This week the Environmental Investigation Agency hosted a night of eco-crime awareness against a backdrop of artwork at the annual exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists. A pair of violinists elegantly serenaded patrons, supporters and campaigners who mingled and chatted while sipping wine, necking neat rectangular cut sandwiches and wishing they could afford one of the fabulous paintings or sculptures on display (we were particularly fond of the birds, bears and badgers dotted......

Wheelie bin crisis? Blame the French. That's what Lewisham is doing, claiming that a fire in France is responsible for a severe worldwide shortage that has also blighted local homeowners. Councillors in the southeast London borough have hit upon an ingenious solution - they're asking people to suck up a little of that wartime spirit and share their bins with the neighbours. Never mind that most folk in London could barely pick their neighbours......

With waiting lists for London allotments spiralling into 6 years or more, the new report Growing Round the Houses, from food and farming charity, Sustain and the Women's Environmental Network, is very welcome. It advocates planning communal food growing into social housing and transforming unused estate ground into fertile kitchen gardens with huge growbags. Which is a lovely idea, of course, as long as there's genuine community buy in, the local kids don't vandalise......

When Boris scrapped The Londoner he was fulfilling a pledge to divert the money to tree planting and 'protect and preserve' our open spaces. Today it was announced that we'll be able to vote for our local park to get a slice of the £6m pie set aside for the Priority Parks project. Taking a leaf out of reality TV's preferred way of doing things, he told the BBC: Londoners know best which areas......

A small Camden charity, Hare Krishna Food for All, was named Novelis Community Recycing Project of the year at The Resource Awards last week. We hadn't heard of them before today but nosing around their website we're really rather in awe of their humanitarian and environmental efforts in central London. It's a really simple idea. Food For All provides disadvantaged people with free hot meals in Camden, Kings Cross and Holborn, by collecting food......

Love London is a "green-up" festival packed with 3 weeks of "eco-events'. We mentioned the Green Tours last week but there's much much more going on, starting with the Recycled Sculpture Show at ZSL which hosted the launch of the festival last Thursday. Previously lumbered with the title "London Sustainability Weeks", Love London's snappier current form covers events as diverse as naked bike riding, fair trade tea dancing, a locally sourced, midsummer feast in......

In 2002, the BBC pronounced the Cockney Sparrow dead. A year later, they were asking where it was. Sparrow news went cold for a bit, then bounced back in 2006 with the London House Sparrow Project and efforts to find out why the London sparrow population had all but vanished. Happily, today the Beeb report on a new biodiversity action plan from Westminster Council to help reverse the decline of the once ubiquitous, cheeky......

That certain night, the night we met, There was magic abroad in the air. There were angels dining at the Ritz And a nightingale sang in Berk'ley Square Ah, the romance! Vera Lynn immortalised the posh, garden square back in the 1920s but today it's hit the news for one specific, value-for-lots-of-money, tree. The Victorian plane tree, stretching a impressive 6ft circumference, has been valued at a staggering £750,000 in calculations to decide whether......

Something surprising is happening in our fair river: Conservationists have found seahorses among the muck in the Thames. More exciting, the seahorses are a rare short-snouted breed -- Hippocampus hippocampus, for you bio fiends out there -- that usually live around the Canary Islands and Italy. Seems like a long way to travel for a horse with no legs. The little creatures, which normally live in shallow muddy waters, estuaries or seagrass beds, have been......

Harrygate escalates: Prince pulled out of Afghanistan, whilst the media whip selves into frenzy over involvement in the news blackout/leak. Winegate averted (for now): Winehouse will not face charges in connection with husband’s alleged attempts to pervert justice. Guess which city is the world’s museum capital? We’ll give you three guesses; first two don’t count. A day after M&S announces it will charge for plastic bags, Gordon Brown indicates that the government is ready......

Despite Londoners being inveigled mere days ago to report any suspicious activity to the police, people in Marylebone are now being advised to, er, do the opposite. The reason? A Home Office-run project is to simulate a dirty bomb attack on the capital. The trials, part of a study called Dispersion of Air Pollution and Penetration into the Local Environment, or DAPPLE, will involve scientists releasing colourless, odourless gas from canisters on the street.......

Tonight the area between London Bridge and Tower Bridge is going to look a little different. HMS Belfast will be camouflaged and the old London Bridge post office building on Borough High St will look like a post box. You won't be tripping out but you will be witnessing the illuminations for Switched On London 2008 lighting up the bridges, the Tower of London, Potters Fields, Southwark Cathedral and more in a fantastically sustainable......

Having barely emerged from January’s wreckage of failed New Year’s resolutions, it was with a groan that we greeted the news that Lent arrives early this year. Questions of belief aside, Lent always seems likes such a promising self-improvement programme: give up chocolate, drink less, quit smoking. But didn’t we just make – and break – those same resolutions last month? We’re not such optimists to think we should try again so soon. Perhaps......

Are you an unreconstructed, consumerist, couch potato with no social conscience? Excellent. Read on. Because the Rubbish Game wants you. We went to the Rubbish Game this week and, if only we hadn't got distracted drinking wine, we might have won it. Through 3 punishing rounds of stuff distribution we managed to zero our waste, creatively and cunningly disposing of it through righteous means. We dabbled in the recycling fair to win recycling tokens......

Us and Paris have won an award for "visionary achievements in sustainable transportation and urban livability". Yes, such an award could only come from the US of A and it is courtesy of their Institute for Transportation and Development Policy that we are sharing such an honour. Ken's C-Charge scheme and best efforts to get us all on our bikes impressed the judges whilst we imagine our Parisian pals' fabulous Velib scheme won them......

Office shag sees uniformed officer sacked even though he kept in touch with his colleagues by phone and radio whilst he enjoyed his internet date Rumblings in the House over transport security and funding for the Olympics. De Menezes inquest may take months The faithful defrauded But to end on good news, lightbulb amnesty at B&Q! Image courtesy of DICKSDAILY via the Londonist flickr group.......

What stops you recycling? Are you lazy? Don't know where to start? Does your rubbish overwhelm you? The Rubbish Game wants to know. Then it wants to turn your rubbish around, with the help of the Binman of Love. It could get filthy. The Rubbish Game takes place on Wednesday 16 January at the Dana Centre at the Science Museum. It sounds a bit like Hungamunga crossed with the Krypton Factor and wrapped in......

We don't just mean bring out the same old decorations next year and put that box of bath salts away to give to your ageing aunty as you'll be vastly allergic to them. We mean don't let Christmas excess go to waste. Recycle your poor old Christmas tree, garish Christmas cards, hastily torn apart wrapping paper and as much of your larger than usual household waste (could anyone else start a bottle band with......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... It seems that everywhere we’ve gone recently, we’ve had the opportunity to buy environment-friendly souvenir and decorative tote bags. Gone are the days when......

To top off a year of switching the telly off standby, turning down the thermostat and carbon offsetting concern, you can now give a loved one 12 square metres of greenbelt land for Christmas. Yes, you can help protect London's precious remaining circle of undeveloped land by purchasing bits of it through the Good Gifts catalogue, run by the Charities Advisory Trust. 12 square metres is apparently the size of your average living room.......

If you're stumbling around department stores, going red and sweating with embarrassment as you try to choose the perfect piece of lingerie for your other girlfriend, then this Thursday help may be at hand. Both this week and next Thurs (20th Dec), John Lewis on Oxford Street are hosting a Lingerie Buying Academy for Men. With detailed instructions on how to gather the necessary information you need beforehand (check for size, colours, brands etc),......

You may have noticed the streets were very crowded in central London on Saturday but this wasn't a pre-emptive swipe at the shops for early Christmas shopping - it was London's participation in a global rally on climate change. Coinciding with the climate change summit in Bali, there were demonstrations, marches and general activity around the world to put pressure on governments to prioritise climate change measures. Targets for lowering greenhouse emissions as set......

It's very easy to get caught up in this city for all of it's music, clubs and big shiny loud stuff. Well, as much as we remain a fan of all that is big and shiny, Londonist occasionally needs some down time. Preferably with trees and tweety birds. And there's nothing more relaxing than a walk through the countryside. This is why The Wildfowl and Wetlands Centre is perfect. It's a short skip and......

As Londoners we pootle around our fair city doing Londonish things: pretending to read anything off the Orange shortlist, pretending not to read the free newspapers, pretending not to notice how bad the man sitting next to us on the bus smells, rush-rush-rush with our minds usually elsewhere. And then once in a while we focus and spot something unusual, something that hasn’t happened before, or that wasn’t there yesterday. Thus it is with spaces......

Never knowingly underrated - his was the sole photographic contribution to a recent Phaidon book about art history - Canadian photographer Jeff Wall is best known for his imposingly large colour transparencies that evoke scenes from unmade films. For his first UK show since a 2005 Tate retrospective, Wall has filled the lower half of the White Cube in Mason's Yard, SW1 with a selection of his lesser-known black and white photos. Drained of......

Londonist is a massive fan of two-wheeled transportation, especially when it comes with a gift voucher attached. Yes, the lucky residents of Islington can now give up the motor, get on the manual and be £100 richer. Or even £300 richer, for those who would otherwise fork out £200 annually on a parking permit. We were practically packing the bags and moving to the Borough upon reading this, but alas, the following recent government statistics......

...that the government’s gone a bit loopy, actually. They are still banging on about developing the optimistically titled Thames Gateway region into some eco-wonderland filled with gainfully employed and happy eco-bunnies. Yvette Cooper was due to, er, ‘clarify’ exactly how this can be achieved and for how many spondulicks at a brainstorming forum today. Now Londonist knows that London needs a bit more housing, and is all for the creation of well budgeted, environmentally-friendly utopias......

The dear old Evening Standard is all up in arms that people are being "forced" to shut their dustbin lids or risk not getting their rubbish collected. We're not quite sure why. Surely, putting your rubbish in a standard issue (240L, wheelie, locking) bin and keeping it shut helps keep our streets cleaner and safer? Foxes can't get at bin bags, things can't blow away, unsightly stacks of supermarket carrier bags and globs of spilled......

Londonist is all for environmentalism. We even clothe the Londonist baby in non-disposable washable cotton nappies and take all our groceries home from the organic food shop in a bag made of woven hemp. We wash our hair with a cuttlefish and row everywhere. However, when we heard that a low-carbon Olympic flame will light up the 2012 Games, we weren't impressed. We want a big old dirty flame. This is the Olympics! Let's......

Well, the sugar people are actually living up to their somewhat irritating catchphrase at the moment, as they are being incredibly good eco-bunnies. They are to install an awfully costly new biomass boiler (£20 million - in Londonist’s book that’s expensive: mind you, you shouldn’t get us going on the subject of the cost of plumbing…) at their East London plant which will burn on something called ‘wheat feed’ (a bi-product of the flour industry).......