Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

For Netanyahu, Gaza’s ‘day after’ must wait

Japan, famously polite, struggles to cope with influx of tourists

Middle East conflict live updates: Biden to approve $1 billion in arms to Israel; E.U. condemns Rafah operation

Senators unveil plan to regulate AI, as companies race ahead

OpenAI wants users to act natural around ChatGPT

TikTok creators sue U.S. government over potential ban

Gov. Jim Justice wins West Virginia’s Republican Senate primary

Alsobrooks wins Democratic Senate primary in Md.; Justice wins GOP in W.Va.

Michael Cohen: ‘Yes, I would like to see’ Trump convicted

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

En búsqueda de la verdad a más de 100 años de una matanza fronteriza

After a borderland shootout, a 100-year-old battle for the truth

How America tried and failed to stay White

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

No, Apple, people do not want tech to crush everything in its path 

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Carolyn Hax: Aging mom’s increasing anxiety robs child of a valued confidante

Miss Manners: Dinner host hates clearing the table for guests

Ask Amy: My mom lied about how much she supported my sister

Nasim Nuñez’s heads-up base running helps Nats get doubleheader split

The 26 best new restaurants in the D.C. area

Ted Leonsis remains interested in buying the Nationals

Tired of overcrowded national parks? Here’s how to go backcountry camping.

When hotels go to the (Westminster) dogs

Pete Buttigieg’s view from the middle seat

Angela Alsobrooks Wins Maryland Senate Seat 

Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

See more coverage in your recommendations

Climate & environment

The Climate Coach newsletter

Climate alerts

Jane Barlow

GLASGOW, Scotland — Britain’s future king, Prince Charles, told world leaders at the U.N. climate summit on Monday that they should seek solutions to global warming in nature.

“After billions of years of evolution, nature is our best teacher,” the Prince of Wales said. “In this regard, restoring natural capital, accelerating nature-based solutions and leveraging the circular bio-economy will be vital to our efforts.”

Unlike the presidents and premiers who will be speaking at the Scottish Event Campus, the prince has spent his life developing deep thoughts about sustainability, organic farming, biodiversity — and the sanctity of Nature, which the prince always capitalizes in print.

Unlike the others, Charles has no real power over laws or budgets. But the 72-year-old, ruddy-cheeked royal in the immaculately tailored pinstripes is a potentially powerful voice on climate change — now, and when the heir apparent takes the throne some day as the 21st century’s first eco-king.

The question: Will the people listen to him?


<i>[How hippies, farmers and Prince Charles are preserving the ancient art of hedgelaying]</i>


Charles is often judged the most environmentally committed royal — and the one with largest carbon footprint.

With a lifestyle unimaginable except to the planet’s billionaires, Charles oversees vast holdings in the <a href="https://duchyofcornwall.org/frequently-asked-questions.html#question_1">Duchy of Cornwall</a>, more than 200 square miles of land, mostly in southwest England. He maintains multiple royal estates, and to represent the monarchy abroad, he travels widely by private jet with an entourage of aides and security staff members.

He is a potent influencer with global reach, and his realm — the United Kingdom and the 54 Commonwealth nations — includes 2.4 billion people. His soapbox is Buckingham Palace.

And it is safe to say few of the leaders at the summit, known as COP26, know more about composting than Charles.

He is an extoller of the benefits of bees, homeopathic medicine, gardening, elephant conservation and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/british-hedgerows/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">hedgerows</a>. Charles sees a “sacred geometry” at work — in the pattern of flower petals the movement of Venus across the night sky over time, and the stained-glass windows at the Chartres Cathedral.

Charles believes we have fallen from grace, from a more traditional, natural, edenic state, by succumbing too much to mechanistic, technological, modernist thinking — rather than the “whole-ism” (his spelling) he believes is the virtuous path.

In his 2010 book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061731315?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=0061731315" title="www.amazon.com">Harmony</a>,” a 336-page exposition of his princely philosophy, Charles decries how the Age of Convenience produced the Age of Disconnection.

Last year, his courtiers confirmed he often gives a branch of a tree “a friendly shake to wish it well.”

On his 1981 honeymoon with Princess Diana aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, his biographers say, he read the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who argued there was a human collective unconscious, informed by deep instincts, just as a baby sea turtle knows to scurry toward the sea.

Humans have such instincts, too, Charles believes.

In the early years, his harshest critics dismissed the young duke as a kind of New Age mash-up of half-baked ideas.

“At the beginning, everyone thought he was crackers, the mad prince who had these strange ideas. They wrote him off completely,” said Penny Junor, a biographer who has written volumes about Charles and the royal family.

“He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but world has caught up to Charles, hasn’t it? she said. “He’s certainly not a crank now.”

“I’ve always felt it, I think intuitively,” this sense that nature was being desecrated, said Charles in a <a href="https://youtu.be/tmEHJxWkvPg">video posted</a> last year on the royal family’s YouTube channel.

“I remember years ago, in the ’60s, when I was a teenager, minding so much about all the things there were going on, the destruction of everything,” he said. “The uprooting of trees and hedgerows and draining of wet places. . . . This sort of white heat of progress and technology to the exclusion of nature . . . this complete determination somehow to defeat nature.”

Emily Macinnes for The Washington Post

His first <a href="https://youtu.be/K8GhRhkVOWE">major speech</a> on the environment was in February 1970, when the young prince warned, “We are faced at this moment with the horrific effects of pollution in all its cancerous forms.”

Charles has called for a revolution in sustainability in all things: urban design, corporate production, organic farming, energy generation. He brings together many people, recommends many solutions, most them now viewed as mainstream.


<i>[Prince Charles says cheap food and industrial farming are ruining the planet]</i>


In the run-up to COP26, the prince defended his lifestyle and ticked the boxes of his green bona fides to the BBC. The duke now forgoes meat, fish and dairy several days a week. He loathes stockyards and factory farming and decries the cheap American poultry that must be <a href="https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/news-and-updates/posts/what-is-chlorinated-chicken/">rinsed with chlorine</a> to wash off E. coli bacteria.

Most eye-catching in the BBC documentary, Charles <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/12/prince-charles-cheese-wine-car-climate/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">revealed</a> he runs his beloved 51-year-old Aston Martin convertible on “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58847456">surplus English white wine</a> and whey from the cheese process,” essentially bioethanol fuel.

Rebecca Naden

Pressed about his energy consumption, the prince said he had installed a hydroelectric turbine on one of his rivers and biomass boilers fueled by trees felled at his Scottish home, Birkhall, on the 52,000-acre Balmoral estate of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.

He has put solar panels on top of his London mansion, Clarence House, and on the farm buildings at <a href="https://www.highgrovegardens.com">Highgrove</a> House, his residence in the Cotswolds.

At COP26, Charles can’t commit Britain to anything, not net-zero emissions nor the decarbonization of the energy sector. But what he can do in Glasgow and beyond is promote his vision, and his vision is . . . complex.

In her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/12/charles-the-heart-of-a-king-catherine-mayer-review-will-self" title="www.theguardian.com">biography</a> “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0753555948?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=0753555948" title="www.amazon.com">Charles: the Heart of a King</a>,” Catherine Mayer explained, “Charles’s overarching quest — the motivation behind everything he does — is to restore harmony. It is a particular irony that his mission frequently plunges him into conflicts and disharmony.”

As Mayer told The Washington Post, it is not correct to view Charles as a standard-issue environmentalist.

“People give him a bit of a free pass these days, saying how forward-thinking he is. It’s a false understanding,” Mayer said. “He was ahead of his time in articulating all sorts of things that are now mainstream, but his conservationism comes from a very deeply conservative place, not a radical one.”

She noted that Charles refers to nature as a “she” and thinks of it as “embodying a trio of celestial essences, the true, the beautiful and the good.”

These patterns and essences have been rejected by modernism, Charles believes.

This explains his dust-ups with modernist architects, whom he has infuriated for years with his interventions. The prince abhors modernist urban planning and brutalist buildings decoupled from nature.

At times, his enthusiasm for a natural order has struck some listeners as an endorsement of hereditary order, placing a monarchy squarely in the natural order of things.

“He does good things, like he criticizes the sway of global corporations,” Mayer said. “He’s been very important in questioning the idea that the solution to problems caused by technology is more technology.”

Charles does more than talk. He is royal patron or president of more than <a href="https://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/prince-waless-patronages?title=&amp;page=4">400 organizations</a>, including Surfers Against Sewage, Bees for Development, and the British Deer Society.

Through his Prince’s Foundation and Prince’s Trust, Charles buzzes through his days, a kind of super-pollinator, among governments, corporations and charities. Even his homes serve as education centers for sustainability and harmony.

One of his latest projects is <a href="https://dumfries-house.org.uk/education">Dumfries House</a> in Scotland, just an hour’s drive south of climate summit in Glasgow.

In 2007, the 18th-century Palladian manor and 2,000-acre estate was in disrepair, about to be sold at auction. Its arboretum was a mud pit. The bridge to the property was tumbling into the river. But the estate also had one of the world’s most intact collections of Chippendale furniture. Charles and a consortium purchased it for £45 million pounds, or about $60 million.

Charles doesn’t live at Dumfries, but he visits often. These days on the property, there’s a health and well-being center, where locals can attend yoga and mindfulness classes, and learn about holistic medicine, to address obesity, chronic pain and menopause.

There’s coursework to train in traditional building arts, sustainable textile manufacturing and organic farm-to-table cookery. There’s also a rare-breed farm populated by Scots Dumpy hens and Tamworth pigs.

“What Charles has done at Dumfries is extraordinary. He’s taken a mothballed, forgotten stately home in a very unfashionable industrial part of Scotland and opened it up to the public . . . and used it as testing ground for new ideas,” said <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Robert-Hardman/e/B001JS3E9G/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1">Robert Hardman</a>, a royal biographer, who writes for the Daily Mail.

When the Prince’s Foundation took over the walled garden, it was a sea of knotgrass. Today, there are gorgeous formal gardens and organic vegetable gardens where busloads of schoolchildren come to learn about . . . soil health.

“A lot of them, like a lot of children everywhere, have no idea, and so we show them that a carrot doesn’t come from a shop. It grows in the ground. And then they make carrot soup,” said Melissa Simpson, head of gardens at Dumfries.

Because the prince wants children not only to eat their vegetables, but know where they come from.


<attribution>
<email>karla.adam@washpost.com</email>
</attribution>



Prince Charles says his Aston Martin runs on wine and cheese byproducts



Queen Elizabeth II expresses irritation at world leaders who won’t commit to COP climate summit



Prince William: Let’s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live on


Overseas Press Club, Kim Wall Award, "Occupied," 2018

 Overseas Press Club, Robert Spiers Benjamn Award Citation, "Mexico's Middle Class," 2012  

Overseas Press Club, Robert Spiers Benjamin Award Citation, "Mexico at War," 2010

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize, Breaking News, "Fort Hood Shooting," 2010

University of Texas at Austin, literature 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vannevar Bush Fellow

William Booth is The Washington Post’s London bureau chief. He was previously bureau chief in Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Miami.

William Booth

Queen's University, BA in psychology 

London School of Economics, MSc in organizational psychology

Columbia University, MS in journalism 

Karla Adam is a London correspondent for The Washington Post, which she joined in 2006. She is a former president of the Association of American Correspondents in London.