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Butterflies | The light in Kirkcudbright | Nempnett Thrubwell

George Monbiot’s memory (Our selective blindness is lethal the living world, 20 December) is indeed bittersweet. As a boy I also recall summertime nettlebeds thickly hanging with the black caterpillars of peacocks and small tortoiseshells. We used to gather them and then watch them pupate and hatch on the top of our television set (a somewhat bulkier item in the late 1960s). I don’t recall seeing such butterfly fecundity for more than 40 years.
Mathew Frith
Director of conservation, London Wildlife Trust

• The light here in Kirkcudbright (Letters, 16 December) is also particularly treasured by artists (viz Hornel and the Glasgow Boys). Many of our beaches up here comprise millions of sea shell shards – scallop and cockle in particular – which make the coast glow on a beautiful sunny day.
Keith Langton
Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway

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how can we plan our world so that we can get what we want but also leave a positive environmental and moral legacy?

World land-speed record-holder Andy Green reflects on the past 12 months' achievements in developing the Bloodhound supersonic car.

BBC News looks back on eight of the biggest science and environment stories of 2017.

28 December 1917 In the sombre foliage of the forest firs we heard the short, high-pitched notes of the goldcrest, and saw two or three of the tiny birds hunting for insects

Iron-hard roads rang beneath our feet and cat-ice between the ruts scrunched and crackled; a black frost had the forest in its grip. Under the firs was a litter of stripped cones and scattered flakes; the squirrels, in spite of the frost, had been busy, and over and over again we disturbed them from their hunt amongst the fallen needles and sent them scurrying up the straight boles. It was in the sombre foliage of these forest firs that we heard the short, high-pitched notes of the goldcrest, and saw two or three of the tiny birds hunting for insects – hibernating insects too insignificant for larger birds to worry with.

Related: Walking in the winter woods: Country diary 100 years ago

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Going out for a breather after the big meal is a tradition. But now you have to think about the quality of the air you’re taking in

The post-lunch Christmas walk is a family tradition in many households. What’s not to like? You get to walk off one of the biggest meals of the year. Young or old, most members of the family can manage a gentle stroll and you get some fresh air in your lungs.

But how fresh is that air? A new study by British researchers recently published in the Lancet highlights the fact that older members of the family need to be much more choosy about where they take their exercise.

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Free-ranging reindeer are spending time touring the UK to help children learn about them.

The Southern Ocean was a sanctuary – but now Japan’s boats have military hardware and conservationists can no longer track them

A fleet of Japanese ships is currently hunting minke whales in the Southern Ocean. It is a politically incendiary practice: the waters around Antarctica were long ago declared a whale sanctuary, but the designation has not halted Japan’s whalers, who are continuing a tradition of catching whales “for scientific research” in the region.

In the past, conservation groups such as Sea Shepherd have mounted campaigns of harassment and successfully blocked Japan’s ships from killing whales. But not this year. Despite previous successes, Sea Shepherd says it can no longer frustrate Japan’s whalers because their boats now carry hardware supplied from military sources, making the fleet highly elusive and almost impossible to track. As a result the whalers are – for the first time – being given a free run to kill minke in the Southern Ocean.

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ABC Science Editor Jonathan Webb chats with environment reporter Nick Kilvert about the environmental science stories that caught his eye in 2017.

Hawkhurst, Kent One of Britain’s largest collections of Victorian glasshouses is being restored thanks to the fond memories of a wartime evacuee

Just outside Hawkhurst, in the Kentish Weald, there’s a walled garden so quintessentially Victorian that stepping inside feels like time-travelling. Rustic brickwork glows in the winter sun; in bright corners the skeletal arms of buddleia seem to beckon the ghosts of bees; and everywhere you look the light is reflected by shimmering glass.

There are 13 crumbling, deeply atmospheric glasshouses – the “Demanding Ladies” – most of them more than 140 years old. There’s a shaded fern house, a long, leaning peach case, a sunken glass corridor for melons and pineapples, a pelargonium house, a carnation house, a hot house with great vats that once steamed with heated water.

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The first person to fly untethered in space, Nasa astronaut Bruce McCandless, has died.

Supermarket announces plans to donate surplus stock to local charities, and urges other chains to follow suit

Tesco is to become the only UK retailer to no longer waste food fit for human consumption.

The company’s chief executive, Dave Lewis, has urged other supermarket chains to follow Tesco’s lead and adopt the changes that it will implement by March 2018.

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In February 1984, Bruce McCandless pushed off from the Space Shuttle and drifted alone into space.

The phenomenon was visible from parts of California and Arizona - the culprit: A SpaceX rocket.

Scientists have filmed one of the world's rarest, and 'ugliest', pigs in a forest in Indonesia.

Pioneering research on cross-species coral hybrids, inoculations with protective bacteria and even genetic engineering could provide a lifeline for the ‘rainforests of the oceans’

New super corals bred by scientists to resist global warming could be tested on the Great Barrier Reef within a year as part of a global research effort to accelerate evolution and save the “rainforests of the seas” from extinction.

Researchers are getting promising early results from cross-breeding different species of reef-building corals, rapidly developing new strains of the symbiotic algae that corals rely on and testing inoculations of protective bacteria. They are also mapping out the genomes of the algae to assess the potential for genetic engineering.

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Two remarkable kids with remarkable ambitions. This is wild, believe us.

Conservationists capture the first footage in the wild of the endangered Javan warty pig

How does a fish the size of a toothbrush head, with bright red fins and big blue eyes, end up living in a puddle of water in the middle of the Australian outback? This story is about one of the rarest fish species in the world, and it's simply epic. {For RN Summer we're playing the best programs of the year, and this one first aired in May, 2017}

The transformation of Singapore into a garden city.