as some of the largest Polish cities, Britain has quite astonishingly disappeared from the news horizon. Donald Trump versus Joe Biden? Sure. Emmanuel Macron’s gamble in France? Up to a point. But the UK general election, not so much.

Some of that is due to Poland’s extremely polarised domestic politics. There is little bandwidth for international news other than the war in Ukraine and the Moscow-induced migration crisis on Poland’s eastern border with Belarus.

The all-but-certain change of government in London is seen primarily through that lens. Will Labour-led Britain still support a free and independent Ukraine and Nato’s defence of the eastern flank?

For all the criticism of Conservatives domestically, both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak made the UK seem an important and reliable ally.

Some in Poland vaguely recall Labour’s ambiguous defence policy during Jeremy Corbyn’s years and want clarity on what, if anything, would change under Keir Starmer. Nothing? Great – there’s not much else to see here, then.

After the astonishment at the descent of the UK, once seen as a paragon of political stability and common sense, into utter chaos during the Johnson and Truss years, Poles have become so inured to unusual things happening in the UK that, paradoxically, the unusual no longer seems that unusual.

Brexit seems largely consigned to history, primarily seen as a cautionary tale for anyone thinking they could follow the same path. There is some surprise that despite growing signs of Bregret, there is little movement to reverse the decision. Similarly, the unexpected re-emergence of Nigel Farage as a political player and the almost existential challenge to the Conservative party are both noted, but mostly as political anecdotes or trivia.

Britain is no longer considered a tempting place to live. In fact, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, recently even made a specific political point at Britain’s expense. On the 20th anniversary of Poland’s accession to the EU, he promised Polish GDP per capita would surpass Britain’s by 2029. “It’s better to be in the EU,” he declared.

There are still enough reasons for Poles to care about who runs Britain, particularly as the spectre of Trump and Marine Le Pen focuses minds on international affairs. However, the contrast with previous campaigns could not be starker.

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The blood-red tentacles of the beadlet sea anemone seem to wave underwater, beckoning to be touched. I reach out a finger. Caitlin Woombs, engagement officer for the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust (HIWWT), bounds over. “You know how it feels as if they’re sticking to you?” In fact, that’s the sensation of the anemone firing dozens of microscopic harpoons into your skin, in the vain hope that it can reel you into its gaping mouth, she says, flashing a broad grin.

Contemplating this miniature drama is a huddle of volunteers, crouched beneath Ryde Pier on the Isle of Wight. It’s an unexpected place to go searching for sea life, and yet it is abundant here. The pier is a veteran survey site in the Wildlife Trusts’ citizen science Shoresearch programme, a “long-term monitoring project that allows us to understand the wildlife on our shores, and track changes over time,” says Daniele Clifford, marine conservation officer at the organisation. The expedition in Ryde is one of 12 local intertidal surveys scheduled by the HIWWT for 2024, and one of hundreds more that are available to join countrywide each year, under the broader Wildlife Trusts network. Volunteers range in age and experience, and surveying is open to all.

Today’s group of 20-odd is a mix of Isle of Wight residents and others who have ferried across a roiling Solent sea to join in. Curiosity is what brought lifelong island resident Mike Davis here. “I must have been up and down that pier hundreds of times, and it never occurred to me what might be beneath it,” he says. Beside him, one of the pier’s enormous iron struts bristles with barnacles, sponges and oysters, the base tasselled with plush anemones. The surrounding sand is thick with sea lettuce and bladderwrack, strewn with cockles and clams.

In Sapzurro bay on the Colombia-Panama border, the blue land crab can be found scuttling around human infrastructure, burrowing in the nooks and crannies of the coastal settlement. The species, which can grow up to 15cm and ranges in colour from violet to bright cerulean blue, is considered critically endangered or vulnerable in this region, although it can be classed as invasive elsewhere. It traditionally lived in the region’s rich mangrove forests, many of which have now been urbanised – habitat loss that scientists have blamed for the crab’s decline.

But when scientists studied the distribution of the species around Sapzurro bay, they were surprised to find it was still thriving in areas where vegetation had been eliminated: crawling in pastures, banana and coconut plantations, and scurrying below concrete structures. While burrows in urban areas were fewer and smaller, it had successfully built homes along sewage canals and among houses.

A growing body of research is collecting data on species like this crustacean – threatened wildlife learning to thrive in urban spaces alongside humans.

“We often forget that we are dealing with living animals,” says José Marin Riascos, a marine ecologist at the Corporation Centre of Excellence in Marine Sciences of Colombia, who published the study on the blue land crab in April 2024. “They are not passive, they are active. If you change something, then they answer with another change.”

These findings also complicate the long-held idea that cities cannot be hotspots for animals and plants, and that conservation is something to do far away, in untouched places.

“We are assuming that when humans modify an ecosystem, the habitat for the biodiversity is lost,” says Riascos. That is not always the case, he says. In some contexts, “it is just changing”.

Broadly, cities have overwhelmingly negative impacts on wildlife. On average, if a region contains 100 species, only 25 would occur inside the city, and populations can be up to 92% smaller than outside the urban area. But the chunk of wildlife that remains includes some species that are actually doing better in cities than outside them. This group can offer useful insights about how animals can adapt – or not – to human spaces, but most importantly, how humans can adapt their cities to be more wildlife-friendly.

Studies have found 66 out of 529 bird species that live in cities are found only in urban areas. In Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, threatened Hispaniolan parakeets hold their ground in urban green spaces and old buildings. Throughout North America, rounded, fluffy burrowing owls have found new burrows throughout the cities. Three endangered species of cockatoos in Australia – Baudin’s black cockatoo, Carnaby’s black cockatoo, and the forest red-tailed black cockatoo – have adapted to munching on urban pine plantations. In London, peregrine falcons have found mimics of tall trees in high-rise buildings.

“This is definitely something that we’ve ignored,” says Erica Spotswood, an urban ecologist at Second Nature Ecology + Design in California. In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Bioscience, she argues that cities could perform a variety of services for surrounding wildlife.

“We created cities in places that we like, along rivers, along the coast, in alluvial plains, at the bottom of valleys,” says Spotswood, and human preferences overlap with those of many species. This means cities also end up having a wide variety of types of habitats inside them, and a lot of diversity.

Urban spaces can be refuges during periods of stress and scarcity in the wild, providing easier access to an abundant diversity of resources year round. And cities can help species escape the threats animals face in the surrounding landscape – such as providing pollinators with refuge from pesticides systematically spread throughout agricultural land.

Studies have found that several different species of native bees are more abundant and more diverse in cities than in their surrounding landscapes, and that cities can be hotspots for some pollinators. “Bees are a great example,” says Robert Francis, professor of urban ecology and society at King’s College London. “The growing season for plants is extended in cities, so there are more plants over a longer period and the resources are really good.”

The smalltooth sawfish, once abundant in North American waters, is now thriving only in the urbanised coastal waters off South Florida, according to one 2020 paper. And studies show endangered western ringtail possums have found refuge in residential gardens across Australia, even when they have access to more rural areas.

When builders went to fill up an abandoned industrial site in Sydney to build a new stadium for the 2000 Olympics, they found the dirty water was filled with green and golden bell frogs – chunky, cartoonish-looking amphibians that are endangered across Australia.

“Everyone just thought it was a horrific, degraded urban site, but it turned out to be critical habitat for these frogs that were hanging on,” says Kylie Soanes, an urban ecologist at the University of Melbourne.

Like this frog, for “the vast majority” of threatened species found in cities, the city is their home range and humans built on top of it. But this also means the city is the last place that the species has a foothold – a category of animals that Soanes calls the “last chance species” – and so urban spaces are a crucial opportunity to protect and conserve them.

Doing so requires upending the assumption that cities cannot be places for conservation, she says, and recognising that they provide opportunities for intensive stewardship by people.

“Building a city and having places for people to live doesn’t mean we have to lose nature and wildlife – we can have both in the same place,” says Soanes. She points to growing more wildlife-friendly plants in private gardens, and sprinkling more wildlife-supporting infrastructure, such as bird nesting boxes, bee hotels and frog pondlets outside homes and around the city, “blurring the lines” between urban and natural.

In Brazil, the Programa Macacos Urbanos has built aerial wood-and-rope bridges across roads to help prevent monkeys electrocuting themselves by swinging on power lines. In the UK, manufacturers of building products have started making “swift bricks” – plastic bricks designed for swifts to nest in, and the roofs of bus stops have been converted into small patches of grass called “bee stops”.

“It’s just saturating the city with biodiversity friendly stuff: green space and green infrastructure,” says Francis, who lives in a housing estate with bat nest boxes built into some of the buildings. He notes, however, that it is still too early to know whether these small changes make significant differences to animal communities in cities, and at a large enough scale to support population growth over generations and repopulate all of the surrounding landscapes too, “or if it’s just a tiny, tiny difference”.

But, says Francis: “The research on cities lately has really transformed our understanding of urban ecosystems.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

It was a humbler and wiser Germany that stepped from the turf here at full-time: euphoric after Niclas Füllkrug’s injury-time header, relieved at topping the group, but with perhaps a more realistic idea of where they are and what to expect from them. Like one of its mercurial intercity trains, Germany’s Euro 2024 journey stuttered and slowed here, even threatening an unscheduled diversion, but ultimately remaining raggedly on course.

And so in a way this was a kind of hazing: a stress test under laboratory conditions, with qualification already secure but a number of flaws that required the scrutiny of a strong Swiss side to expose. How would this team – which until recently was actually very bad – deal with its first big setback, its first indifferent crowd? How would that defence hold up against a team unafraid to run at them? And what happens if you really, really need a goal in the 91st minute?

The stats will show that Germany dominated possession 66%-34% and by 18 shots to four. In reality it was a far more even game than that, with Switzerland having a goal disallowed for offside and Granit Xhaka almost sealing the points late on with a rasping shot from distance. Murat Yakin’s side were sensational: salty when they had to be, slippery on the break, taking the lead through Dan Ndoye and seeing their lead all the way through to 90 minutes.

And so this goal was worth more than one Group A point to Germany. It averted a last-16 tie at Berlin’s Olympiastadion against – probably – their nemesis Italy, with perhaps England, France and Spain to follow. More importantly, it maintains the pleasant vibes around what has thus far been a tournament of discovery and growth.

The yellow card to Jonathan Tah is a nuisance, putting him out of the next game, and there will be a certain anxiety at the ease with which Switzerland were able to slice them open. But the skittish, desperate energy they displayed in the closing minutes will be as encouraging in retrospect as it was infuriating at the time: proof that Germany have multiple attacking threats, personality to burn and the sort of unstoppable momentum that turns half-chances into golden opportunities.

Füllkrug epitomised this, coming off the bench and again – as he did at the Qatar World Cup – proving the difference-maker. He now has six major tournament appearances, all as a substitute, a total of 139 minutes that have produced four goals. “It’s good luck and bad luck for him that he’s so good in that role,” Julian Nagelsmann said. “Yes, he has a chance to start. But Kai [Havertz] also has that chance. It depends what we need during a certain phase of the match.”

For Switzerland, Xhaka deservedly took away the player-of-the-match award for a stirring and brilliant night’s work. Playing further forward than he normally does for Bundesliga champions Bayer Leverkusen, Xhaka was the game’s disruptive force, its unreliable narrator. He hounded Toni Kroos all night, and even if Germany’s talisman still enjoyed 127 touches he was unable to do his usual damage in dangerous areas. “After this game, I hope everyone has a little bit more respect for us,” Xhaka said afterwards.

And perhaps Germany did underestimate Switzerland a little: not their quality so much as their intensity, their willingness to commit to the physical battle. Certainly as Xhaka pounced on Kroos’s casual pass to steal the ball from Jamal Musiala, setting Switzerland on a four-on-four attack, there was little immediate alarm in the German defence, even as Remo Freuler took the ball into the left channel and tried a hopeful cross. Ndoye’s volley was satisfyingly perfect: slammed into the roof of the net, the first real moment of jeopardy for Sommermärchen 2.0.

Nagelsmann waited until the hour before deciding he had seen enough. The surgical Maximilian Mittelstädt was replaced by the surging David Raum at left-back. Off came Robert Andrich, who had been denied a scorching first international goal in the first half by a Musiala foul. Off came Musiala and Florian Wirtz. On went Füllkrug, the Hoffenheim striker Maximilian Beier and Leroy Sané: an all-out frontal assault of pace and power, with the front five pushing up and tucking in Switzerland’s back five like a hotel bedsheet.

Finally, after a Havertz header against the bar and a miraculous block by Manuel Akanji on Joshua Kimmich, and no end of alarms at the other end, Nagelsmann and Germany got their moment of jubilee. Raum crossed; Füllkrug rose highest. The Frankfurt Arena rose with him, and amid the deafening din was a kind of affirmation: proof – if ever it were doubted – that this is Germany’s time.

And it really was looking pretty hairy there for a while. Now Denmark, Serbia and Slovenia will hold no qualms for them; England would be spicy, but this is a good time to play them. Above all, Germany can go into the knockout stages with the satisfaction of having been tested. It may not have been the result they wanted. But it may just have been the night they needed.