I’ve been hearing a lot about Agenda 21 recently, the UN’s sustainable development plan. It’s been around for 20 years now, but for some reason it appears to have become a lightning rod for anti-green paranoia in the last couple of years. And I mean paranoia. Some of the rhetoric around this is absurd, claiming [...]
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Life inside the doughnut
A couple of years ago a group of scientists identified and named the nine planetary boundaries we need to life within. Mark Lynas picked up the concept as the basis for his book The God Species. They have also inspired Oxfam, and this week they released a discussion paper that adds a new dimension to [...]
Building of the week: YHA National Forest
Here’s somewhere I stayed a couple of months back with the good folks from the Breathe network – Britain’s only purpose-built eco-hostel. It’s in the National Forest, part of an ambitious plan to re-forest a 200-mile strip of English countryside. Being in a ‘forest in the making’ means the hostel is currently surrounded by saplings [...]
The Poor People’s Energy Outlook
Future global energy demand is a much-studied topic. The International Energy Agency can map demand into the next century and attempt to say how that demand will be met. But amongst the wrangling over fossil fuels vs nuclear vs renewable energy, one facet of global demand gets missed out: energy poverty. A third of the [...]
Building of the week: David Brower Center
The David Brower Center is an office building in Berkeley, California. It houses a number of environmental and social justice groups, including Slow Money, the Darfur Stoves Project and the Earth Island Institute. The latter was founded by environmental pioneer David Brower, who also founded the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. If you’re [...]
Book review: Alias Papa, by Barbara Wood
Alias Papa is a biography by Fritz Schumacher’s daughter Barbara. It’s a straightforward chronological account of the man and his ideas, from his childhood in Germany, his peripatetic early adulthood, through to his career as an economist and finally as an early environmental spokesman. Along with the facts of his life, Wood devotes considerable attention [...]
Has Britain experienced ‘peak stuff’?
Environmental writer and analyst Chris Goodall discovered something rather intriguing recently – that the amount of stuff Britain uses peaked in around 2001-2003 and has gone into decline. Shortly after the millennium, we started using fewer material resources to run the economy – oil, water, paper, fertiliser, cement – you name it, chances are we’re [...]
The EU is subsidising illegal fishing
That’s the straight-forward message of this latest campaign video from Greenpeace, which highlights the fact that EU subsidy monies have found their way to fishing companies with a history of illegal activity. In one incidence, a Spanish company received €15 million between 20o2 and 2009, despite several of their crews being convicted for fishing without [...]
Why 80 mph speed limits won’t help the economy
“Britain’s roads should be the arteries of a healthy economy and cars are a vital lifeline for many. Now it is time to put Britain back in the fast lane of global economies and look again at the motorway speed limit.” That was Transport Minister Philip Hammond last week, staking the future of the economy [...]
Today is ecological overshoot day
Today is Earth Overshoot Day, the day on which this year’s resources are used up and we start going into our ecological overdraft again. It’s more of a symbolic day than a scientific one – it’s impossible to put an exact date to it, but it’s an annual reminder that our current levels of consumption [...]
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