Bill Scott's blog
Thoughts on learning, sustainability and the link between them
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Hard Rain is falling in Paris
Just before the new seasons riots started in earnest, an exhibition was launched outside the UNESCO HQ in Paris. It sets out to explain the 17 sustainable development goals to a global audience and proposes actions we can all take...
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The COP test
I've written before about the tendency of NGO-type organisations with a social justice remit to downplay environmental issues in what they do. This is, to a degree, understandable; after all, they are interested in combatting discrimination, liberating women and girls,...
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Education, Human Rights, Fundamental Freedoms
Further browsing of UNESCO's Issues and trends in Education for Sustainable Development [A. Leicht, J. Heiss and W. J. Byun (ends)] reveals this on p. 225 Monitoring on the basis of the 1974 Recommendation The Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and...
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Pruitt's Progress
I was wondering the other day how that human wrecking ball – Scott Pruitt – was getting on as Director of the US Environmental Protection Agency; specifically, I was interested in how his plan to undo environmental protection in the...
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Nature, nurture and the genome
I last wrote about nature, nurture and environment (and intelligence) in June, 2017, when I was still musing about a Cambridge Union debate that I went to in the early 1970s when these issues were much more in vogue that they've...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
