Fritz Schumacher only made one film. Two months before he died, he traveled to Western Australia to make an ecological documentary called ‘On the edge of the forest‘. It’s about deforestation, and shows the clear-cutting of ancient woodlands for paper pulp. The film was never screened in the UK, and was pretty much lost for [...]
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The Schumacher legacy
On monday I posted a short biography of E F Schumacher. Today I want to look at what happened to his ideas, and how his thinking has continued to evolve. Schumacher’s work did not end with his death. It has carried on through numerous organisations, societies and individuals, some directly inspired by him, others incorporating [...]
Stop Burning our Trees – corporate lobbying in disguise?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the bus posters I’d seen for a campaign called Stop Burning Our Trees. Among the campaign actions is a petition to ban the burning of virgin wood for electricity generation, and the petition has been promoted through a series of stunts around London. Since the campaign culminates [...]
How is the government doing on its green commitments?
“The greenest government ever” was what David Cameron promised as he formed his coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The precise policy plans were laid out in the coalition agreement. So, 18 months in, how are those measures going? The Wildlife and Countryside link is an umbrella group of many of Britain’s [...]
A positive angle on carbon offsetting
Carbon offsetting is the practice of reducing CO2 emissions by carrying out carbon positive action somewhere else. I could pay a company to plant three trees on my behalf in Costa Rica, and by balancing their carbon absorbing capacity against my carbon emitting activity, the net result is a zero carbon footprint for me. There [...]
What’s a tree worth?
As Tom Hodgkinson says, the first thing you should do when you move to a new house is plant a tree. This we did two years ago, two apple trees and a cherry tree, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve picked the first apples off our little cordon apple in the back garden. [...]
Positive News
Just a quick shout out to Positive News, which for some reason I hadn’t come across until very recently. It’s a quarterly newspaper “dedicated to promoting environmental sustainability, peace, social justice and equality, cultural diversity, political co-operation, individual fulfilment, and community empowerment.” The title of the paper reflects a desire to focus on solutions, which [...]
Silent Spring and the mixed up story of DDT
Last year I picked up an old copy of The Limits to Growth report from the Club of Rome. It’s a much-maligned book, and I was surprised to find that almost all of the commonly held beliefs about the book are false. You only had to read the book and the controversies evaporated, but several [...]
Book review: The God Species, by Mark Lynas
This is a book I’ve been looking forward to. A couple of years ago an article in Nature explained a new way of looking at sustainability, as a series of planetary boundaries. The earth has a number of systems that need to be held in balance, and human activity can overshoot them. Climate change is [...]
Post-green environmentalism
This week I’ve been reading The God Species, Mark Lynas‘ new book. It explores the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’, and how we manage the earth we find ourselves in charge of as a species. It’s also a broadside at the environmental movement. Every other page seems to take a pot-shot at the greens, accusing them [...]
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