To Bradford for an Ellen MacArthur Foundation session at the British Science Festival. One refreshing thing about the EMF is its steadfast refusal to use words and concepts like eco / sustainable / green – largely on the grounds that they're meaningless to the people they are trying to influence. Would that we were all so disciplined.
The government finds itself caught in these headlights at the moment, having foolishly invoked the concept of sustainable development as the condition for new building permission, and then by refusing to say what it mean by this. They know, as do, increasingly, we, that here 'sustainable' is an empty signifier.
I note, from yesterday’s PMQs, that this has now become “sensible sustainable development”. Dear me! The hole (literally and metaphorically) just gets bigger.
At the Festival, I also went to talks on the search for dark matter (which is now assumed to exist, and which – oddly – it is actually possible to “see”. Nice pics. Two questions from these sessions stick in my mind:
Is there dark matter in this room?
The answer is “yes” it seems, though you'd not know it. And ...
Are we using the right models to allow us to understand what we’re doing?
I wonder if government asks this question. The EMF certainly does.
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