Be careful out there
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, and the 9/11 attacks, were huge international events, but they did not leave a third of the world in lockdown. The Covid-19 pandemic is having enormous ramifications on everything we do. Different forces are finding themselves in opposition. Continued capitalism seems to be a threat to our […]
Nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation
We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial. In the rich nations, we have begun to believe we have transcended the material world. The wealth we’ve accumulated – often at the expense of others – has shielded us from reality. Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses, […]
Necessity…
…is the mother of invention In the UK, coronavirus is the new Brexit. It is getting saturated media coverage, and it is all anyone talks about. Across most of Europe, countries are in lockdown. Paris is a ghost town. Last weekend, bars, restaurants and non-essential shops were ordered to close their doors at midnight on […]
School’s out (in a lot of places)
In Italy, like most of Europe, schools have been closed because of coronavirus, and parents are thinking hard about how they are going to look after and entertain their children, for an unknown period of time. The BBC reported on a school, in northern Italy, that had closed due to the virus and Amanda Ferrario, […]
Europe after Brexit
The UK has left the EU and I have decided to report on how our departure has affected our now ‘ex friends and partners’. In the first of a short series, I travelled to Spain and visited a typical Spanish city, Benidorm, to gauge the Spanish response to Brexit. I already know (from Wikipedia) that […]
The government must abandon its fossil fuel power projects. If not, we’ll sue
No longer should our survival be an afterthought. If we are to withstand the climate crisis, every decision should begin with the question of what the planet can endure. This means that any discussion about new infrastructure should begin with ecological constraints. The figures are stark. A paper published in Nature last year showed that […]
