A terrific new word arrives just in time for the weekend: “phugoid”. I learned about phugoids from an airline pilot called Paul in his reply to John Michael Greer’s piece on “the effluent society”. “As a pilot (writes Paul) I like to use flying analogies. An aircraft, if disturbed from straight-and-level flight, will execute a […]
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Palin’s poisonous pump and dead ducks
A diary piece at daily Kos investigates the environmental impacts of the so-called Palin Pipeline. It points out that the pipeline is not a conduit of natural gas to US consumers, but (as the map shows) to the tar sands of Alberta, Canada where it will be used to power the extraction of oil. Canada […]
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Green noise: expert meeting
The biggest challenge we face in City Eco Lab (see below) is the explosion of public events, media channels, reports, platforms, trade shows, and government initiatives, at all levels, to do with sustainability. Paul Hawken’s WiserEarth web portal, alone, alone lists over 100,000 non-profit projects and organisations. In the UK, the Transition Towns movement is […]
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City Eco Lab – Preview -70 days to go
This two-week-long market of sustainability projects opens in 70 days from now in St Etienne, France. We have set out to design a scalable, reproducable event, at the level of a city-region, that will materially accelerate its transition to sustainability. As with Dott07 in North East England, citizen co-design of projects are at the core […]
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How dematerialisation adds value
Did you ever turn a packet of dried biscuits to dust trying to get them out of the packet? Me too. This brilliant solution from Bolletje, a venerable Dutch brand, adds value by de-materialising an aspect of the product. Go to the top of the class, Mr/Ms biscuit designer.
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Design per un futuro sostenible
To cap three days of high-energy conversation at Changing The Change in Torino at the weekend – it’s already been very well reviewed and signposted by Mark Vanderbeeken at Core 77 – and here by David Stairs – my dynamic editor at Allemandi, Pier Paolo Peruccio, handed me the first copy of In The Bubble […]
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Assimilated
Passing through Amsterdam last week, I could not help but notice that the entire populace was dressed in white. There was talk of a rave in a football stadium – but I prefer to believe that they’ve all been assimilated by a post-human collectivity based in Tiblisi.
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Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
“Nature provides human society with a vast diversity of benefits such as food, fibres fuel, clean water, healthy soil, protection from floods, protection from soil erosion, medicines, storing carbon (important in the fight against climate change) and many more. Though our wellbeing is totally dependent upon these ecosystem services they are predominantly public goods with […]
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Did this architect trigger global financial mayhem?
We don’t know yet whether $85 billion dollars will be enough to save American International Group (AIG), the world’s biggest insurance firm (although some apparently insider commentators are not reassuring). But could an architect have been responsible for starting the panic? The Stern Review, when it was published two years ago, stated that failure to […]