April 2018

  • Pity the Sulawesi bear cuscus

    This is how the Banyan column in a recent Economist began: "EVEN the Minahasan people, who pride themselves on eating bushmeat, call the collection of stalls at Tomohon, in the highlands of North Sulawesi, the “extreme market”.  There is certainly...

  • Colonial impudence in the English Lakes

    A while back, I re-published an extract from the Rank Grass and Bracken Times which had first been written at the time that foot and mouth disease threatened to wipe sheep farming from England's Lake District hills. Here's another lively extract; this...

  • What should be taught?

    I'm looking forward to the seminar on May 8th at Bath.  Here's the blurb: What should be taught in the university and school curriculum?  Should we focus on a western enlightenment paradigm?  Are we ignoring other epistemologies and views of...

  • The duck-shaped problem in California

    The Economist – well-known for its fine graphs – published another last week.  This was about how electricity demand in California varies across a sunny day (most days that is), and how an increase in solar power availability (most of...

  • Sustainability and war

    I reckon that anyone interested in sustainability needs to be interested (in that academic, enquiring sense) in war.  After all, war is something humans are quite good at and seem to like.  We have certainly been indulging in it for...

  • Composting is its own reward

    Jonathon Porritt tried hard to prioritise questions from young people at his seminar last week, but age muscled in, with some self-declaring as young and others saying they'd brought a young person with them and so it was o for...

  • Carbon sinning

    I'd just finished yet another Skype meeting when I noticed the article in the Huff Post on academic airmiles: The Climate Change Hypocrisy Of Jet-Setting Academics.  There wasn't much new in this about the problem of academics (and others) jet-setting around...

  • Reading Kate Marvel

    As if Facebook weren't enough, Jonathon Poritt's seminar last week was gloom leavened with a little bit of hope.  He asked us, in relation to averting the coming climate apocalypse, where we were on a 0 totally pessimistic to 10 wholly...

  • Porritt and Facebook – a night to remember

    Last Tuesday evening, I spend three hours watching drama.  First, there was Jonathon Porritt's I-SEE seminar in Bath, and then there was Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before a sprawling Senate mega-committee at the US Capitol. They were, of course, differently dramatic....

  • It's the gas, stupid

    I often refer to being Quartered Safely in Wiltshire, partly this is in homage to George MacDonald Fraser; partly it is because it feels a safe place to be despite sheep rustling, quad bike thefts, traveller slave gangs, and the...