Tim Smedley

England

Journalist, Book Author and Copywriter at Freelance

Freelance Features Writer at The Times

Environmental Writer at BBC

Environmental writer (BBC, FT, Guardian, etc) & book author. Find me here now: @timsmedley.bsky.social #ClearingTheAir: https://t.co/PSFmRXx03t #TheLastDrop: https://t.co/JNCn1xc55B

Articles

Water companies make us look like April fools

2 weeks ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Tim Smedley

I’m writing this on 1st April. My eldest daughter has taped over the light switch in the kitchen. My youngest put pepper in my tea. One of them has drawn on the toilet roll. And my water bill went up by 31 per cent overnight, despite going to one of the biggest offenders during the sewage scandal, a company that has amassed £19bn in debt. The odd one out among the April Fools’ Day pranks is not immediately obvious.
Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read on climate activism after Just Stop Oil

3 weeks ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Tim Smedley |Caroline Lucas

Rupert Read, who helped launch Extinction Rebellion (XR), has long had doubts about the tactics of climate activists. He pauses halfway through our Zoom call with Caroline Lucas, former Green MP, to reminisce about the early days of XR, and introducing Lucas “to the wild crowd outside parliament…at the first ever Extinction Rebellion action in London, October 31, 2018!” He still remembers the date with ease; it was a foundational time for him and for many climate activists.
The New Climate. New(s)letter #17

4 weeks ago | medium.com | Tim Smedley

Soil and substance (and the collapse of global world order)Tim Smedley·FollowPublished inThe New Climate. ·Sent as aNewsletter·6 min read·--Photo by Steven Weeks on UnsplashPerhaps it’s the emergence of spring (if you’re in the Northern hemisphere) that has had us thinking about soil this month. Each year, as if by miracle, green shoots start to reappear out of the brown stuff, and the carbon cycle starts all over again.
The Last Drop: Solving the World’s Water Crisis

1 month ago | libraryjournal.com | Tim Smedley

. May 2024. 416p. ISBN 9781529058178. pap. $18.99. SCI COPY ISBN With a topic as large as the global water crisis, environmental journalist Smedley ( Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution) has to pick and choose his examples to elaborate on the problem’s nature and the increasingly urgent solutions. Readers will find the most familiar cases of drought in this book, including examples from the southwestern United States and the Middle East.
Copenhagen’s disastrous ski slope-cum-incinerator

1 month ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Tim Smedley

Just beyond the end of Nyhavn, Copenhagen’s colourful canal district, an ominously smoking chimney punctures the horizon between sailboat masts and a cyclists’ bridge. Most tourists in town for one day wouldn’t go much further. But I kept walking, past kindergartens brimming with hygge, through the hippy district of Christiania Freetown, and on to grey apartment blocks in the shadow of a man-made hill: Amager Bakke, or CopenHill.
To fight flooding, bring back the beaver-for good, this time

2 months ago | prospectmagazine.co.uk | Tim Smedley

I thought I might cry. But the emotions that threatened to overwhelm turned more euphoric—a silly, wide smile, plastered across my face for hours. As the first beaver padded tentatively but fixedly out of its cage towards the water, I was witnessing history. The first of its kind to return to this part of central England for over 400 years. Beavers would have been a common sight for our Tudor ancestors—as natural a part of our waterways as otters and swans.
The New Climate. New(s)letter #16

2 months ago | medium.com | Tim Smedley

Fighting fires, fascism, and reconnecting with the land. Tim Smedley·FollowPublished inThe New Climate. ·Sent as aNewsletter·5 min read·--The Palisades fires (Photo courtesy of Ethan Swope)2025 started with the traditional flash and smoke of New Year fireworks — but unlike previous years, the fire and smoke didn’t die down with the next day hangovers. The focus of many The New Climate articles for January was, understandably, one thing: wildfires.
The New Climate. New(s)letter #15

Nov 29, 2024 | medium.com | Tim Smedley

Shifting focus from the shocks of geopolitics, to what we can control and achieve locally. Tim Smedley·FollowPublished inThe New Climate. ·Sent as aNewsletter·5 min read·--Photo by Nick Fewings on UnsplashNovember gave us more talking points than some full years do. We had the fevered anticipation of the US election followed by the shocking reality. COP29 in Azerbaijan was similarly anticipated, albeit expectations were set very low. In the end, it managed to crawl beneath even that very low bar.
Is Recycling A Lie?

Nov 28, 2024 | medium.com | Tim Smedley

As the UN tries to agree a new deal on plastics, Tim Smedley, Editor of The New Climate, looks at why recycling isn’t the solution some think. Tim Smedley·FollowPublished inThe New Climate. ·15 min read·--Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on UnsplashA decade ago I watched a film called Cowspiracy on the exciting new TV streaming service that everyone was talking about—called ‘Netflix’.
We Need To Talk About Degrowth: Part II

Nov 20, 2024 | medium.com | Tim Smedley

On how to make it happen. Tim Smedley·FollowPublished inThe New Climate. ·19 min read·--Photo by Jude Mack on Unsplash“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination.” ― Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (1994)And yet, after writing We Need To Talk About Degrowth: Part I, the nagging feeling remains: it all sounds nice, but it’s not going to happen.