When I was at primary school in Madagascar, one of the poorer kids used to spend play time crouched in a corner of the playground with a long cane. When a grasshopper landed within reach, he’d smack it expertly with the stick and stash the dead insect in a bag. It was something of a [...]
Archive | August, 2010
Sew Your Own, by John-Paul Flintoff
A year after starting our house renovation project, we’re at the soft furnishings stage and recently got some quotes for curtains. I find myself wishing I had paid more attention in sewing classes at school. It’s a recurring thought – that sewing is something that I really ought to be able to do, especially since [...]
Why are we still subsidising fossil fuels?
If you put together tax breaks, feed-in tariffs and other forms of government support, the renewable energy industry received between $43 and $46 billion last year, according to Bloomberg. If you add up similar support for oil and gas projects, the total comes to $577 billion. Isn’t there something rather perverse about this scenario? As [...]
Britain’s suspect new friends in Sudan
Last month the International Criminal Court issued a new arrest warrant for Sudan’s president Omar Al-Bashir. He was already wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, to which he can now add the count of genocide for his campaigns against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups. In response, Al-Bashir warned Western [...]
What we learned this week
A few weeks ago I wrote about The Giving Pledge, a campaign to encourage billionaires to give their money away. It now has 40 signatories. Tom Levitt and Kara Moses ask a crucial question on The Ecologist: do environmentalists actually hold sustainable lifestyles? I think they often do. Forget turbines – a new Chinese wind [...]
Bike schemes are a secret UN plot!
This last week saw the launch of London’s new bike scheme, and the city’s cycling mayor Boris Johnson has been typically outspoken about it. “In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London” he told journalists at the launch event. “If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, what’s the [...]
How to be a Humankind Superhero, by Harold Forbes
I was sent a copy of this book to review, and my first thought was ‘what on earth is going on on the front cover?’ Is it a man wearing a bear suit? Is he being hugged by a lion, or attacked by it? Maybe the creature is trying to prevent the man from stealing [...]
Put it right
A rather good short film from UNICEF, leaving the facts and figures to one side and offering a snapshot of real lives, real childhoods so different from our own. ” This film is window into a different day-to-day world” as Victoria Rae, UNICEF UK’s Director of Communications puts it. “It’s a childhood where there is [...]
The Post Carbon Reader
Here’s a book you might want to be aware of: The Post Carbon Reader is a collection of essays from the good folks at the Post Carbon Institute. It is edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, and I’ll let Richard introduce the book: The Post Carbon Reader explores key drivers shaping the 21st century, [...]
Deepwater Horizon now worst oil spill in history
It was America’s biggest oil spill in June, but it now appears to have taken the big one: new estimates released this week show that the Deepwater Horizon incident is now the worst accidental oil spill in history. A dubious honour indeed. I say accidental because the Iraqi army released 9 million barrels of oil [...]
Books
No data found
