According to the Disasters Emergency Committee, donations towards aid for Africa’s current famine are far below the totals raised for the Asian Tsunami, Haiti, or Pakistan, even though more people are affected. I wonder why. Is it bad timing, a disaster in the middle of an economic crisis, with people holding onto their cash? Is [...]
Archive | August, 2011
Brave Old World, by Tom Hodgkinson
For those who still believe The Idler is about laziness, it may come as a surprise to learn that Idler editor and Ecologist columnist Tom Hodgkinson has written a book about his experiences of running a smallholding. All that digging, mucking out animals and chopping wood sounds suspiciously like hard work. But since the Idler [...]
What we learned this week
We all know it, but now it’s been studied: conservative white men are more likely to be climate change deniers. “Is it as socially unacceptable for executives to pay themselves as it is for so-called welfare scroungers to over-claim on their benefits” says Philip Stephens in the Financial Times. Our financial system has become a [...]
Ed Miliband reads up on post-growth
This is the first time I’ve used a paparazzi image on the blog, but I suspect it’ll be the last too. Here’s Britain’s leader of the opposition Ed Miliband photographed with his summer reading, as featured in the Daily Mail. Three books from the top is Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth. We do actually have [...]
Who killed economic growth?
Another great viral from Richard Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute. This is the five minute summary of Richard’s latest book, The End of Growth, which I reviewed here. (On a complete aside, I did a bit of a double-take on viewing this, as it’s soundtracked to All Caps, by Madvillain, which I distinctly remember [...]
Saving lives
Guest post by Steve at Next Starfish Imagine you are walking to work and see a toddler flailing about in a pond, drowning. No one else is around to help. Without any risk to yourself you can easily wade in a few steps and pull the child to safety and save its life. Surely none [...]
Ten things you didn’t know you owned
This week I’ve been reading All That We Share, an introduction to the idea of the commons by Jay Walljasper. It’s got me thinking about the commons, and I thought I’d post a few things. The commons are the things that are shared between us, owned by nobody but available to all. You might naturally [...]
Overconnected, by William H Davidow
Books about the dangers of the internet aren’t likely to get much of an audience right now, and some might be tempted to dismiss them as neo-Luddite scare-mongering. But a book about the downsides of online connectivity written by an insider, a venture capitalist and former VP of Intel, well, that might just get a [...]
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