The Case for Working With Your Hands, or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good is a book that reflects on this idea. US readers may recognise it under it’s American title Shop Class as Soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work (The term ‘shop class’ would be unfamiliar to most British readers). It’s been a big seller in the US, and I can see why. This is a great book, timely, inspiring, and counter-cultural. And the UK edition has this lovely wood cover.

This is a work of philosophy, but Matthew Crawford is an unorthodox philosopher. He has the Phd and worked at a think tank, but quit to open up a motorcycle repair shop. The book references Aristotle, Hobbes and Heidegger, but is just as likely to discuss spring compression or clutch hydraulics. Like Alain de Botton’s writing, this is philosophy for real people.

In brief, Crawford’s point is that ‘manual labour’ has been devalued in an age of information. Schools tore out their wood and metalwork shops and brought in computer labs. Students were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that academic subjects and then college were the route to a successful career, despite the fact that there’s good money to be made in the trades, and a skills shortage. The result is that we have a generation of people equipped for office work, but lacking in practical skills.

This, says Crawford, is something of a tragedy, as manual labour is often more rewarding than office work. He found this to be true in his own work life, and the book explores why, critiquing our work culture and speaking up “”for manual competence and the stance it entails towards the built, material world.”

The great thing about manual work is that it deals with real stuff, it requires “focused engagement with material things”. Fixing things draws you out of yourself, forcing you to think and to care for something. You cannot be self-absorbed and be a good repairman. When you’re done and the object is made or fixed, your competence is evident to the world. A difference has been made in physical reality, and your work is “meaningful because it is useful”.  Office work on the other hand is usually more nebulous. The results of our work aren’t particularly obvious, success or failure is more arbitrary, and that leaves people unsure where they stand.

Of course, some forms of manual labour are boring and stultifying, and here Crawford references a history of thought on what good work actually is. Henry Ford, for example, is credited with devising the production line. Where his cars were originally built by craftsmen from the coach-making trade, the line moved the car along, with each man doing just one simple task. Frederick Winslow Taylor was an influential industrial theorist who promoted this philosophy, arguing that reducing processes to the simplest possible tasks was more efficient. It was faster, but just as importantly, it allowed factory owners to use cheaper unskilled labour. When Ford brought in his new system in 1913, workers quit in their hundreds, because it was so boring.

Lewis Mumford pointed out the dehumanising effects of this way of working in the 1920 in his book Technics and Civilization, and E F Schumacher’s Good Work makes a similar case. Crawford updates this philosophy of good work by showing how the same processes that simplified industrial labour have squeezed the human factor out of other kinds of work too. Business processes, scripted responses and software formulas do the work for us, and we have “ever fewer opportunities for judgement”. In return, companies can hire less qualified staff and spend less on training, although the cumulative effect is that as a society we may be getting “more stupid with every passing year”. We all know what this looks like, the ‘can I interest you in any of our special offers today?’ at the chain store checkout, the ‘mortgage advisor’ who merely enters all your information and cannot explain why the computer says no.

Good work then, is work that “engages the human capacities as fully as possible,” despite the fact that this “humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing.” People who fix things understand this, and so do doctors who see patients, farmers and gardeners, firemen, carpenters and electricians, craftsmen and builders.

The Case for Working With Your Hands is a call to rediscover good work, to take pride, to value excellence, and to change our relationship with our own stuff. It offers different perspectives on consumerism and the throwaway culture, on creativity, and on resilience. It is full of observations and insights, drawing on the author’s own experiences of fixing things, making things go faster, and running his own business. It’s funny, warm, and irreverent. I’m sure you’d enjoy it more if you like motorbikes, but don’t let that deter you if you don’t. I have zero interest in them and this is a contender for my favourite book of the year so far.

The Guardian led with ‘Top climate sceptic calls for $100 bn fund to fight global warming.’

On the same day, the Daily Express had ‘Climate change lies are exposed.’

Quite an insight into editorial policy on climate change, I’m sure you’ll agree. The first of those headlines refers to a new book from Bjorn Lomborg, arguably the best known climate sceptic, in which he calls for immediate action on climate change. The article begins: “The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.”

Having gloated for six paragraphs, the article also mentions that the Interacademy Council has published it’s investigation into the IPCC’s 2007 report. As a result, there is pressure on IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri to stand down.

The Express, which came out against climate science in a big way last year, leads with the IAC report: “The world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices. A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.”

The Express is being misleading here, as the report comments on IPCC structure and process, not the evidence for climate change. “The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce its periodic assessment reports has been successful overall,” begins the IAC’s own press release, but it does recomend that it “fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures”.

I mention these stories not to say who’s right and wrong, but as a reminder to read broadly.  If you’re a Guardian reader, chances are you take climate change as a given. If you’re an Express reader, as the comments below the article testify, you may well think it’s all a massive con. It’s easy for us to surround ourselves with voices that we agree with, filling our bookmarks and RSS readers with “all the news you choose”. Let’s keep asking questions of our favourite news sources.

These are the five defining questions of the next 20 years, according to the British government’s chief scientific advisor John Beddington. As a one page summary of the challenges we face, I think it’s pretty good.

HT Duncan Green

A phytoplankton bloom from space

A few weeks ago I read a book called Seasick, which looked at the effects of climate change on the oceans. In it, I learned that plankton create 50% of the world’s oxygen and are a major carbon sink, but that we don’t know how warming waters and rising Ph levels in the seas will affect these tiny but essential creatures. In fact, plankton are so overlooked that Alanna Mitchell interviews a marine biologist who wanted to study them for a dissertation, and was told they weren’t important enough.

That research has now been done however, and the July issue of the Nature investigates the effects of climate change on the plankton. It shows that plankton levels have declined by 40% since 1950.

The Dalhousie University study compiles almost half a million readings of sea transparency between 1899 and 2008, which measure the amount of algae in the water. It has declined in 8 out of the 10 locations, at the rate of around 1% a year. The decline matches the rise in temperature, although as usual with climate research, the exact nature of the correlation is hard to determine, and nobody knows what effects such a decline will have.

It shows once again how delicately balanced the earth’s ecosystems are, and there’s a strange irony to the interconnections here. The plankton numbers are falling as the earth warms, driven in part by our burning of oil, and much of our oil is ancient plankton.

But more than that, I just find the whole story astonishing. The organism responsible for every other breath we take has declined by 40%, and we only just noticed, and we don’t know what it means. Our ignorance of the planet we live on apparently knows no bounds.

• BBC: Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm

• Independent: Global warming blamed for 40% decline in phytoplankton

• A 100 kilometre traffic jam in China made the news on day nine, but is expected to last for weeks (thanks Phil)

• China has 19 million cars. If it had the same rate of car ownership as the US it would have 590 million.

One of them is that Make Wealth History is a provocative title and easily misunderstood, and it needs a good strapline that explains what it’s about. Paul and I chose ‘because the earth cannot afford our lifestyle’ when we started, but it’s not quite complete.  We write about development, poverty and justice as well as climate change and the environment, and I wouldn’t want to suggest that the earth matters more than people. I’d also like a strapline that suggest building something new rather than just critiquing a current way of life.

But what do you think? Have you got a favourite from the options below, or another idea?

Not sure what the human residents will make of it, but the wildlife should appreciate it – artists have created a bird city in the trees on an estate in London. It’s part of a series of ‘secret garden’ art projects that highlight the biodiversity of the city, and it should provide a home for a range of birds and insects.

It’s an initiative from art collective London Fieldworks, with more photos on Inhabitat.

Christians and Catastrophe is a very short book, at 40 pages more of a bound essay. It’s also rather specific, written in response to Slavoj Zizek’s recent book First as Tragedy, then as Farce, but neither of those things need detract from its usefulness.

Ingleby takes imminent catastrophe as his starting point, and his concern is how we respond to it, rather than debate whether or not we’re in trouble. He laments the “supportive membership and comforting ambience” of church that turn a blind eye to ecological collapse, or even welcome disaster. The Bible’s teaching doesn’t allow for this sort of complacency, he argues, because “it makes this life irrelevant.” Holding out for a heavenly existence devalues this life, and trivialises real injustices and suffering that we could be trying to put right. What we do in this life matters far too much to write off the planet.

“However much we are convinced that ecological disaster is inevitable, it is still our responsibility to try to prolong the world’s life and to save the environment.” If that sounds a little depressing, Ingleby points out that there are solutions, a direction that we could take that would lead us away from disaster. It’s not too late for “distribution instead of growth, local solutions rahter than global ones, limits instead of excess,” but even Christians seem happy to defend the consumerist status quo.

How should Christians respond to catastrophe? By remembering the importance of community, says Ingleby, by ‘reading the times’, being ready, being watchful and aware, and modelling a hope that transcends shallow optimism. “Every endeavour that nurtures our world and tries to prolong its existence is God’s work,” the essay concludes. “In the very teeth of catastrophe we can be building, planning, offering another way.”

Having written about the Atlantic trash patch earlier this week, I thought I’d highlight another little known pollution problem: space debris.

In 2008 the European Space Agency released this image of the known pieces of debris orbiting the earth. Of the millions of fragments out there, about 18,000 are larger than 10cm and trackable, and that includes rocket parts, discarded equipment and over 5,000 obsolete satellites. It grows every year, as new satellites are launched and old ones are retired. Each rocket sent into orbit also leaves a trail of discarded booster sections, as this ESA graph shows. The image not shown to scale of course, but let’s zoom in a little to see just how ‘congested’ it gets.

This is the result of half a century of space technology, and it’s beginning to ring alarm bells in the space industry. The Office for Outer Space Affairs, one of the UN’s lesser known bodies, keeps a Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space. This year they warned that coverage of the World Cup could be disrupted as satellites could be knocked out at any time. Their warning about ensuing riots may have been a little dramatic, but it’s hard to blame them for taking any opportunity going to highlight a danger that’s so far away and invisible.

Space junk doesn’t pose any real danger to us on the surface, as any object drawn into the earth’s gravitational pull would burn up on re-entry. The big problem is our satellite systems. Last year two of them collided, instantly creating 1,500 more objects to hit. Not helping matters, China blew up a satellite with a missile in 2007, apparently to see if they could. That one act accounts for about a quarter of the debris, but before we harangue China, we might also want to remember the US Military’s ‘Needles Project‘. Conceived as a Cold War back-up communication device, scientists are still discovering little clusters of the millions of copper needles that were released into orbit in 1963.

Moving at almost five miles a second, anything larger than a speck of paint is enough to destroy a satellite, and it could become a chain reaction. As a US Defense Department review explained in May, the debris from one collision triggers a second, which causes a third, until everything in that orbit is destroyed. A worst case scenario would be a collapse in GPS systems, international communications, satellite television, and weather monitoring, and space rendered unusable for generations.

As you might expect, the people most concerned are the ones who depend most heavily on satellite technology, and the US military is a key player in finding a solution. There are solutions – debris could be knocked out of orbit from a ground-based laser or a roving robot, causing it either to burn up in the earth’s atmosphere or spin out to a higher and safer altitude. There are no cheap or easy answers.

Like the oceans, it’s easy to think of space as being vast and boundless and there for our every unthinking use, but everything has a limit. I don’t think we need to lie awake worrying about space debris, but I think it symbolises our careless attitude to the earth rather well.

I’ve just been updating the events pages, something I don’t do quite often enough. A few interesting things for your diaires:

• First up, put down the 10th of October as the 10:10 global day of action, and check out the website for activities near you. I’ll come back to this one, but look – they’ve got a moving banner and everything.

• 22nd of September is European Car Free day. If you’re in a church, you can take part in Car Free Sunday on the 19th.

• To buy or not to buy – consumption, growth and prosperity’ is a residential course at Schumacher College. It’s October 4th – 9th, and speakers include Ed Mayo, Julie Richardson and Tim Jackson.

Check out the events pages for more, and if you’re organising something that we should know about, leave a comment or drop me an email.