Eddy's Good News: Restoring UK rainforests and stolen treasure sent back to Cambodia

Virgin Radio

24 Feb 2023, 11:19

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Friday 24th February 2023

Good news from here in the UK as we meet the man with a plan to help restore the UK’s lost rainforests. 

The word rainforest is something you’d normally associate with South America, or Africa or anywhere on the equator, but the fact is over a fifth of the UK used to be covered in temperate rainforest, in other words a forest so wonderfully damp that plants grow on plants.

Meet conservationist and author Guy Shrubsole, who is campaigning to regenerate Britain’s rainforests and has written a book about this forgotten realm of mossy loveliness. 

Technically speaking, ecologists define rainforests as receiving more than 1,400mm of rain throughout the year. Under these conditions, life grows on life and the forest becomes a wonderfully layered ecosystem, the richest in plant diversity. Lichens. Mosses, mushrooms, these places can sequester so much more CO2 than normal forests so they’re vital to meet our targets. Guy is mapping them, protecting them and hoping to double them in a generation and we wish him Godspeed!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Great news from here in the UK but mostly for Cambodia and Cambodians as a veritable treasure trove of royal antiquities from Angkor Wat stolen from the Cambodian people, have been repatriated.

Say “suostei” to 77 glorious artefacts including royal crowns that are knee bucklingly beautiful.

The treasures were trafficked from the country while in the horrendous grip of the Khmer Rouge. 

Gold and other precious metal pieces from the Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian period including crowns, necklaces, bracelets, belts, earrings, and amulets, as it turns out, mostly trafficked by one Englishman who died in 2020 before he could be convicted. Now these pieces have come to light, they’ve been donated back to the place they were stolen from and will now delight the descendants of the medieval artisans who made them, where they belong, in a museum.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org