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 [...]
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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 [...]
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 [...]
No, sustainable development does not mean growth
Reading through the government’s new national planning policy strategy, you might think that they are finally coming good on their promise to be the ‘greenest government ever’: “At the heart of the planning system is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan making [...]
Exploring national biocapacity
The idea of biocapacity is one of the key concepts behind this blog and one of the earliest things I researched in any detail. In a nutshell, biocapacity is the total of all renewable resources and services provided within a given area. Countries and regions have a biocapacity of their own, and so does the [...]
How self-sufficient is Britain?
Interesting graph from the Climate Safety website this morning, showing Britain’s declining ability to feed itself. It’s not a disaster as long as we’re able to trade, but it is a clear vulnerability in a world of rising oil prices. We’ve been stung by this vulnerability before, albeit under exceptional circumstances, during the war. In [...]
Where does your supermarket shop?
We all get to choose where we do our shopping, and for most of us that basically means choosing from one of the big supermarket chains. But supermarkets have to go shopping too, filling those shelves in the first place. Suppliers in turn need to buy in their ingredients, and so on back through processors [...]
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