There has been a frenzy of fakery accusations flung at the BBC recently, largely from the Daily Mirror it should be added. The accusations are concerned with how the BBC’s Natural History Unit filmed an enchanting sequence of newly born polar bear cubs suckling their mother. This sequence was actually filmed in a zoo, yet it was intercut with footage of polar bears filmed in the wild.

The BBC’s Frozen Planet series has been breathtaking. Never before have we seen such a masterly crafted medley of mesmerizing footage of our polar regions. The events captured were remarkable, the stories told were gripping and the time-lapses were literally out of this world. The BBC Natural History Unit: we salute you!

In an age where corporate responsibility is king, it had all the makings for a lively debate; an edgy title and a lineup that featured the green might of Mike Barry from M&S debating alongside Barnaby Briggs from Shell - of course, accompanied by the obligatory threat of anti-capitalist protesters. Organised by ICAEW and held at the Cambridge Union Society, the debate saw the 'aye' speakers, such as economist Sean Richard put forth a compelling barrage of cold, hard economic logic, wheeling out old favourites, including 'a business can only survive by creating wealth'. With much talk of investors, bottom lines and ROI, their economic lexicon framed 'corporate responsibility' as woollier than an M&S cardigan. The noe camp put forward an equally compelling case, with Warren East, CEO of ARM (one of the poster boys of successful British business) stating that 'responsibility is a competitive necessity of the businesses of today'. Mike Barry didn't beat around the bush either, saying 'If business sits on it's backside, we have no future: business needs to intervene'. A frank-talking Barnaby Briggs didn't shy away from speaking about Shell's turmoil in Nigeria - what he believed to be a precursor for what's to come in a resource-constrained world. Whilst he painted an emotional picture, his focus on small-scale case studies of 'responsibility' appeared to skirt around the core issue of whether extracting a non-renewable resource is fundamentally responsible, despite our dependence on it.

Despite the overwhelming evidence in contrary, climate change denial raises its ugly head every now and again, only to be immediately trampled back down by an army of scientists and eco-fanatics. It seems, however, the environment has now found itself a rather unlikely, but very welcome, supporter. Best known for British comedy Peep Show, and often found throwing banter around on various news quiz shows, David Mitchell recently addressed climate change doubters in his video series David Mitchell’s Soapbox.

I was taken by this weeks Economist cover story: Welcome to the Anthropocene. It's a new term that is being banded around by scientists to refer to the current epoch in the Earth's history which is primarily shaped by the heavy hand of humans, contrasting against the relatively stable Holocene epoch – in which we officially live - which only began 10, 000 years ago. What particularly struck me was an example that they opened with, 'a single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30 billion tonnes of earth – twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in a year'. BOOM! Environmental scientists tend to refer to minute percentage increases and distant timescales, not a whopping 30 billion tonnes of rock! I suppose it's the tangibility of the Anthropocene concept that really gets me, it emphasises the digging, scraping, damming, stripping, polluting reality of the situation. Just imagine the architect that digs up our the remnants of civilisation in 100,000 years: characterising us by a strange fondness of concrete, tarmac and obscure fridge mountains; the modern day Stonehenge perhaps?!