dirtmeetsthewater

moving home

2011-10-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

For lots of reasons dirtmeetsthewater is moving home... you can find us here

landscape photography

2011-10-24T04:12:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick set of links to some beautiful landscape photography.

I recommend going to have a look, both here in the telegraph where I saw it first - and on the winner Robert Fulton's own site.

http://www.kenleslie.co.uk/section412040_195202.html

More Biomimicry Please - A new source of inspiration for wind farms

2011-10-19T04:34:00.000-07:00

How Schools Of Fish Can Lead To More Efficient Wind Farms

(straight from fastcompany)

A new source of inspiration for wind farm engineers has come from an unlikely place: the sea. By imitating schools of fish, engineers can increase wind farm output--potentially getting up to 10 times more power from the same site compared to traditional wind farms.

The biomimicry news comes from a Caltech study (PDF) in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which examined a test array in the California desert that used vertical axis wind turbines (they look like spinning eggbeaters) laid out based on the fluid dynamics of schools of fish.

Today's standard horizontal axis turbines--the propeller-like objects that are most often seen on wind farms--have to be spaced far apart in order to work correctly. This means that the wake generated by one of the giant turbines can interfere with the aerodynamics of neighboring turbines, leading to wasted wind energy. The problem can partially be solved with bigger blades and taller towers that can capture the wind gusts found at higher altitudes--but bigger turbines have other problems, including increased noise and more danger for birds and bats.

Caltech explains:

The solution, says [study researcher John] Dabiri, is to focus instead on the design of the wind farm itself, to maximize its energy-collecting efficiency at heights closer to the ground. While winds blow far less energetically at, say, 30 feet off the ground than at 100 feet, "the global wind power available 30 feet off the ground is greater than the world’s electricity usage, several times over," he says. That means that enough energy can be obtained with smaller, cheaper, less environmentally intrusive turbines--as long as they're the right turbines, arranged in the right way.

Vertical axis wind turbines are well-suited to the task, because they can be placed close to one another and can capture wind energy from all directions--even from above. By having every turbine placed in the opposite direction of its neighbor, Caltech researchers found that efficiency can be increased due to opposing spins lowering the drag on each turbine.

This is much like what is seen in schools of fish, which align themselves similarly to increase their forward propulsion. If there is just one fish swimming by itself, the energy kicked off into the water would be wasted. But if another fish is behind it, the follower can use the leader's kinetic energy to move forward.

Fish have inspired more than just better wind farms. Researchers at MIT, for example, areworking on energy efficient electronic screens that are based on cuttlefish camouflage, and a group at Case Western is using salmon to design better bridge stability sensors for floods.

[Hat tip: BBC]

[Image: Wikipedia]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

The Gathering - an SAS POW action

2011-10-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

(from Surfers Against Sewage's youtube channel)

Surfers Against Sewages (SAS) new campaign Protect Our Waves (POW) had its first action today, The Gathering, a mass paddle out, in association with local campaign group Access BroadBench Association (ABBA). Over 350 surfers from across the nation joined SAS and ABBA and paddled out at Kimmeridge Bay on International Surfing Day. The action called on the Secretary of State for Defence to allow surfers access to Broadbench, a special wave found on the outer boundary of a Ministry of Defence (MoD) firing range.

Broadbench is a quality wave in Kimmeridge Bay, described by many as one of Britains best. Unfortunately it falls right on the outer boundary of a MoD firing range. SAS are not asking the MoD to reduce their use of this important firing range. However, SAS believe there is a compromise that will ensure surfers and waveriders can have 100% access to Broadbench without impacting on the MoDs full use of the firing range.

We are calling on the Secretary of State for Defence to implement SASs compromise, changing where the MoD currently fire from. This will in turn change the direction of the MoDs firing and could leave Broadbench outside the boundary of the firing range. It will not impact on the MoDs use of the firing range, leaving surfers and waveriders with 100% access to Broadbench and the MoD full use of their range.

International Surfing Day (ISD), sees surfing events taking place all over the world. There will be events in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia but nothing like the Gathering. SAS expect the Gathering to be the best-supported event with over 350 surfers and supporter actively participating at the paddle out protest on ISD.

For more information visit sas.org.uk

A Grain of Sand Picture Gallery

2011-10-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Like a billion trillion bejillion little gems.... up close, even the grubbiest beach looks lovely. (from geology.com via stumbleupon)

Strange beautiful bunkers

2011-10-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Not really sure what this has to do with anything - except that it does prove that utilitarian buildings can blend into the landscape and be hidden. Shame that innovation is so often driven by military necessity and cold-war paranoia - but the Swiss prove what can be done when there's a will or sufficient motive. So I give you Swiss bunkers.

And last but best the smashing Dutch take an old bunker and make it art....

Sky Truth - a smart new tool for environmental protection?

2011-10-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

So here's something clever from the states that I found via the rather cool and increasingly essential PSFK.

Last week, environmental monitoring group SkyTruth launched an alert system that provides daily updates of environmentally significant incidents in America. The free service lets you view the most recent incident reports on a map or in Google Earth, which are tracked using remote sensing and digital mapping.

It shows air and water pollution, oil spills, and other incidents on an interactive map. Notes such as the time and date, nearest city, incident type, suspected responsible party, and a report description are listed for each incident. The maps are compiled using satellite images, aerial photography and data from emergency response agencies.

If you zoom in on an area of the map that you’re interested in and subscribe to the alert feed, you will be sent notifications about new incidents in that location via email or RSS as soon as they are posted.

SkyTruth Alerts

Is this something Surfers Against Sewage can take up and run with in the UK?

via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2011/10/nonprofit-group-launches-environmental-incident-map.html#ixzz1b9w1DD6c
The SkyTruth alert system is a free service open to the public that provides daily updates of environmentally significant incidents by geographical area. You can browse the most recent incident reports on a map or in Google Earth, and you can also subscribe to a personalized feed of incident reports via RSS or email. The alert feed currently contains reports generated from ongoing SkyTruth investigations, combined with selected reports from the the National Response Center that have been processed by SkyTruth's automated expert system to clean up problem data and add additional SkyTruth commentary and analysis.
http://alerts.skytruth.org/

what's the environmental priority for the next 40 years?

2011-10-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

I sawthis article in the Guardian (which led me to Joe Royle's own page here)but her synopsis and the following video capture it all.

What should be the topenvironmental priority for the next 40 years?

With every breath we take and drop of water we drink we are connected to the ocean. Seventy two percent of our planet is ocean. The ocean drives global weather systems, absorbs the heat generated from our addiction to burning fossil fuels and provides the main source of protein for over a quarter of the world's population. We live on a blue planet. The ocean breathes for the planet, with most photosynthesis occurring on the sea surface more than anywhere else. The health of future generations is dependent on the health of our ocean. However, silently and out of sight, the deep blue is suffering from our take-take relationship. We are getting dangerously close to the sea reaching its capacity to act as the planet's largest carbon sink. Depletion of the oceans fisheries, toxic contamination of the sea by industrial runoff and plastic pollution and acidification pose great threats to the health of the world's population. The oceans are clearly of critical importance in providing energy, foodand economical security and drinking water. The blue planet teaches us about love, beauty, respect, sensuality and mystery. The ocean fuels our curiosity, imagination, well being and gives us a sense of clarity, meaning and purpose – the liquid planet is the greatest teacher. Would we get the same feeling of peace looking across a lifeless ocean?

tree houses - don't require much explanation

2011-10-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

what a great site - found with stumbleupon

some people look for a beautiful place

2011-10-12T14:27:00.001-07:00

WAR - what is it good for? Waves Are Resources

2011-10-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

This is a really interesting read and an important document - and not just if you're a surfer. Lifted straight from SAS' website it gives thoughtful analysis:

The WAR report clearly highlights why Waves Are Resourcesand, as such, should be recognised as valuable assets, protected for this andfuture generations. The WAR Report not only focuses on the intrinsic value ofwaves to surfers but also the economic value to the wider community. SASreleased the report on the first day of the Relentless Boardmasters 2010, theUK’s largest surfing competition. The Boardmasters is obviously solelydependent on the waves and the event bring £1,700,000 into the local economy.

There are a myriad of threats that constantly jeopardize ourfinite surfing resource, our waves. In 2009 SAS launched the new Protect OurWaves (POW) campaign that focuses on protecting waves from overzealous on andnear shore development, environmental impacts and waverider’s rights of access.

The WAR Report was written for planners and waveriders alikeand SAS will ensure that all relevant planning bodies in the UK have a hardcopy of the WAR Report and will expect the WAR Report to be referencedalongside SAS’s other reports when coastal developments schemes are in theplanning process. Download a copy of the The SAS WAR Report here on pdf

The WAR Report was written by SAS Director Dr Tony Butt PhD.Dr Butt is one of the world’s most highly respected authorities on the scienceof waves and how they interact with the coastal environment.

bonkers civil engineering is the way forward

2011-10-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, to get amazing things done, it takes someone who is prepared to stand up and sound bonkers in public. Bjarke Ingels is clearly one of those people, but because he is both a Dutchman, and an architect, no one thinks he is mad and they commission him to build wonderfully insane buildings.

The one that caught my eye is a huge waste treatment plant on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

http://www.big.dk/projects/amf/

He explains,"Amagerforbraending is in many ways situated on an edge condition. It is a place in the outskirts of Copenhagen, but also the centre for new recreational activities. It divides the local area in two, with factories on one side and housing on the other. It is a place you know from afar, but where few people ever go. On one hand the city of Copenhagen on the other hand Amager. The aim of the project is to tie all these opposing forces together, forming an identity for a new place in Copenhagen. We want to turn it into a place in itself – a destination where people will travel to."

"Most of the recently build power plants are merely functional boxes, wrapped in an expensive gift paper. The main “function” of the façade is to hide the fact that factories are having a serious image/branding problem. We want to do more than just create a beautiful skin around the factory. We want to add functionality! The ambition of creating added value in terms of added functionality does not stand in contrast to the ambition to create beauty. It does not have to be either/or – it can be both! We propose a new breed of waste-to-energy plant, one that is economically, environmentally, and socially profitable."

"Instead of considering Amagerforbraending as an isolated object, we mobilize the architecture and intensify the relationship between the building and the city – expanding the existing activities in the area by turning the roof of the new Amagerforbraending into a ski slope for the citizens of Copenhagen. Now is time to re-brand the factory."

Stuart Maconie: England will fight for access to its coast

2011-08-31T08:15:00.000-07:00

This rather excellent article by
BBC 6 Music DJ, writer and avid walker Stuart Maconie is taken from the Walk magazine website. He warns of a bigger public backlash than over forestry should the Government abandon its commitments to English coastal access.

You can justify anything with statistics, of which, as Vic Reeves astutely observed: “95 per cent are made up on the spot”. Of late, we are fed a daily diet of grim figures, mountains of debt, oceans of deficit, all trotted out to justify deep and lacerating cuts to our public-spending budgets. Leaving aside the question of who got us into this mess (it certainly wasn’t me, or any of the nurses, cleaners, librarians who are carrying the can), I’d take issue with the notion that when times are tough, some things are expendable.

Take footpaths. While it doesn’t take a genius to work out that, by inclination, a Conservative-led government is not going to put matters of access ahead of matters of private property rights, there are issues here that should worry walkers. We saw what happened when the plans to sell off the nation’s forests were announced last year. This hugely misguided strategy united some of the most disparate sections of our society, from retired colonels in the Shires to eco-warriors.

Now, as the Ramblers’ chief executive Tom Franklin has pointed out, it seems from the recent Government white paper that the all-England Coast Path project may be being quietly shelved. If so, we should make our voices heard again. If one thing should exercise an island race even more than woodlands, it is the coast and the sea. It may not be putting it too strongly to call free access to the British coast a birthright.

Billy Bragg puts this primal and enduring link rather nicely. Billy lives dead alongside the South West Coast Path in Dorset. He’s often asked by those mindful of his roots in urban Barking how he feels now living in the countryside. He always replies that he doesn’t live in the countryside. He lives by the sea. There’s
a difference. He’s absolutely right. The British coast is a joy and a marvel. We are blessed in having it as our neighbour. From the austere and haunting flats of East Anglia to the pleasure palaces of Blackpool, from the rugged inlets and gull-haunted rock cathedrals of Zennor to the muddy, ribbed Humber Estuary beloved of Philip Larkin. The sea has shaped the land and us. We should not give it up without a fight.

There’ll be some who balk at the notion of walkers getting ‘too political’, feeling that we should stick to our genteel pursuits and let others make tough fiscal decisions and wield the axe. To which my reply would be unrepeatable. The roots of the Ramblers, let’s remember, are not in cream teas and stiles, but in dissent and protest. Every time I take out one of my beloved OS maps – in mountain mists, or lashed by rain on a soaking moor, or later by a crackling fireside with a warming Talisker – I think of Benny Rothman and his mates. Because these last few years, when I look at the battered map, I see great expanses of sandy yellow where previously there was antiseptic white space and ‘keep out’ signs.

The yellow shading stands for open access land; great tracts of our country once forbidden to me and you that is now open to us all. That ‘right to roam’ was won by the bravery and fortitude of many, and chief among them were the Kinder Scout Trespassers. In my new book, Hope And Glory, I make the point that the British love of nature and exploration transcends class and economic divisions. You only have to look at how climbing, for instance, made tight partners of men as socially disparate as Chris Bonington and Don Whillans to see this.

The point is that a nation is not built on GDP and fiscal prudence alone. Nationhood is forged in the character of the people and how they interact with the landscape and history of the land. I get a swell of pride when I see Japanese tourists taking pictures by the shores of Derwent Water or the slopes of Skiddaw; or when I chat to the German and Dutch tourists who throng the Cornish sections of the South West Coast Path, entranced by the savage beauty of it.

If a Big Society means anything, it is an open society: a society that welcomes those, British or not, who want to enjoy the nations’ natural joys and wonders to the full. If not, we are a small and crabbed society, one seeking to close doors and lock gates under cover of an economic darkness. We should not let this happen.

Stuart Maconie’s Hope And Glory is published by Ebury Press

The best way to clean up an oil spill is not to have one. The second best maybe to make a meal of it.

2011-08-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

Want To Clean Up An Oil Spill? There Are Some Microbes Looking For A Meal

BY ARIEL SCHWARTZMon Aug 1, 2011

A lingering mystery of the Gulf oil spill is where the oil actually went. It seems now that the microbes in the water made a meal of it, but that doesn't mean we can rely on them for the next spill. (This article is directly from Fast Company which I came to from the Do Lectures' twitter feed...)

After the initial shock of last year's Gulf oil disaster passed, it quickly became apparent that the oil had somehow disappeared--on the surface, at least. Dispersants helped break up some of the larger plumes, sure, but that doesn't entirely explain why the surface oil slick in the Gulf seemed to disappear just three weeks after the disaster. Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute think they have the answer: hungry bacterial microbes.

Scientists have known for some time that certain bacteria enjoy a good meal made out of oil. But after studying samples from the slick and its surrounding waters, the Woods Hole researchers discovered that bacterial microbes inside the slick were devouring the oil a whopping five times faster than microbes outside the Gulf slick. And strangely enough, there was no increase in microbes inside the slick, leaving the researchers to wonder what the microbes did with all the excess energy gained from chowing down on oil (you would except more microbes to breed as a result of all the available oil).

The researchers were also surprised that the microbes consumed so much oil in the first place, since necessary nutrients for the oil-eaters--like phosphorous and nitrogen--were lacking in the oil slick and surrounding waters.

The scientists' big fear, of course, is that oil companies will take this information and use it to allay fears about future oil disasters ("We can spill all the oil we want into the ocean because it's just feeding the microbes"). But Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, questioned just how well these microbes break down oil in an interview last year: "Now, did they degrade every single component of the oil? It's doubtful. And there could be some long-term effects from some of these very, very low concentrations. We don't know. That remains to be seen."

The Woods Hole researchers also explain that molecules from the broken-down oil could still find its way into food webs, both offshore and in shoreline areas. So while the oil may appear to be gone, little bits of it could have toxic consequences.

Still, it's a comforting thought and a sure source for innovation--if bacterial microbes can at least partially help clean up our massive man-made disasters, what can we learn about how to speed up, mimic, or augment that process in preparation for the next big oil spill?

[Image: Flickr user faceless b]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.EL SCHWARTZMon Aug 1, 2011

just a great picture

2011-07-04T01:51:00.001-07:00

from the Atlantic's site - of course the first shuttle was enterprise....the stuff of dreams etc...

The article has an awe-inspiring selection of pictures that say a lot about man's ability to amazing things if the will and determination are there....

I love a good cloud

2011-06-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

I love a good storm and a great skyscape. I highly recommend visiting Extreme Instability

we all take the same pictures

2011-06-10T02:55:00.000-07:00

As a fan of photography I loved this collection Corinne Vionnet - who harvested thousands of pictures from photo sharing sites, overlaid them and created some Turner-esque impressionist beauties. Called Photo Opportunities - it's more than just simple proof that there are some ideal spots to snap a good pic. It's more a quiet meditation on the importance and impact of natural and man-made beauty in the eye of multiple beholders..... or they're just nice pictures.

Norway does a great line in highway 'rest stops'

2011-05-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

For the last five or six years, Norway has been investing in a new adventure industry, seeding infrastructure and supporting fledgling outfitters, and sprucing up its already beautiful lands.

In 2005, Norway began building “national tourist routes” along its particularly scenic areas, laying down quality standards for the roads to retain this status, and constructing more than 100 rest areas. But these aren’t your typical grungy, institutionalized pullouts: Norway commissioned architects to design structures, ramps, porches, overhangs, and other very cool and often subtle enhancements to the landscape. It’s your Kodak moment delivered with thought, consideration, and whimsy.

from the adventure journal

Huge solar photovoltaic farm opens in France

2011-05-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

A new photovoltaic park has opened on the plateau of des Mées, in the southern department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Spread across 36 acres, the park, built by Belgian firm Enfinity, joins several other plants built on the vast plateau of the Colle-Mees. By the end of 2011, solar panels will cover 200 hectares and produce around 100MW, making it the biggest solar array in France. Enfinity's €70m investment has included work to preserve the landscape with space for grazing and a system without a concrete foundation. story and pic here

turtle is disappointed

2011-05-18T07:05:00.001-07:00

for my friends in Norfolk Island who are campaigning to save a beautiful bay from becoming a cruise ship terminal. Turtles are common there. And they would not approve. search 'saveballbay' on facebook groups or here saveballbay@groups.facebook.com

abandon responsibility and embrace frivolity

2011-05-18T07:03:00.000-07:00

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

2011-05-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

This piece, By the peerless Douglas Adams first appeared in the News Review section of The Sunday Times on August 29th 1999. Over 12 years ago. And it's still bang on. Nothing to do with the beach, or green issues - it's just about the world.

It's on douglasadams.com

A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.

But the change is real. I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Of course, there’s a great deal wrong with the Internet. For one thing, only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected. I recently heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet would always be just another unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor for the following reasons – that computers would always be expensive in themselves, that you had to buy lots of extras like modems, and you had to keep upgrading your software. The list sounds impressive but doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The cost of powerful computers, which used to be around the level of jet aircraft, is now down amongst the colour television sets and still dropping like a stone. Modems these days are mostly built-in, and standalone models have become such cheap commodities that companies, like Hayes, whose sole business was manufacturing them are beginning to go bust.. Internet software from Microsoft or Netscape is famously free. Phone charges in the UK are still high but dropping. In the US local calls are free. In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.

However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.

The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

just when you start to despair someone big does something huge

2011-05-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

No apologies for re-hashing another Guardian story, because this is a biggy. I shall blog on it more in due course, but I really hope that something as terrible as Fukashima ends up having a huge positive impact.

Japan to scrap nuclear power for renewables and conservation

The prime minister says Japan must 'start from scratch' and Japan will scrap a plan to obtain half of its electricity from nuclear powerand will instead promote renewable energy as a result of its nuclear crisis, the prime minister said Tuesday. Naoto Kan said Japan needs to "start from scratch" on its long-termenergy policy after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was heavily damaged by a 11 March earthquake and tsunami and began leaking radiation.

Japan's nuclear plants supplied about 30% of the country's electricity, and the government had planned to raise that to 50%.

Kan told a news conference that nuclear and fossil fuel used to be the pillars of Japanese energy policy but now it will add two more – renewable energy such as solar, wind and biomass, and an increased focus on conservation.

"We will thoroughly ensure safety for nuclear power generation and make efforts to further promote renewable energy," an area where Japan has lagged behind Europe and the US, he said.

On Monday a landmark report by the UN's climate science body, the IPCC, said that renewable energy could account for 80% of the world's energy supply by 2050 – but only if governments pursue the right policies.

Kan also said he would take a pay cut beginning in June until the Fukushima nuclear crisis is resolved to take responsibility as part of the government that has promoted nuclear energy. He didn't specify how much of a pay cut he would take.

The operator of the stricken power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co, has been struggling for nearly two months to restore critical cooling systems that were knocked out by the disaster. Some 80,000 people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant were evacuated from their homes on 12 March, with many living in gymnasiums.

On Tuesday, about 100 evacuees were allowed into that exclusion zone briefly to gather belongings from their homes.

The excursion marked the first time the government has felt confident enough in the safety of the area to allow even short trips there. Residents have been pushing hard for weeks for permission to check up on their homes.

The evacuees boarded chartered government buses for the two-hour visit.

They were provided with protective suits, goggles and face masks to wear while in the zone, and were issued plastic bags to put their belongings in. They were also given dosimeters to monitor radiation levels and walkie-talkies.

All were to be screened for radiation contamination after leaving the zone.

More visits are planned, but residents fear they may never be able to return for good.

Many had been secretly sneaking back into the zone during the day, but the government – concerned over safety and the possibility of theft – began enforcing stricter roadblocks and imposing fines on 22 April.

The official visits were seen as a compromise that took both safety and the wishes of the residents into consideration.

The government and TEPCO in April projected that bringing the plant to a cold shutdown could take six to nine months and residents might be able to return to resume their lives. But they admit that timing is a best-case scenario.

On Monday, another utility, Chubu Electric Power Co, agreed to shutter three reactors at a coastal power plant while it builds a seawall and improves other tsunami defenses there.

Kan requested the temporary shutdown at the Hamaoka plant amid predictions an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or higher could strike the central Japanese region within 30 years. The government's decision came after evaluating Japan's 54 reactors for quake and tsunami vulnerability after the 11 March disasters. The Hamaoka facility sits above a major fault line and has long been considered Japan's riskiest nuclear power plant.

Kan said Japan will have to compile Japan's new energy policy in a report for submission to the International Atomic Energy Agency in June. He didn't give any numerical estimates for each source of energy in the new policy.abandon its plan to obtain half its energy from atomic power

DE-DESIGNATING BATHING WATERS DEVALUES OUR BEACHES

2011-05-09T02:41:00.000-07:00

Straight from SAS' website - it's unbelievable that this kind of reverse logic can even be considered....

With new bathing quality standards looming (2015), some local authorities around the UK are attempting to de-designate bathing waters. Once de-designated, bathing waters can effectively be forgotten about, leaving the water quality to at best stagnate, and at worse deteriorate into an altogether more unpleasant environment for surfers, waveriders and bathers. Local authorities are trying to de-designate beaches to avoid posting warnings when water quality is deemed to pose a health risk.

SAS use current legislation to drive environmental improvements for designated bathing waters. The Environment Agency and water companies around the country prioritise designated bathing waters that are struggling to meet minimum bathing water standards to deliver improvements.

De-designating a beach will dramatically devalue the coastal environment and reduce the multi-agency protection given to the area. Environmental standards across the board, from water quality to beach cleanliness will fall and investment will be moved to designated bathing waters elsewhere. Local authorities are actively trying to hide the problem rather than make efforts to solve it, letting down their whole community.

On de-designation, Roger Jacob, clerk to Instow has said “It’s like the Jaws effect, putting people off going to the beach.” The main similarity with the Jaws film is the local authorities withholding important information from beach users. And, just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water!

Ilfracombe’s District Councillor Mike Edmunds said ““The worst thing that could happen is if the beach failed… because signs saying ‘poor quality’ would be detrimental to the tourist area… It’s important that we don’t have signs saying ‘poor water quality’ at Wildersmouth, especially in light of the magnificent new design proposals for the seafront. We don’t want anything to detract from that.”

They are missing the point of the signs; it’s not to scare away tourists. The problem is not the signs, it’s the water quality, which is something on which action can be taken whilst designated The signs are to warn that bathing in the sea has been deemed to be a risk to public health. SAS believe that, if a local authority knowingly withholds this important information it is acting irresponsibly. They should have a duty of care to their community and should want to allow the public to make informed decisions about how and when they use the sea before they expose themselves to potentially harmful pathogens.

On the 22^nd of March 2011 SAS formally requested that DEFRA inform SAS as soon as a local authority apply for de-designation. In the DEFRA guidance it clearly states “bathing waters will not be de-designated because water quality has failed the current Bathing Water Directive’s mandatory standards or because it is projected to be classified as poor under the revised Bathing Water Directive.:”

SAS will continue to be vigilant on this issue and oppose any de-designation in lieu of water quality improvements at designated bathing waters.

things I learned while my plane crashed | Video on TED.com

2011-05-04T06:40:00.000-07:00

Moving, succinct and heartfelt. a video well worth watching from the TED talks

Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed | Video on TED.com

Rio Ferdinand – red devil turned unlikely green guru

2011-05-03T23:50:00.000-07:00

I was very happy to read this disarmingly honest and excellent interview from Rio Ferdinand in the Gruniad. It's hard to be truly green and Ferdinand readily admits to his shortcomings, but does repeatedly refer to being on an 'educational journey', and being ready to 'learn more', before making rash statements and decisions. He knows, wisely, that it's better to do some small things and make meaningful adjustments where he can, rather than just pontificate and quote greenwash. Who knew he'd be a do-er?

Here's the interview in full.

"It's about the future … natural disasters, sea levels, ice melting, fires … people have to understand that's down to humans. Governments need to let the public know how we can become energy self-sufficient." From an environmental campaigner, that statement would hardly raise an eyebrow – but from a former captain of the England football team, it sounds altogether different. We've become used to musicians, film stars and celebrity chefs flaunting their eco-credentials, but green-minded sports stars are still few and far between.

Rio Ferdinand, the Manchester United centre-back who grew up on a south London council estate, seems very aware of the need for a different type of environmental messenger. Having recently become more interested in green issues, he's planning not only to reduce his own impact – and "to make sure my kids are aware" – but also to inspire regular people to do the same. "It all comes down to education. If people aren't educated, they're not going to get behind something. They need to understand it before they take a stand."

Ferdinand's green awakening started when energy company E.ON signed him up to be an advocate for their Energy Fit programme. The scheme organises competitions for local sports clubs to get energy-saving overhauls, and the community element appealed to Ferdinand. I met him in the clubhouse of century-old amateur team Alexandra Palace FC. Like Ferdinand's own home, the building has just had an "energy fitness" audit, and after the interview one of the club's staff proudly shows me their new light sensors and extra thick loft insulation.

Chatting in an upstairs office hardly big enough to accommodate his expansive frame, Ferdinand makes it clear that he's not about to become a green fanatic. "I'm not going to change my whole lifestyle overnight," he says. "I'm starting an educational journey." Judging from his passing references to unleaded petrol and the ozone hole, it seems his last period of eco-education was the 1980s. He doesn't mention climate change until prompted, but he's in no doubt that the stakes are high. When asked what's at risk if we don't look after the environment, he answers emphatically: "Trees, animals, humans … everything. Everything's endangered."

I ask Ferdinand whether he thinks the sports world – players, clubs and fans – have been slow to catch onto green issues. "It's not about that group," he replies quickly. "It's a social issue, and it's not been high on the agenda. It's not an ignorance in the sports sector but in society in general. Any walk of life is the same." But are there any other players who have taken green lifestyle steps? Ferdinand namechecks Gary Neville and David James, both of whom – like many other celebs – have dabbled in low-carbon vehicles. "Gazza's got a Prius and David James had a car powered by rapeseed oil."

By contrast, Ferdinand has started out by focusing on his home – which I rather admire, because while domestic energy efficiency is far less sexy than eco cars, it's just as important. Ferdinand, for one, seems quite fired up about it. "Little things like moving your sofa from in front of a radiator, changing lightbulbs. You get a better feeling about yourself, and the little things add up. It's like, how many pennies make a pound?"

Among many other things, Ferdinand's home energy auditors advised him to turn the thermostat down ("we just use the duvet more") and switch off appliances properly, which Ferdinand has found a way to get the kids to do ("we make it like a game – who can turn off all the switches before bed"). Another recommendation was to move the freezer, which was next to a radiator in the hottest room in the house, making it work much harder to stay cold. That's another good example of the need for education, Ferdinand says, recalling with raised eyebrows exactly the same issue in his childhood home. "I remember in my flat on the council estate, the radiator was behind the fridge. Basic things like that – you just don't see them until you're educated in the field."

What about bigger steps? High-specification insulation? Solar panels? "Yeah", he says – but those are jobs for the new-build he'll be moving into soon. "We're talking to the architects about that." In the meantime, he's sticking with small changes. The one that seems to have caught his attention the most is putting the right amount of water in the kettle. "At first I thought, how can that make a difference? But when you think about it, it's obvious." Has he now become super-vigilant on that front? "Yeah, man, if someone fills the kettle up they're gonna get …" he says, miming the punishment he has in mind.

Ferdinand currently has a Jaguar, though gone are the days when he thought of cars as glamorous. "These days I've got kids and it's just about getting them from A to B." Would he ever switch to an electric car? "Yeah, definitely." We agree that, at well over six feet tall, he wouldn't fit in a G-Wiz or some other supermini, but how about a Tesla or some such? "Not yet – all the price tags on them are crazy, aren't they? I saw one come up the other day for £2m." If Ferdinand can't afford a decent electric car then we have quite a long way to go.

In the meantime, how about eco driving? Having read that when Ferdinand was younger he lost his licence on multiple occasions for speeding, I can't help asking how he'd feel about driving more slowly to increase engine efficiency. "With maturity I started doing that anyway, so I should be already in that bracket," he says.

For an international sports star, though, flying is more problematic. "We travel week in week out. We're in France one week, Spain the next. How do you get around that? I'm yet to be told – unless you can enlighten me?" The only thing I can suggest is we have fewer of them. So now that Ferdinand is thinking about carbon footprints, how does he feel about the World Cup, say, or the Olympics, and the massive amounts of energy they consume. "I don't know – it's hard to say. It's difficult. Are you going to stop people being happy and going to big events because of the carbon footprint? Or should we make them more environmentally friendly so you're doing as little damage as possible? There's not really a right answer."

He doesn't just stop at the car and the house, either. "We grow organic food in the garden," he says, "we've got a little vegetable garden with a greenhouse where we grow tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and strawberries." Any tips for other green-fingered types? "Tomatoes are the easiest. Green beans as well. Just don't leave them out there too long or the kids start eating them." And the strawberries? "Nah. Strawberries are a no-go. Too hard!" What about the rest of his diet? Would he consider eating less meat and dairy, for instance? He looks a little bit pained and says he'd need to "get more knowledge" before thinking seriously about that. He adds, somewhat sadly, "I love meat, man."

No doubt Ferdinand's green efforts will be dismissed by some as tokenism or even greenwash. Here's a celebrity – and one who almost certainly has a fairly huge carbon footprint – focusing on little lifestyle changes rather than bigger ones, and doing so under the banner of an energy company that was until recently considered the UK's leading environmental villain. But that would, I think, be to miss the point. Popular concern about an issue can help bring about deeper political change – and Ferdinand surely has a much better chance than traditional environment campaigners of seeding that concern in as-yet unreached parts of society.

But should he be taking up a political stance on green issues as well as just tweaking his lifestyle? Ferdinand's not so sure. "That's a long way down the line for me." Without learning more, he say, taking too much of a political angle "would be just hanging myself out to dry". Returning to his favourite theme, he adds, "I think the government are trying to make a concerted effort, but it all boils down to education. People need to understand it … it has to start more grassroots." But should the government make policy changes to ensure that everyone is greener? "Yes, definitely. It's the government's duty to do that. The environment and the world we live in is changing dramatically after disregard over the years."

SAS: Warning for our beaches

2011-04-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

From the Indy:

Celine Gehret has been asked to pose for photographs many times but never while wearing a pink colander for a hat and a plastic shopping bag for a face mask. But Gehret, one of Cornwall’s most outstanding surfers, is anxious to make a point.

The campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) claims that Britain’s beaches are being damaged by the “growing problem” of marine litter and the discharge of effluent into the ocean.

An unusually warm April has already led to packed beaches but to coincide with the official start of the bathing season next month, SAS will launch a new warning system whereby beach users - from families with buckets and spades to professional surfers and body-boarders - will be able to receive real time sewage alerts that will warn them that the water they are intending to swim in is unclean.

The alerts will be sent by text and tweet and will cover up to 50 of Britain’s best beaches. The warning system is being set up in conjunction with three of Britain’s biggest water companies, South-West, Southern and Welsh. The alerts are part of a wider surfing campaign called “Protect Our Waves” and will be accompanied by an arresting poster campaign featuring some of Britain’s star surfers.

In the most shocking image of a campaign produced by the advertising agency M&C Saatchi, which includes the Conservative Party, Coca-Cola and the Department of Health among its client roster, the champion British body-boarder Jack Johns is pictured covered head-to-toe in what appears to be excrement (it is in fact brown coloured polystyrene). Johns, 24, who began surfing in his native Cornwall at the age of 16 and is the current world belly-boarding champion, said Cornish waters were generally clean but he had encountered severe problems off the east coast of England. “I have been surfing in Yorkshire among raw sewage and it’s horrific – you don’t realise until it is right in front of you,” he said. “There are amazing waves in Yorkshire when the conditions are right but raw sewage is being pumped into the North Sea so often and there’s nothing stopping it.”

Gehret, 30, who is shown entirely shrouded in marine refuse, is a four times Swiss champion surfer who is based at Fistral beach in north Cornwall. She recalled once trying to surf at Whistand Bay in south Cornwall and finding that the water was brown. “We didn’t go in because it didn’t seem safe. The waves were good but you couldn’t surf.” Hugo Tagholm, director of SAS, said: “I have suffered from stomach bugs and throat infections. If you visit any beach in the UK there will be marine litter and there has been a 120 per cent increase since 1994.”

Among the beaches being covered by the new warning system are Bude, Porthleven and Porthtowan in Cornwall, Brighton and the Welsh beaches of Newgale and Broadhaven. “These real time alerts are about giving people reassurance. If pollution incidents are being reported in real time then people using bathing spots can have confidence in whether or not the water they are using is clean.”

SAS hopes that Yorkshire Water will join the alert system next year and that the remainder of Britain’s water companies will eventually sign up to the scheme. The images of champion surfers covered in sewage and detritus will be shown in magazines and on strategic billboard sites, such as alongside the River Thames, which conveys large amounts of marine litter into the ocean. Graham Fink, executive creative director of M&C Saatchi, said: “Most people think of the seaside as quintessentially British with fresh air, sea and sand. But it’s not all what it seems. Lurking under the surface are hidden horrors. We wanted to smack people in the face with a wet fish and show the problem in an arresting way.”

Join Surfers Against Sewage today

http://www.sas.org.uk/join/

This doesn't sound good

2011-04-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

Union leaders warn over coastguard cuts

The Independent says...

Union leaders are set to tell MPs of their concerns about government plans to cut back on coastguard centres, leaving just one in the South West.

Under government proposals, the number of round-the-clock coastguard centres will be reduced from 18 to just three.

On Tuesday the House of Commons Transport Committee will take evidence on the coastguard plans from the Public and Commercial Services Union, the RMT transport union , the Prospect union and the ships' masters' union Nautilus.

In the Government's plan, there will be three 24-hour operational centres - at Aberdeen, in the Southampton/Portsmouth area and at Dover.

In addition, there will be five sub-centres open during daylight hours - at Swansea, at Falmouth in Cornwall, at Bridlington in East Yorkshire, at either Belfast or Liverpool and at either Stornoway or Shetland.

Shipping minister Mike Penning has said the major reorganisation of the coastguard will improve services and cut costs.

He added that the current system was "not well placed" to meet the challenge of larger ships, congested seas and the increasing number of people visiting coastal areas for leisure activities.

When the coastguard plans were announced last year, RMT leader Bob Crow said: "It's a shocking indictment on this ConDem Government that plans to cut our coastguards could even be considered, let alone implemented, and shows that they are quite prepared to hack away at life or death services. These proposals must be fought tooth and nail every step of the way.

the hottest fires

2011-04-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

At work, I've doing a lot of work on how we might develop our company brand and what we hope that brand might come to mean to people. In doing that I've had to try and figure out what the company's promise is to its customers. 'Brand value' is now almost seen as an oxymoron - but it isn't - there are reasons we all choose the products we do, and it all comes down to what we believe the product will deliver; its promise. Trying to encapsulate that promise in a way that is easy to understand....is not easy. I think this commercial does it perfectly.

holy shit, what a ride

2011-04-15T02:15:00.000-07:00

Today I simply point you to David Hieatt's blog entry - 'Love & Purpose'

David founded Howies - a company I used to admire greatly for it's ethics and ethos as much for its products (while David was in charge), and he founded the Do Lectures too.

a small act of generosity

2011-04-13T05:29:00.000-07:00

Hilde Back & Chris Mburu

One often repeated theme of this blog is the fact that doing something no matter how small, rather than nothing, can have a big impact. On a daily basis I am dismayed by the marine litter on my local beach and even more dismayed that I've only ever done something about it once. But this story is a good example of how small acts can pay huge dividends. It's being widely reported but as usual it's the Guardian that I'm quoting from:

Sponsorship from an unknown Swedish woman led Chris Mburu towards a UN job and to a national education fund.

We all face crossroads in life, but few present choices as stark as those confronting Chris Mburu as he grew up in rural Kenya. He was an exceptionally bright and hard-working lad, but the road to secondary education – and a better life – was exclusively for the well-off. It was the other path, towards a life of poverty and hard graft in the fields, that he would have to take.

A Small Act
Production year: 2010
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 88 mins
Directors: Jennifer Arnold
More on this film

Or at least, that was the case until he became the beneficiary of charitable sponsorship by a Swedish woman, Hilde Back. A thought-provoking new documentary, A Small Act, shows how her $15-a-month sponsorship enabled him not only to complete his school education, but to attend the University of Nairobi and - thanks to a Fulbright scholarship - Harvard law school. It all culminated with a career as a human rights investigator for the United Nations.

Mburu never forgot the sponsor who changed his life. But it wasn't until American film-maker Jennifer Arnold came to him with a plan for making a film about his experience that he had the chance to meet Back and tell her what he had always wanted to say face to face: "Thank you".

"I think the thing that really drew me to the story in the first place was the idea that an ordinary, everyday person can have a quite extraordinary effect on the world, just by doing something small," Arnold told the Guardian on recent trip to London.

Her film – released in the UK on 15 April – celebrates the profound, life-changing impact of a single act of charity and the way it can spread ripples throughout society.

"When I started to make the film it was the Bush era in the United States and a lot of my friends were feeling quite disenfranchised; that it didn't matter what we protested for, or what we voted for, it wouldn't change the world at all," she says.

"But then I heard Chris Mburu's story, about how a woman did a small thing, and had no idea of how important it was, and yet it had such an effect. That was really inspirational to me. It's an uplifting, hopeful story."

The poignancy of Back's charitable act became even more profound when it emerged that she had fled to Sweden as a child to escape the Holocaust. Yet decades later, her regular gift had educated a man who would, without knowing of her experience, dedicate his working life to investigating crimes against humanity around the world – as well as set up his own charity, The Hilde Back Education Fund, which now helps more poor Kenyan children afford education.

"We hope this film will deliver the message that a small act can indeed go a long way and affect a whole community and society at large," says Mburu. "And I think we are seeing this already, because a lot of people are seeing the film and saying that they want to do their own 'small act'. We are really encouraging that."

The film also follows the extremely moving story of three of the brightest children at a rural primary school as they prepare for their difficult KCPE exam at the end of primary school. It's genuinely edge-of-the-seat stuff: getting top marks puts them in the running for one of Mburu's scholarships and, with that, the potential to change their own and their families' lives forever.

"Initially, we just wanted to make a great film, but it quickly became clear it would go way beyond that," says Arnold. "So many people have now seen the film, been inspired and got involved with the Hilde Back fund."

It's a tribute to all involved with the making of A Small Act that, in the 10 days after its premiere at Sundance in 2010, the Hilde Back Education Fund raised $90,000 (£55,000), transforming the charity from a local to a national organisation.

"When we started the whole mission, we could only help 10 kids a year, but now, after making this film, we are able to reach out to a lot more kids," says Mburu, whose organisation now helps 160 children.

"It's discouraging when you can't help everyone that needs help, but it's so encouraging when you see the ones that you can help going on, getting through and getting a better life."

Mburu believes education is the key to solving the political and sectarian conflicts that rip up so much of Africa. "Without jobs and education, it is easy for politicians to give people a really insignificant amount of money to terrible things," he says. "With an education, they can make their own choice, they can be free. This is my message."

Oil spill clean up idea: swarms of sailing drones

2011-04-08T03:08:00.000-07:00

As seen in the Guardian: another mad idea with lofty purpose....it just might work. Robot boats designed to sail upwind as spilled oil flows downwind: a big idea for a big problem?

Protei is a concept for an autonomous inflatable articulated sailboat that cleans up oil spills Simulated image: protei.org/Flickr

For big problems, you need big ideas, even if they seem crazily ambitious. And with the anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spillon 20 April, a swarm of robot oil-slick clearing boats is a timely big idea.

The concept of the sailing drone is being developed by a project calledProtei, which is notable in that all the technology and software is open source - no patents, no copyright. So, if it works, anyone can use it.

The idea, explained to me by project co-ordinator Cesar Harada, is as follows. In marine oil spills, the oil is blown downwind, so boats designed to sail upwind while dragging absorbent booms behind can soak up the oil. As the boats have no crew, no-one's health is endangered by oil or dispersants and the boats can go out in all weather (they are designed to be self-righting - a "torpedo with a sail", says Harada).

"There are oil spills all the time," Harada says when I ask him why he started the project, for example in the Niger delta. "And using the same natural force that is pushing the oil to clean it up makes sense."
But sailing upwind, dragging a large load, is not easy. So the team have developed a hull that flexes like the backbone of a fish, which they say make sailing upwind easier. Harada, now based in New Orleans, is ex-MIT and a TED fellow and many of the team are based in academic engineering departments.

They have tested six small scale prototypes - see the video below - but aim to launch a full scale boat, 8m long with a 20m boom-tail, from Rotterdam in September. "We know the idea works, but not how well it works," says Harada. Protei have raised enough to keep the project afloat for a while, but are seeking more, in particular for sensors to monitor the tests.

The drones would be deployed in swarms, which would avoid each other either by using a decentralised swarm algorithm or by being controlled remotely from the shore. "Since I got to New Orleans, we have really changed the project so that local fishermen will be able to build and control the boats," says Harada. "When I first came they told me I was crazy and would steal all their jobs with an robot sailing boat."

Harada also sees long term applications of the sailing drones in clearing up the plastic and other pollutants concentrated in the great Pacific garbage patch and in towing scientific payloads around the oceans.

The nearest existing equivalent appears to be the patented Waveglider, which uses wave power to travel the oceans. But they are slow, claims Harada, doing about 2 knots. He says Protei's sailing drones will be much cheaper and faster.

Of course, we've also had Kevin Costner's centrifuge-based oil clean up technology. That is also patented and does not appear to have been deployed in a major operation yet.

So, Protei seems to me to be useful, simple and backed by smart people. Crucially, by virtue of being open source, the profit motive can't compromise the search for the best technical solution. But I'd be keen to hear what you all think, especially if you have knowledge of relevant areas.

and here's the video

SAS Win

2011-03-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT

A Surfers Against Sewage campaign victory, secured in the revised Bathing Water Directive was launched on the 25th of March by the Environment Agency with the publishing of beach profiles for bathing waters. These beach profiles highlight what forms of pollution the beach suffers from and identifies the discharge points.

As well as vital information on sewage discharge points, locations of Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOS) and other sewerage infrastructure, these bathing water profiles also include maps and a description of the beach.

SAS Campaign Director Andy Cummins says: “Bathing water profiles will not make the water cleaner, but they will allow all beach users to make more informed decisions about when is best to use the water and the information to know when it might be better to give it a miss due to pollution incidents.”

Now you have access to this information you need to use it to then make informed decisions about when’s best to use the water. With almost 500 designated bathing waters in England and Wales alone, your favourite surf spot is probably included. Have a look for yourself athttp://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/recreation/127626.aspx

For more information on this campaign please contact Andy Cummins or Dom Ferris on 01872 555 950 or 07711 767 548 or on andy@sas.org.uk

are you happy?

2011-03-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

from: http://piccsy.com/

is this blog too earnest?

2011-02-25T01:48:00.000-08:00

probably. So here's an important story from the Daily Mash

Humans to stick with oil

HUMANS are to continue to base their societies on a highly toxic substance that obviously costs far too much money. As the price of oil reached yet another high for transparently artificial reasons, across the Earth humans vowed to stick with it even though it has clearly made their lives immeasurably worse in almost every conceivable way.

Bill McKay, a senior oil industry analyst at Donnelly-McPartlin, said: "Volatility Libya demand equals two China spikes and a triple Opec. Unstable India-Brazil spiked by Kuwaiti-Brent Opec demand as crude Libya instability Chinas a volatile Saudi."

He added: "Vortex of uncertainty."

McKay said the price of oil would continue to rise because and warned that if you stop using it people will think you're weird. McKay's analysis was backed by Professor Martin Bishop, the Nobel prize-winning economist who first developed the theory that large companies could make a lot of money by charging whatever they felt like.

He said: "Oil is the basis of our society for four incredibly good reasons: One, it is controlled largely by corrupt psychopaths in places like Libya, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Texas.

"Two, as it starts to run out it will become even more expensive leading to a series of exciting wars while we wait until there is none left before deciding to use something else.

"Three, every time the price increases it fucks up everything."

"And four, it gives off lots of delicious carbon dioxide and has killed more than 248 billion fish."

Bishop's analysis was backed by everyone who stressed that without oil they would be rooted to the spot and would eventually die of starvation and lack of plastic.

They also said that using different things to make things go was impossibly complicated and hopefuly illegal.

Tom Logan, from Peterborough, said: "If there was even such a thing as solar power I would be against it. Mainly because it doesn't smell of anything but also because the people who are in favour of it are homosexual.

"They put on bright red lipstick and kiss each other on the penis and then they all skip around a solar panel wearing fancy pink lace."

He added: "I'll die before I drive a car that likes bottom”

Gawd save us - another Quango

2011-02-17T04:19:00.000-08:00

A short, depressed post.

I read, on the SAS website that there's a new(ish) marine management body (the MMO) to look after our seas. Er good?

Their website says, "We are a new executive non-departmental public body (NDPB) ...as a cross-government delivery partner...." If that doesn't scare the bejaysus out of you it probably should. What does it mean? Maybe I'm a cynic, but shouldn't it be a government department doing this? You know something run by a directly elected and accountable member of parliament. I don't want an independent body - when it comes to the protection of the seas around Britain, I want the Prime Minister himself at the point where the buck stops. We elected him and his cronies to look after our interests and yet another quango is not the answer.

The short history of quangos proves, pretty unequivocally that they're not up to the job of governing and policing important aspects of the country (I give you the Environment Agency or CSA as examples).

The Crown estate is technically in charge of the beaches and the seas, which means that the Queen should really be in charge, and god save her, she'd probably be a more diligent and protective guardian than the government.

"The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) has been established to make a significant contribution to sustainable development in the marine area and to promote the UK government’s vision for clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse oceans and seas.

We are a new executive non-departmental public body (NDPB) established and given powers under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009. This ground-breaking act brings together for the first time key marine decision-making powers and delivery mechanisms.

We have incorporated the work of the Marine and Fisheries Agency (MFA) and acquired several important new roles, principally marine-related powers and specific functions previously associated with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Department for Transport (DfT).

The establishment of the MMO as a cross-government delivery partner therefore marks a fundamental shift in planning, regulating and licensing activity in the marine area with the emphasis on sustainable development."

Which is a lot of words to say, 'we'll be ineffective and powerless.'

"The short answer to that is, no."

2011-02-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

The Guardian is reporting that the Government is set for another major U-turn over plans to dispose of Forestry Commission land.

David Cameron is to back away from plans to change the ownership of 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland in England after admitting to MPs he is unhappy with the policy. The prime minister indicated that the government would embark on another major U-turn after Ed Miliband asked him in the Commons whether he was happy with his flagship policy to sell off the forests.

To laughter, the prime minister replied: "The short answer to that is, no."

The government will clarify its plans in the next few days, but Cameron will argue the coalition is not being forced into a policy about-turn because the forest plans are no more than a consultation.

"It is a consultation that was put forward," Cameron said. "We've had a range of interesting responses to this consultation. What is important is that we should be making sure that, whatever happens, we increase access to our forests, we increase biodiversity and we don't make the mistake that was made under the last government where they sold forests with no access rights at all."

The government has been under intense pressure since the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, unveiled plans last year to dispose of about half of the 748,000 hectares of woodland run by the Forestry Commission by 2020. Spelman has faced intense criticism from Conservative MPs who have been confronted by angry protests from constituents who believe the government is showing a lack of sensitivity to a key fabric of the nation.

The government, which hoped the sale would generate as much as £100m, had earmarked the Forestry Commission for substantial reform in its review of quangos.

The government indicated over the weekend that it was shying away from the sale when it took 40,000 hectares of public forest off the market. The last Labour government had allowed about 15% of England's public forests to be sold.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said it would refrain from selling the forests until the government had decided what to do with the rest of the Forestry Commission's land.

Miliband mocked Cameron during prime minister's questions over the plans. The Labour leader said: "Even he must appreciate the irony. The guy who made the tree the symbol of the Conservative party flogging them off round this country. He says they are consulting on this policy. They are actually consulting on how to flog off the forests, not whether to sell off the forests. Is the prime minister now saying that he might drop the policy completely?"

Cameron replied: "I would have thought the whole point about a consultation is that you put forward some proposals, you listen to the answer and then you make a decision. I know it is a totally alien concept but what is so complicated about that?"

Miliband said: "Everybody knows you have to drop this ludicrous policy. Let me give him the chance to do it. Nobody voted for this policy; 500,000 people have signed a petition against the policy. Why doesn't he, when he gets up at the dispatch box, say not say he is postponing the sale but say he is cancelling it?"

Cameron replied: "Once again, he read the question before he listened to the answer. I think the bandwagon has just hit a bit of a tree.

Wind turbines and solar panels turn viaduct into generator

2011-02-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

Green civil engineering on a bonkers scale . we like. of course.

The pictures tell the story but the details are here

opting out of the social future?

2011-02-03T05:04:00.000-08:00

A few selected readers have received an ultra-personalised cover on their issue of Wired this month. "We wanted to see how much personal data we could easily find about them from publicly available sources -- as a means of emphasising some of the points made in our cover story on "what the end of privacy means for you".

And the amount of information that is available from legitimate sources is very alarming (the choice of Andy Coulson as the example cover star is perhaps too ironic) , but most worrying is the amount of information we are now voluntarily and carelessly sharing with the world - if often unwittingly. In his cerebral essay for Wired, Sharing Is A Trap, Andrew Keen paints a dark Orwellian picture, not of the distant future, but of the present.

Both articles are worth a read, and then sign in to facebook and see how many of your privacy settings are set to 'friends of friends'... do you really want to be sharing that widely and randomly? This is not an ill-informed scare-story, but a well thought out meditation on the inevitable stripping away of our privacy; layer by layer. To quote from Keen's article 'Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the smiling utilitarian at the heart of this social darkness, has even come up with his own law to imagine the future of the trap he is laying for us all. "I would expect that next year people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and the next year they will be sharing twice as much as they did before," Zuckerberg's Law states.' And as he has publicly acknowledged elsewhere, 'privacy is dead'.

Having successfully navigated a month without beer, I am seriously considering a month without Facebook....just to see who I miss...and who misses me. And because I don't like the idea that the likes of Zuckerberg are arbitrarily farming my social life to build fantastic wealth - or to build anything else. I doubt that they have my best interests at heart.

(click on the image to see the details)

Papier-mache milk “GreenBottles”

2011-02-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

Nice idea reported in Wired - An eco-friendly, papier-mache milk carton from an inventor called Martin Myerscough, has won over local dairies, and is now being trialled in Asda shops around the country.

The need for biodegradable and more recyclable milk bottle designs is a pressing concern. The traditional plastic milk carton can be recycled, but if it's chucked onto a landfill site, it will take some 500 years to decompose.

In 2007, the Environment Agency said Britain's West Midland landfills have only enough room for the seven more years of waste, if residents keep throwing it away at the current rate.

This new design, named GreenBottles, has a much longer lifespan, and decomposes much quicker when spent. The outer shell is made of thin, but sturdy, papier-mache, which can recycled up to seven times and then only takes a few weeks to decompose on the compost heap.

Inside, the milk is held in a plastic lining. It's not quite as environmentally friendly as the paper exterior, but it will take up less than 0.5 percent of the space of a plastic bottle when dumped.

Local Suffolk dairies were the first to trial the new eco-friendly packaging, and a handful of Asda stores in East Anglia have been using the bottle for a number of months. This week, the bottle will go nationwide, starting in Cornwall. "GreenBottles have hit the South West this week, we're now in stores in St Austell, Bodmin, Falmouth and Newquay," says the bottle's official Facebook page.

The paper bottles are greener, but not necessarily cheaper. With the expensive paper cases being manufactured in Turkey, the new bottles are actually about the same price to make as the plastic ones. But if they become more popular, bulk-production methods could mean price decreases.

Private Eye are on to Save Our Woods

2011-01-21T07:40:00.001-08:00

Private Eye never pulls its punches and in the current edition their HP Sauce column 'Forest Chumps' goes hard at the government's idiotic idea:

"THE coalition clearly can’t see the wood for the trees if it thinks its plan to sell vast swathes of Forestry Commission land in England makes economic sense. In 2009 an attempt by the Scottish National Party to lease Scotland’s national forests to private firms was opposed by all political parties.

It was recognised, among other things, that as well as threatening jobs and access, any firm taking over the land and continuing forestry would still be eligible for public funding. As MSP Elaine Murray said at the time, logging firms could “chop down timber that was planted at public expense, walk away with the profit and then get paid to plant more trees” (Eye 1228).

The same issue exists in England, where the cost of regulating and dishing out funds to private forestry companies is likely to outweigh the money raised from land sales. Lorraine Adams, branch president for the scientists’ union, Prospect, which represents more than 200 researchers, cartographers, rangers and skilled Forestry Commission (FC) workers, has uncovered evidence of this since the FC already sells off land occasionally. When it recently flogged an area of woodland for £60,000, for example, the new landowner immediately applied for funds under the English Woodland Grant Scheme to grow and cut timber and was given assistance totalling £55,000.

The private landowner will also be able to come back and ask for more grants in future – as well as bidding for other environmental stewardship and rural development subsidies available to forest owners – while the government can only sell the land once.

So will the coalition cut back on grants so the sale makes economic sense? Er, no. In an attempt to head off the more alarming protests – suggestions that buyers would develop huge holiday parks or housing estates – the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement: “Full measures will remain in place to preserve the public benefits of woods and forests under any new ownership arrangements. Tree felling is controlled through the licensing system managed by the Forestry Commission, public rights of way and access will be unaffected, statutory protection for wildlife will remain in force and there will be grant incentives for new planting that can be applied for.”

Then there are the earnings the FC will lose from no longer selling timber (around £61m in 2008). Thanks to that cash, it costs the taxpayer just £15m a year to regulate and license the private forestry sector, plus providing numerous education schemes and leisure access to woodland, not to mention the FC scientists who do vital research to combat tree diseases – such as sudden oak death (now devastating larch trees in the south west) and pests like leaf miner moths which attack horse chestnuts.

Harper’s bizarre
Anger at the proposed sale is particularly acute in the Forest of Dean, where a campaign group, Hands Off Our Forest (HOOF), has been mobilised and 3,000 people rallied earlier this month to make their voices heard.

Notably absent was local Tory MP Mark Harper, who believes the forest sale to be an example of Dave’s Big Society in action as it would allow local people to buy and manage things as they see fit. As environmentalist Jonathon Porritt and many others point out, however, thanks to rights and entitlements secured over centuries, people in the Forest of Dean already see “the Dean” as their forest anyway.

The strong relationship between the foresters and the local Forestry Commission is largely down to longstanding mutual respect and an understanding well beyond the financial realm of what “ownership” of this precious resource means. For Harper to offer to sell people something they already believe to be theirs could be a suicidal electoral strategy for the ex-KPMG accountant.

The last Tory MP to trip up in the Forest of Dean was one of Harper’s predecessors, Paul Marland. He favoured the Thatcher government’s attempt to sell the Forest Estate in the early 1980s. But public pressure on him was so intense he managed to secure an exemption for the Forest of Dean, concluding: “I regard the possible sale of the Royal Forest of Dean and other Crown Forests to faceless investors as a national disaster. The Royal Forest of Dean is steeped in ancient history and tradition. Today’s Forester is of the same independent mind and rugged character as were his forefathers. It is our duty to preserve his ancient rights and traditions.”

If Harper disappoints his constituents, he could become the first victim of another coalition brainwave: the “right of recall” which enables voters to recall an MP if they lose faith in him or her. This would be ironic. When Harper isn’t calling for the sale of his constituents’ natural environment, he is the minister for constitutional reform responsible for… the right-to-recall policy!"

From Private Eye

Save Our Woods

2011-01-20T08:24:00.001-08:00

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.”
John Burroughs (1837-1921), American Naturalist.

'The Government wants to sell all publicly owned forests. This can’t happen'

Further to my post the other day about the Government's nasty plan to sell off state own woodland, Twitter (#saveourwoods) has once again provided insight and information. There's now a well thought out and well put together resistance gathering speed with a raft of ways to get involved and to protest.

From their website:

"Our ancients woodlands and forests are our natural heritage. Around two-thirds of our woodland is privately owned already. The remaining 33% is publicly owned, managed by the Forestry Commission (FC) and other public agencies, including local authorities.

The Government have proposed a Bill that will allow them to sell all publicly owned forests – the Public Bodies Bill clauses 17 and 18. Buyers could include foreign energy companies, private organisations, charitable trusts, companies and individuals for shooting rights, leisure developers and many more.

We believe our trees, woods and forests are too important to be sold to the highest bidder.
We believe our woodlands and forests play an essential part in the biodiversity of our country.
We believe our forests are our natural heritage and it is in the public’s greatest interest for them to remain under public ownership.

Maybe some of our forestry land isn’t managed well in terms of biodiversity (as some “mono-culture” farmed pine plantations could be deemed) but it has its benefits in providing a source of timber to our construction industry among others.

Maybe some of these pine plantations could be harvested and replanted with native deciduous woodland to start the long road back towards an ecologically sound and biodiverse environment – beneficial to both wildlife and humanlife.

What ever happens – we would rather our forests remained as publicly owned lands so that WE can decide how they could be managed and not a foreign energy company, a rich landowner expanding territory, a leisure developer for shooting rights or holiday parks.

If you feel the same way – sign the 38 Degrees petition then go here to find out how to contact your MP."

http://saveourwoods.co.uk/

'The BP oil is all gone!' Oh really?

2011-01-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

Why did it seem very unlikely that the massive oil spill could magically disappear.

Naomi Klien has the inevitable evidence against.

http://www.thenation.com/article/157723/search-bps-oil

Modest suggestions for anyone trying to save the world

2011-01-17T05:33:00.000-08:00

Recently I've become much more interested in Twitter as a speedy, wide-ranging and often very funny news source. It's not the vacuous status update many think it is, and if you choose to follow the right people (probably not 'celebs') you get an informed (mostly) and vigorously debated (often) take on breaking news and issues that may not get great coverage in the mainstream. Selective filtering and healthy scepticism are required, but it's easy to find some real gems to read. My previous post of Johann Harri's article is a case in point - and so is this little gem for anyone keen on organising any kind of 'Change' campaign....from saving the world to beach clean-ups. 12 invaluable steps for the supine activist.

Note to self: must get off my arse and DO more. Thanks Shihab for the reminder.

For sale - Cameron's green credentials

2011-01-17T05:30:00.000-08:00

For sale - Cameron's green credentials

Johann Hari writes in the Independent, 'Why do the Tories think timber companies want to buy the forests? To abandon the work they do and become druids?'

Can you hear the silence of the huskies? When he was rebranding the Tory party, David Cameron promised us he would lead "the greenest government ever". Since he came to power, he has broken every environmental promise he made – and then gone much further. He has opened up the coasts of Britain to the deep-sea drilling that worked so well in the Gulf of Mexico, and put a "for sale" sign outside every single remaining forest in England. Yes, as his own Environment minister puts it, Cameron is determined to "dispose of public forest" – and the timber companies and holiday parks are preparing their opening bids.

In order to raise £2bn, the Government is selling all 650,000 acres of our forests – a privatisation that even Margaret Thatcher blanched at. These are the most popular outdoor spaces in Britain. They are the last places where millions of people can go to escape their anxieties and glimpse what Britain looked like to our ancestors for millions of years. They are the site of some of our most potent national myths: what would Robin Hood say if he knew Sherwood Forest itself was now on the market? Is Cameron really taking the Sheriff of Nottingham as his role model? This is in direct contradiction to what Cameron told us he would do before the election. In 2007, talking about forests, he promised he would "take a more effective and strategic approach to safeguarding a priceless – and irreplaceable – natural asset." He said the countries that were cutting forests down were "barmy". The Government says there is no danger to the forests in selling them to timber companies and the other highest bidders. They say they will still be standing, they will be cared for as well, and the public will have just as much access. Does this match the facts?

It is true that once a company has bought a forest, it will still need planning permission to cut the woods down. This is a crucial brake. But – wait – Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has just announced he is "remov[ing] the structures of control" and making it "much easier" to get planning permission across the country. Planning is being massively deregulated, just as the forests are sold.

Not every buyer will cut them down, but some will. Why do the Tories think timber companies want to buy them – to abandon the work they do in every other country on earth and become druids? Confronted with this point, the Government admits there is a "possibility of established forest being bought by energy companies who would proceed to chip it all for energy recovery" – and then swiftly insists there is nothing to worry about.

The forests that remain will be less well maintained and harder to access. The Forestry Commission looks after our woods today, and 100 per cent of it is maintained to the international Forest Stewardship Standard. By contrast, only 25 per cent of private forests in England are looked after this way. After the sale, they will become more degraded, less biodiverse and less likely to survive for the long term.

And you will find it harder to get to them. The Government says that the legislation passed in 2000 granting us all the "right to roam" will mean we can enjoy them just the same. But the public only has a right to access woodland classified as "freehold". According to The Ecologist magazine, half of privately owned woodland is barred to the public.

It gets worse still. The Forestry Commission works very hard to make our woods accessible to everyone. It builds car parks, bike tracks, visitor centres, picnic areas. When the land is privatised, most of that will go. They can put a massive fence around the forest, they just can't put up a sign that says "keep out". Look at what happened to Riggs Woods in the Lake District, sold a few months ago. The car park has been shut down, the picnic area has been dismantled, the visitors' centre closed, and all you see when you go there now is a large, bolted gate that, legally, you are allowed to clamber over. And for what? To preserve our forests costs just 30p per taxpayer a year. Selling them off for ever will raise just half of the sum that one corporation – Vodafone – did not have to pay after the Tories came to power out of what Private Eye estimated was its total tax liability. (Vodafone denies this figure). So if you go down to the woods today, you'll find the best metaphor for Cameronism. Change your party's logo to a lovely green tree – then sell off all the real trees to corporations. Oh, and then say you are "empowering volunteers" by doing it.

The Prime Minister has said the forest sell-off "empowers local communities" to take over the forests for themselves as part of a "Big Society". Yet sources within the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs say that, unsurprisingly, only about 1 per cent of the sales are anticipated to go to local co-operatives or green groups. The "Big Society" is a fluffy fig leaf for dismantling and demolition.

But, amazingly, this may not be the biggest environmental vandalism of the Cameron years. The Conservatives have just authorised the launching of deep-water drilling off the coast of Shetland. The White House investigations are only now uncovering quite how disastrous this tactic was in the Gulf of Mexico – but it would be worse in the Shetlands, where the very harsh, cold and windy conditions would make a clean-up dramatically harder and more expensive. It would have to be bigger too: Chevron has admitted that if things went wrong it would release 77,000 barrels of oil a day – 25 per cent more than went into the Gulf.

The Health and Safety Executive warned that serious accidents on British oil rigs almost doubled last year. These are the very warning signs that preceded the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Even if the oil is excavated "safely", it will then release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and destabilise our climate even more, which doesn't sound very safe to me. As if that wasn't enough, Cameron has also authorised drilling for shale gas off the coast at Blackpool – an extremely controversial practice that is suspected by many scientists of poisoning water supplies at several sites in the US.

Britain's forests and seas do not belong to David Cameron. They belong to us. As Bill Hobman, the former chairman of Forest of Dean District Council, says: "Mr Cameron should show us the deeds to the forest. How can they sell something they don't own?... This is a wonderful part of the world and shouldn't be auctioned off to the highest bidder to have their own little bit of heaven. We will fight this all the way." The fightback will be ferocious, and, like the inspiring fight against super-rich tax-dodgers, it unites people from the Tory shires with amazing left-wing activist groups like 38 Degrees.

This is a fight about what we value as a country. Do we want to preserve Britain's most beautiful places – forests and seas that were alive for our distant ancestors, and should be alive for our distant descendants – or do we want a few rich corporations to make a little bit more money from destroying them? David Cameron has made his choice. Now we need to make ours.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

You can sign the petition to save our forests: click here.

For updates on this issue and others you can follow Johann atwww.twitter.com/johannhari101 or you can get links to all his articles by following his Facebook fanpage here. www.facebook.com/pages/Johann-Hari/52060383293?ref=ts

Southampton water in the snow

2010-12-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

South Devon Coast

2010-09-30T01:29:00.000-07:00

just some nice pictures taken on a crisp early Autumn day in South Devon

Big steps

2010-09-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

It is easy to moan that nothing will change until consumers demand that it changes, but sometimes it takes a a big company to say 'we wont wait - we'll do it' to drag everyone along with them; usually though it needs to be a VERY big company to actually make a real impact.

Proctor and Gamble makes Pringles, Bold, Crest, Iams, Olay, and lots and lots of other products you probably buy all the time (or maybe assiduously avoid). Regardless, it's the world's largest consumer products company, and this week, it revealed an ambitious "new long-term vision": It plans to eventually run on 100 percent renewable energy, use 100 percent recycled or renewable packaging, and send no waste to landfills.

Large companies have made bold promises in the past, but this is extra bold. What's encouraging, though, is that P&G has committed to incremental, 10-year targets along the way. The company is aiming to get 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, for example. It will take a while for it to get there, but P&G deserves credit for setting the bar where it should be: up at 100.

(retweeted/aggregated/lifted/nicked from Good

The Government Responds...

2010-09-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the year I signed a Surfers Against Sewage petition on the No 10 website urging the government to do more about marine litter. "Volumes of marine litter are dramatically increasing year after year. Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) has successful marine litter campaigns targeting manufacturers, mobilising large-scale grass roots direct action and increasing public awareness on this ever-worsening problem. However, with each new high tide comes a new marine litter line impacting on our beloved beaches and surf spots.

Current anti-litter legislation such as The Environmental Protection Act 1990, MARPOL and the Port Waste Reception Facilities regulations are not providing the levels of protection needed for the coastline.

SAS believe that marine litter is coming from a wide variety of sources, including; beach users, sanitary related debris, industry, and fishing. SAS and other environmental NGOs have found that almost 70% of this litter is plastic. Plastics have a devastating impact on the marine environment over a long period, as well as economic impacts on local communities and the fishing industry.

As an SAS supporter, I urge you to implement a National Marine Litter Strategy to combat this worsening issue and help protect our coastlines."

And their response....a we're not doing much, and will continue to do not much.... or as they put it;

"The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the government department responsible for the marine environment and recognises the importance of tackling marine litter to achieve the Government’s vision for ensuring our seas are clean, healthy and safe. Defra’s strategy for dealing with marine litter encompasses a range of national, European and North East Atlantic initiatives.

Within the UK, it is against the law to drop or throw litter anywhere in the open air, including beaches, and Defra already supports a number of initiatives to reduce litter including providing funding to support Keep Britain Tidy which runs the Blue Flag and Quality Coast award schemes in England, and Fishing for Litter - a Defra funded project to land and dispose of litter caught up in fishing gear in SW England. This pilot project has recently been expanded to include the port of Appledore in North Devon.

Defra’s ‘Charting Progress 2’ report, an integrated assessment of the state of UK seas, to be published this summer, draws attention to the limited evidence available regarding the problems litter can pose for habitats and species in the marine environment. The wide range of sources, number of entry pathways, ease of transport by currents and wind, as well as insufficient knowledge on the impacts of litter in the sea, make it a complex issue to address.

Marine litter has also been highlighted in the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008). All Member States, including the UK, are required to put in place a programme of measures by 2016 to ensure that ‘properties and quantities of marine litter do not cause harm to the coastal and marine environment’ by 2020. The European Commission has appointed a group of experts through its Joint Research Centre to review the current research on the impacts of marine litter and consider possible indicators for monitoring and assessment. This report has just been completed and is being used by the Commission as a basis for developing methodological standards and criteria which Member States will use as a basis for assessing the scope of the problem, with a view to putting in place any measures that may be necessary.

Defra considers that the framework set out by the Directive offers the best opportunity to consider what action is necessary to tackle the problem of marine litter. As one of the next steps in taking this forward Defra is hoping to explore the issues associated with marine litter in a workshop to take place this Autumn. We will be inviting key stakeholders and hope that you will attend to represent your organisation."

amazing volcano

2010-07-13T05:04:00.001-07:00

apropos of nothing - just some stunning photography on this blog

is all plastic all bad?

2010-07-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

One of the things that stuck me most in my previous blog, about Subaru's zero-landfill plant in the US, was their use of re-usable plastic boxes that suppliers were obliged to use when sending components to the factory. The simple idea was that using robust packaging all but eliminated the need for wooden pallets and in particular, cardboard - both of which are relatively fragile, generate a heavy carbon footprint to produce and create a voluminous waste stream.

Through my work I recently visited two supermarket distribution 'hubs' (both terrifyingly huge, airport terminal sized monsters), but they both had an employee, gloriously titled Environmental Champion, responsible for ensuring that all that could be done, was being done. I was there to help them re-cycle the unavoidable number of wooden pallets they use, but I was impressed by the amount of heavy-duty plastic crates they now use for many of their products. The producers co-own the boxes with the supermarket; sharing costs and responsibility and in a stroke eliminating a large waste management cost for both companies.

This is all very well hidden in the back loading dock where fickle customers don't see them, but it's become increasingly clear that even green-minded consumers think all plastic is bad. And this is a deep and complicated problem that is at the core of our waste problem. There's a lot more to this but I'll let the following article, in the gruniad back in March, explain....

Riverford Organics, one of the largest vegetable box schemes in the UK, has suggested it may move away from cardboard packaging and towards plastic. In this week's note to customers, Guy Watson at Riverford says that plastic boxes could reduce the carbon footprint of the company's packaging by 70%. He strongly hints that the company wants to move to plastic immediately but is frightened of the reaction of customers.

This issue is an important one. Householders continue to see plastic as wicked and paper-based goods as benign. But when considered over the entire life of the packaging, paper and cardboard embody far more greenhouse gases than their plastic equivalents. Paper products take substantial amounts of energy to make. Crushing a tree down into small fibres, mixing the wood pulp into a slurry and then passing the wet mass through huge rollers cannot be done without use of enormous quantities of power. Making paper and cardboard is almost certainly the third largest industrial use of energy on the planet. By contrast, plastic is light, durable and its manufacture is generally not particularly energy intensive – at least by comparison to paper. A second concern is that many paper and cardboard products, probably including Riverford boxes, end up in local authority landfill, where they rot down anaerobically, creating the greenhouse gas methane in the process. Plastic, as is well known, doesn't rot and sequesters its carbon for ever.

Guy Watson's company delivers its products to homes in cardboard boxes that can be returned to the delivery driver the following week. Watson says that the boxes are designed to last for ten delivery cycles before being recycled. They typically only actually survive four outings before they are lost or made unusable. Because these boxes are 'free', the householder doesn't look after them properly. As a result, about 10% of the total carbon footprint of the business is derived from making and recycling the boxes. This is about the same figure as the carbon cost of shipping the Riverford vegetables to the local distribution hubs. If I have done the calculations correctly, the carbon cost of its boxes would be greater than plastic replacements even if they did actually last 10 cycles and were never used, as the company says, 'to let the dog give birth in'.

85% of our packaging footprint is made up of paper and cardboard yet our customers are very happy with this packaging; virtually all negative comments on packaging relate to plastic punnets and bags which contribute only 8% to the footprint.

It is the customer who is stopping Guy Watson and his colleagues using long-lasting plastic for any form of packaging, not economics or carbon accounting. Watson despairs of getting householders to understand the true environmental cost of paper goods and one can only sympathise as he demands government action to force suppliers to recognize and account for the full cost of packaging.

We all need to understand, far better than we do now, that anything that doesn't last – like paper for packaging – is almost certainly a far greater problem than an almost infinitely recyclable plastic crate. Yes, of course, plastic is an increasingly serious litter problem, in the UK and elsewhere. But it is not a significant cause of CO2 pollution compared to paper.

As a devoted customer, my suggestion to Guy Watson is that he pushes ahead with plastic – perhaps only with customers who agree in advance – and gives us a small price reduction but imposes heavy deposits on each plastic crate left on our doorstep each week. If we don't leave the box out next week, we get charged. Painful, but there is nothing like a punch in the wallet to get people to change behaviour. In the longer run, a 'closed loop' recycling system using plastic crates is infinitely more environmentally sustainable than one based on cardboard boxes.

Subaru's zero-landfill car plant

2010-07-04T02:27:00.000-07:00

I blogged about this remarkable achievement - from an unlikely industry - some months ago, but my swish new design rendered it unreadable, so here it is again. The original was by Sara Snow on treehugger.com

There is a Subaru plant along a stretch of I-65 that you can't miss if you happen to find yourself about an hour north of Indianapolis, travelling toward Chicago. It's a 2.9 million square foot facility (with 3.4 million usable square feet including a second floor) that covers over 70 football fields. It's big, but I can't say that this particular plant looks all that different than any other from the outside.

But get inside (they offer a 90 minute tour) and you'll learn that not only was it the first auto assembly plant in the U.S. to achieve zero-landfill status, but they took that to heart and have gone a lot further.

I learned a great deal as my husband and I toured through the facility under the leadership of their master guide, Tom Elgin, but it was when we sat down with the manager of safety and environmental compliance, Denise Coogan that how hard they work to go beyond expectations really became apparent.

Subaru is a Japanese automaker, a country where they're often thinking ahead of us because they simply don't have the space for landfills. It was from the top down that the zero-landfill directive came. So the plant set to work figuring out new uses for their trash in order to achieve zero-landfill status.

Their three biggest waste sources have always been steel (it's a highly valuable recyclable, so there's no problem in getting rid of that), cardboard (also easily recycled), and pallets (which are also recycled). While they found that it was easy enough to find ways to recycle or re-use this type of trash, they wanted to find a way to cut down on the amount of trash they were producing in the first place.

Originally 30% of their waste was paper from the bathrooms and cafeteria. That all went to an incinerator where it was burned and turned into steam energy. And though that met the requirements for a zero-landfill facility, it wasn't good enough for the higher-ups at SIA (Subaru of Indiana Automotive); they wanted to do better. Now they use biodegradable paper products (some made from corn) and have set up two 90 gallon composters behind the plant where the paper products and other food scraps are turned into nutrient dense soil that employs can come and pick up for their own gardens on weekends.

One of the other biggest contributors to their waste stream was all of the shipping materials their suppliers used when shipping various parts in. So SAI started providing their suppliers with big plastic bins that they could fill with parts and ship back. The bins, much like the ones you use to store out of season clothes or old sports equipment in your basement, can be used over and over again, cutting down on the need for disposable shipping boxes.

They found that their single largest energy expenditure came in the form of the 4 air compressors used around the facility. Though the air itself can't be recycled per-se, it can be used more efficiently. Through a series of checks and balances they were able to cut down to 2 air compressors, which cut their energy costs literally in half.

They even made changes to the paint application process. They use a water-born paint now, which is much less toxic than the old type. And their application process has an 85% efficiency, up 30% from the old application method. A company just east of Chicago reclaims the paint runoff.

At SAI, their belief is that waste is just a raw material with a next use that hasn't yet been discovered. Discover that use, and it's no longer waste.

The same was the case for the additional land where the plant resides. Wasted land? Definitely not.

The plant sits on 836 acres but the manufacturing facility only uses about 500 of those acres. The remaining 300+ acres have been turned into dedicated wildlife zones. In fact, there's a pond, right in the middle of the test track, that serves as a blue heron sanctuary and a bald eagle migration zone. Pretty remarkable.

fawley before the leak

2010-06-22T01:27:00.000-07:00

oil leak closer to home

2010-06-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

not as big as what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, but I was interested to read this on Guido Fawkes' blog as it is directly opposite 'our' beach. To state the bleeding obvious; oil and water just don't mix.

"The Environment Agency have been called to Southampton to investigate a leak in a pipeline controlled by American oil giants Exxon (Esso to Brits). It is believed this Yankee oil could be seeping into the English channel. Will the coalition now embark on a sustained trashing of Exxon’s share price? Guido can’t quite see Dave going round demanding to know “whose ass to kick”.

UPDATE : Exxon have got in touch:

In view of your latest blog and comment that oil could be seeping into the English channel, please find attached a statement from Esso on the spill last night at Fawley marine terminal. The amount of oil released is estimated at 20 barrels.
Statement 5 – Oil Spill at Fawley Marine Terminal
Monday 21 June 2010
We can confirm that at 9.20 pm on Sunday 20 June there was a release of oil from a pipeline at the company’s Marine Terminal at Fawley.
The incident happened whilst a ship was being unloaded. The offloading was immediately stopped and the pipeline valve closed. We are collecting
any residual oil from the leak site until the pipe can be drained completely. The amount of oil released is estimated at 20 barrels.
We immediately deployed our local oil spill response procedures and informed the Harbour Master and the relevant environmental agencies."

why are clean beaches important?

2010-06-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

2010-06-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

Simple and appalling - use the map to enter your home town and then get the scale of the spill in perspective.

http://www.beowulfe.com/oil/

the price of good beaches

2010-05-28T01:16:00.000-07:00

Last week's Tonight programme on ITV was titled 'how safe is your beach?', and proceeded to investigate the cleanliness of sand and water on our nations beaches - particularly those rated 'good' that turned out to be 'bad'.

Tonight does have a habit of reducing important issues to sub-tabloid levels of hyper-sensationalism, but it was pretty well balanced and didn't get too over excited despite the use of a lot of rather nebulous stats. What exactly does a "one in seven chance of getting sick" really mean? Am I really going to get sick every seventh time I go swimming? I do worry that alarmist stats like that actually numb the viewer into a general sense of unspecific unease without helping to really press the case. We don't want people to avoid the beach - just take more care of it.

As clean beaches are the basic raison d'etre of this blog I was delighted to see the issue on prime-time, even if there was a definite sense of deja vu. The Beeb's Panorama covered the story in slightly more graphic style last year from Surfers Against Sewage's perspective and Tonight's version didn't raise much that was really new. They were obviously sparked by the release of the MCS' annual Good Beach Guide, which is a curate's egg of a thing, as the BBC website reported with a blindingly confused title, "More UK bathing beaches have excellent water quality than last year, but pollution has worsened since 2006, the Marine Conservation Society says. It rated 421 of 769 beaches as excellent - 33 more than 2009, but below the 505 rated highly in 2006."

I'm afraid that if you're being harsh that synopsis really reads as 'Some of Britain's beaches are a bit better than last year but they're mainly still shit'.

I did enjoy the part of the programme where the reporter gave the Environment Agency spokesman a deserved kicking and the poorly-chosen spokesman for the water industry twitched and flinched through the interrogation and just made his clients look as culpable as they undoubtedly are.

The idiot from the EA made the statement that you were 'more likely to drown on a beach than get sick from the water', which the reporter quickly informed us was rubbish - actually there's a one in a million chance of drowning versus the vaunted one in seven chance of getting sick. The man from the Agency quickly disappeared up his own fundament with gibberish phrases like 'I'm not sighted on that intelligence' and firmly proved that the EA has no control over the water industry it is supposed to police (it lets them record and reveal how often they pump poop into the oceans without any oversight), and worse, that its senior officials are happy to blurt out made up stats.

So here we are again. Another pretty good bit of TV that highlights a serious problem and reminds us how dangerous uncontrolled utilities companies can be, but what will actually happen to improve the situation, particularly in relation to allowing untreated sewage to be vented into the sea?

SAS reports that there are over "4,000 unregulated Combine Sewer Overflows (CSOs)" in the UK which are overflow pipes which release excess 'fluid' into the sea when the storm drains overwhelm the sewage system. The water industry seems reluctant in the extreme to do anything to prevent or even reduce the practice, but in a country where it has been known to rain a bit, it seems unbelievable that this 17th century practice is still so prevalent.

SAS are maintaining their pressure (see their article here), but they acknowledge that it will require more action to see significant change.

What no-one asked is why raw sewage has to be pumped into the sea at any time? What are the alternatives and why aren't they happening or being made to happen? The age-old argument that it's a problem of the the antiquated infrastructure that the water companies inherited can't be sustained any longer. Surely they should be obligated to find a way of keeping storm water and sewage separate. With BP having to shoulder responsibility for the toxins they're releasing into the Gulf of Mexico, so too should the water companies take responsibility for their mess.

From an economic point of view, the water companies' major costs are tied to the volumes of water that they have to treat - thus CSO's provide a handy reduction in sewage that they have to process, reducing treatment volumes and therefore costs. Just as a bye-the-bye, I read that Severn Trent Water has reported a 19% increase in profits to £541m for 2009/10 and
South West Water's pre-tax profits have risen by almost 9% over the past 12 months.
Profits went up by 8.7% to £132.5m.

A quick wild under-guesstimate.
4,000 CSOs each releasing 100,000 litres each stormy day (I imagine it's a lot more given that an Olympic pool holds 2.5 million litres), and guess that there are a minimum of 30 stormy days a year? Equals a rough 12,000,000,000 litres. Or a little over a European billion.

Even if you wildly under-guesstimate the amount of merdre being released by the CSO's around the coast, it adds up to a frightening amount of crap that really has no business being there at all and a huge saving to the companies' shareholders.

What to do? Simples as the meercat would say. Install flow metres on every CSO and charge the responsible company per litre that is released. Fair discounts will apply for the ratio of water to poo, but a base of 50p per litre would make the companies move pretty quickly I'd imagine (£6 billion by my spurious maths).

Reasons why not? None I can see.

Chris Huhne

2010-05-17T05:25:00.000-07:00

Chris Huhne is the MP covering our much maligned beach in Hamble and I have met him on a couple of occasions regarding environmental issues. As a constiuency MP he was excellent - dealing with my requests swiftly and writing to the Minister in question (then labour) and letting me know how the follow up went.

And now he's Energy Minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and as the Gruniad comments, he has the experience and power to make 'cleantech' a viable way forward for the government....

"At the risk of sounding like a mini Alan Sugar, what the Department of Energy and Climate Change needs now is to get business savvy.

We've had just about all the bureaucracy we can stand with the likes, as worthy as they are, of the Carbon Trust's carbon labelling schemes and the Carbon Reduction Commitment. To keep DECC relevant, what we need now is an effective green investment bank to hand out smart loans swiftly to support projects for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

We also need government to help businesses, especially in the engineering and manufacturing sectors, to save energy and innovate with clean tech products via small loans and tax rebates. In addition, companies investing in renewable energy production need clarification on the Renewable Obligation Certificate subsidy system quickly.

The arrival of Chris Huhne as energy minister at DECC is a good sign. He is aware of the investment needs of cleantech and, after his stint in the City as vice chair of ratings agency Fitch, he'll know how business and investors work, and hopefully how the department can work with them.

Unsurprisingly, RenewableUK has told me it is "delighted by the proposal of the coalition government to increase renewable energy targets". But Richard Gledhill, global leader of climate change and carbon market services at PwC, took a more reserved stance, explaining: "Chris Huhne… has got to keep the lights on and to keep energy affordable, at a time when public expenditure is going to be under huge pressure."

We will no doubt see an upward trend to energy prices as a result of various climate change levies, and DECC will have to be fair and transparent about how the money will be raised and where it is going.

There is also a need to deal with EU carbon pricing realistically. If the carbon price is to be useful to compliant businesses it needs to be more stable and to rise predictably; but that's a matter to be dealt with at the European level, and will take time. Part of this shift may involve supporting a 30% reduction in EU emissions by 2020, to lower the emissions cap.

His experience in the investment community will make Huhne more likely than most to spot the wise bets in clean energy. His more challenging task may be in overcoming the political obstacles along his way."

The guardian sustainable business section also reports here on more from Chris and the new green government...

bluebell woods

2010-05-11T12:49:00.000-07:00

cutting across country to avoid jams on the M5 has its rewards

Guido’s Advice to Newbie MPs

2010-05-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

I regularly follow Guido Fawkes' political blog - not because I agree with is right-ish/libertarian sentiments - but mainly because he pulls no punches and skewers left and right equally.

So I am happy to cut and paste his advice, and warning to the new batch of MPs; whoever their leader might maybe.

"First day for a couple of hundred or so new MPs today. The thrill of looking for a new office, excitement at your new status, a slight sense of disbelief that you pulled it off. Congratulations, well done.

Here’s some advice. Read the Green Book, it is your responsibility to know the rules. Better still read the Shadow Kelly Report on reforming the rules and best practise, there are copies in the House of Commons library. Screw up and try to use the excuse “I thought it was within the rules”and you’ll be unemployed after the next election (which might be sooner than you think).

Don’t claim for a single thing that you don’t want to see on the front page of your local constituency newspaper.

Why are you in parliament? If it just to climb the greasy pole of power (and for many of you it is) well nothing Guido says is going to influence you. If you have ideals, hold onto them, resist all baubles and temptations that might lead you to abandon those ideals. Being a backbench MP who influences legislation for the better is a worthy if not so glamorous role.

Finally, never forget Guido and his co-conspirators will be watching you. Step out of line by doing the wrong thing and we’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks. Be seeing you…."

Eneropa

2010-05-10T03:34:00.000-07:00

And the interesting (wacky/clever/could that work?) ideas are coming thick and fast at the moment - and it's another Euro architect who has caught my eye.

The gruniad reports that maverick architect Rem Koolhaas has wiped out a couple of millennia of history and re-drawn the national boundaries of Europe along sustainable energy lines. The article is nicely Utopian and as As Reinier de Graaf, the partner in charge of the proposal, says (I suspect with his tongue in his cheek): "Megalomania is a standard part of our repertoire."

The graphics make tasty food for thought.

Organic seaweed farm powers bio-hydrogen airship

2010-05-10T01:05:00.000-07:00

How can you go past a headline like that?

Regular readers will know that I have a love of both quality sci-fi and sensible environmental solutions to our planet's travails, so this idea from Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut ticks all my boxes..... except perhaps the one marked simple and quick to install. But why pick holes with an idea that includes airships powered by seaweed. That's got to be ace hasn't it? Briefly, Monsieur Callebaut has dreampt up a sustainable air-cargo ship/office block that is powered by renewable bio-gas from fast-growing organic matter.

The full story is here on treehugger and whilst it is easy to dismiss as a mad scientist's flight of fancy, it does show the kind of integrated big thinking that is needed - not just for practical advances covering several problems at once - but in setting an engineering agenda too. And it looks super-cool to boot.

Change - yeah yeah blah blah

2010-05-05T02:11:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow the UK goes to the polls to vote for change. Or for more of the same. All the parties are claiming that they are the only true agents of change, but really this is like a choice between takeaways; all are superficially tasty with the promise of fulfilment, but bad for you in the long run. Burgers, pizzas or chips - that's the choice - there's nothing radical on offer like vegan, Nepalese or macrobiotic - not even a basic vegetarian option. Nothing that might be hard to stomach to begin with but that is ultimately healthy and life-boosting.

And we've heard it all before Obama said 'Change' and everyone was filled with joy and a new dawn emerged. Frankly being African-American was change enough and it showed that the most blighted political landscape could be changed radically without him even having to sign a bill into law. The fact that he's gone on to be true to his word on big issues like healthcare ensures that he'll be rightly remembered for far more than his skin. We don't have such a candidate - they all say 'Change' and we say 'yeah yeah blah blah.'

The media is slathering that this has been the most exciting and extraordinary campaign in decades, but also point out that even with the emergence of Nick's Liberal Democrats, none of the three leaders are telling the electorate anything they don't want to hear. Like details of the fact that the country is going to have to undergo some very nasty belt-tightening that means none of us are going to feel better off for years. They're not saying that vital investment in environmental development will surely be slashed and that we're all in for a grim old time.

As with politics stateside, there's precious little obvious difference between the parties' policy-wise so we end up electorally lashing out at them all - "a plague on both your houses". The LibDems have done well purely because they are the only ones who haven't been in power since Prime Ministers had big moustaches and MPs wore fob-watches. They're agents for change simply because the other two haven't let them play with the ball since the first world war.

I always used to joke that I'd vote LibDem for a bit of a giggle - it would be funny to see them in power - but the joke is on me now as they do have a good chance of wielding power of some kind and are really the only ones with the chance to deliver some kind of change. Even if it's token gestures here and there. And there's the rub. Until we the people really get involved and demand change as a set of tangible, measurable actions then we'll get the government we deserve and be back here, on the eve of another election, with even less of a choice than before. The prospect of a hung parliament is the opportunity that activists (supine or otherwise) have to grasp and enforce real change, real fairness and real action.

So change will surely come with the new government, but it's not an Obama-esque hope-filled change we might wish for (there's no-one with his charisma standing here); it's a change like The Who sang about...."meet the new boss, same as the old boss....won't get fooled again". Will we?

Duh! story of the day

2010-05-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Just five minutes of exercise in a "green space" such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

This is a charming story on the BBC website that really is a 'you don't say!?' story and apparently "There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being." Who'd have thunk it?

"In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem. The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.

The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail.

The biggest effect was seen within just five minutes.

With longer periods of time exercising in a green environment, the positive effects were clearly apparent but were of a smaller magnitude, the study found.

Looking at men and women of different ages, the researchers found the health changes - physical and mental - were particularly strong in the young and the mentally-ill.

A bigger effect was seen with exercise in an area that also contained water - such as a lake or river."

I'm not sure what is more worrying - the fact that Mind, the excellent mental health charity, thought that it was necessary to conduct a study of the bleeding obvious (is water wet and fire hot?), or the fact that the Environmental Science and Technology journal found it necessary to point it out to the world. It is a sad, sad day when people are unaware that getting out into nature makes you feel better.

On the flip side - hooray for publicising the outdoors to glum people. I know that even a short burst of mother nature always heals me.

I love a good oil spill

2010-05-01T02:27:00.000-07:00

Simon Barnes, writing in The Times today, makes the point that no one can really argue with...it's a silly way to live.

"I love a good oil spill. With a really good oil spill, every possibility of ambiguity is vanquished. With an oil spill, there really is no “on the other hand”. An oil spill is plainly, unremittingly, remorselessly dreadful. I love a good oil spill because there is not a single good thing that can be said about it.

I’ve been to one. I was in West Wales when the Sea Empresswent down in 1996. The sweet smell that hung in the air wasn’t even unpleasant, just hideously unnatural. A scent that told you fast as intuition that the world was out of joint.

I saw three or four ducks flying over the roofs. If you were any kind of birder you could feel the awfulness of this event. These ducks were scoters, sea ducks, and they never, ever, fly over land. Their minds had been scrambled by the terrible things that had happened to the place they live in.

On the beach I saw another scoter swimming along gamely. It was up to its neck. This was a duck, for God’s sake, the most buoyant thing on the planet, and it was going down with all hands, going down even as the stinking black treacle oozed on to the shore. No one, human or duck, could be in any two minds about the matter. It was awful.

It is even more awful as the great slick slithers across the Gulf of Mexico and starts to devastate the coast of the southern United States. I’ve been there, too. I saw brown pelicans, majestic aeronauts with comic-book beaks, and roseate spoonbills, bright pink birds with a beak like a ladle. Both species, along with many others, are going to cop it from the oil.

We have a dreadful oil spill, and we say, oh, this is dreadful, and dreadful it is. And then a few years pass and we have another one. We don’t seem to be making much progress. In the United States, they had the spill from the Exxon Valdez as far back as 1989.

You’d have thought that any country would do anything to stop such a thing happening again, but here it is, happening again. It’s a different format of disaster — this is a rig, not a ship — but it’s the same old oil, and it’s here for the same old reason: because safety precautions are insufficient. It is more important to get oil than to stop occasional wallops of it polluting the world.

These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction to oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment — oil at any price — is madness. Treasure this spill: it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

We crave oil as the junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.

It threatens the continued existence of brown pelican Pelecanus occidentalis, roseate spoonbill Platalea ajaja and human beingHomo sapiens. Perhaps it’s time we did something about it.

James Cameron's truthbombs

2010-04-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

This is lifted directly from treehugger in which the director makes the arguement that the only way to make us less apathetic about climate change is to charge us directly.....all arguments about petrol already being £1.25++ a litre can be discussed later...

"Okay, so this is hardly news: it's been apparent for quite some time that coal and oil companies have been funding an ongoing campaign to confuse the public about climate science. Nothing revolutionary there; who would be surprised that fossil fuel industries are protecting their interests? What's surprising is how depressingly effective they've been. Which is why it's encouraging to see a smart, science-savvy public figure like James Cameron -- who also just happened to make the biggest grossing movie in history -- recognizing the travesty perpetrated on the American public.

Cameron is appearing on a CNN International special that's airing this Thursday, called 'The Special Debate for Earth's Frontiers: The Future of Energy'. The debate, which also featured Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, and Changhua Wu, the Greater China Director of the Climate Group , and others, saw Cameron enter the fray, no-holds barred.

He dropped a couple astute truth-bombs, like this one:What I see in the U.S is the oil and coal lobbies spending massive amounts of money on a disinformation campaign that is used to discredit science and steer public opinion away from any sense of social responsibility about climate change.What he sees in the US is the same thing we all see, if we're willing to follow the money . . .

Cameron also commented on the need to price carbon, and the damage our too-low gas prices are doing:"Nothing is going to change until we properly price carbon...Right now gas is US$3 a gallon at the pump... In my perspective, gas is 15 or 20 dollars a gallon if you fully burden it with the cost of all of these big military actions, the overall consequences to the economy and the long term costs of climate change."

Now, some may balk at that figure, and certainly the fact that he's a wealthy film director who can afford all the gas he wants may make him seem out of touch -- but again, I think he's closer to right on than not. Even if you look at the simple externalities, the unaccounted-for environmental costs of burning gasoline -- without the wars -- you still hit a figure way higher than $3 a gallon.Anyhow, the debate looks to be well worth watching. Catch it if you've got an hour to kill this weekend.The Special Debate for Earth's Frontiers: The Future of Energy' airs on CNN International on Thursday 29th April at 1330 BST, Friday 30th April at 0530 BST; Saturday 1st May at 0630, 1830 and 2100 BST; Sunday 2nd May at 0400, 0830 and 1600 BST.

History of medicine

2010-04-27T01:49:00.000-07:00

Quite so. in a nutshell.

http://brainfood.howies.co.uk/2010/04/eat-this-root-by-living-medicine/

Power, Dr Emmett Brown's way

2010-04-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

When Doc Brown returns from the future to collect Marty - to sort out his kids - they have no need for plutonium to generate one-point-twenty-one jigowatts of power necessary for time travel . He merely flips open the fusion-o-matic hatch on the back of his De Lorean and feeds it with scraps from the dustbin (No idea what I'm talking about? Really!? see Back to the Future).

In 1985, the idea that garbage could be the power source of the future was a humorous sci-fi dream and whilst we've yet to achieve nuclear fusion from banana skins and chicken bones, Refuse Derived Fuels (RDF) are a reality.

Through my work I sometimes have to visit landfill sites and every time, without fail, the scale of these stinking holes fills me with horror. It's not just the size of them that appals me, but also how much of the material that is being buried could be usefully re-used. It will come as a shock to many people to discover that much of the stuff that they put out for recycling, still ends up in a hole in the ground.

In many areas of the country, if you diligently put out your garden waste for collection, or take it to a recycling centre, it goes to a landfill site where it is composted as promised. However, the compost is then used to cap the layers of bin-bags and rotting food to try and create some sort of soil-like structure to the waste beneath. It's a common practice and without it landfill sites would be just pools of festering mess. Much of the wood from recycling sites ends up being shredded and added to the cover too.(see google map below)

If you're even remotely concerned about the practice of putting huge amounts of rubbish into holes in the ground it's a doubly painful experience to see useful material like compost and wood being buried too. And it certainly doesn't have to be like this.

Anaerobic Digestion is just one of the new, proven technologies, that works on small scales in local facilities and generates heat and power from waste. Food and green waste are cooked, the gas collected, and the resulting compost digestate can be used as fertilizer - http://www.biogas-info.co.uk/index.php/what-is-ad-qa. The success of these plants is unquestionable and although there are plenty of hurdles (like what exactly do you do with the compost?) they are small fry compared to the terrible legacy of landfill.

Doc Brown would be further impressed by the next generation of biomass power stations and industrial boilers that run off an ever wider spectrum of waste. At the moment the prime biomass fuel is wood - either residues from the timber industry or clean recycled wood, however, the Germans (of course) are now using materials like MDF, chipboard and even plastics. The trick is in the efficacy of the scrubbers and filters used to clean the emissions and in ensuring that all the CO2 and heat is efficiently harvested for use; not released.

It is possible now to generate huge amounts of power from waste and it is happening now, not in the future (probably close to 1.21GW). Except in Britain where decades of government dithering has meant that we have only a handful of such generators compared with the hundreds in use in Europe.

Consider this too. In the UK councils and businesses have to pay between £50-£90 per tonne to landfill their waste, but in Germany powers stations pay up to £40 per tonne to take it in as fuel.....you do the math as they say.

A landfill site with composting operation FYI

View Landfill site in a larger map

throwdownthrees

2010-04-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

classic songs of love and loss from down under's finest songwriters

Don Walker's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILd1O44BDqc

Mark Seymour's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkRNz0tR7tc

Colin Hay's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XK46I_vMeU

devil's dictionary

2010-04-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'd heard of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary , and now I've found it I love it.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com/?C

is climate change the biggest SEP?

2010-04-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

After nearly a week of pristine blue skies, the sight of aircraft con-trails this morning got me thinking again about climate change and why organisations like BeThatChange struggle to get us angry enough about it to participate in direct action. Or even put our vote where it counts and elect a government that puts environmentalism at the heart of its agenda.

It's well documented that the simple answer is that it seems too far off and too abstract an idea and we can't see how it really impacts on our lives. Yes we care about our kids' future, but it's a lovely day today and even when we are snowed in or flooded out, it's hard for us to blame the mess on Easyjet flight 413 to Malaga. If I took that flight last summer am I to blame when the river rises into my kitchen? Does the patchwork quilt of vapour in the sky today really mean that there won't be food on my son's table in a decade? It's simply too hard to make the two things fit together in a comprehensive way. So I'll go about my business and hope that the government sorts it out like they sorted out my free health care and the financial crisis. Small things I can deal with. The big things are for government; somebody else's problem.

In Douglas Adams' Life the Universe & Everything, Ford explains that the way to cloak a spaceship and make it invisible is to use an SEP field.

"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye. The technology required to actually make something invisible is so complex and unreliable that it isn't worth the bother.

The "Somebody Else's Problem field" is much simpler and more effective, and "can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."

When searching wikipedia for the quote I was delighted to find that many finer minds than mine have already used the SEP concept when trying to describe big problems that we struggle to deal with. Obama and Sarcozy join environmentalists and economists in paraphrasing Douglas' wit. The sad reality, however, is that because we don't care - or care yet - the government doesn't either. Modern politics is rarely keen to push wise policies for the future if voters don't say they are important today. The SEP flaps its powerful cloak and the problem disappears again. For now.

I've come to believe that the size and scale of climate change is so big that it will always be an SEP until it is really too late, so we might as well ignore it, but in a clever positive way. In Adams' book the only way to unpick an SEP is "to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye." and Ford goes on to explain that if you can ignore the fact that you're ignoring it, then you'll see it. Or words to that effect.

If we ignore the seemingly insurmountable problem that the world is changing dangerously fast, and concentrate on using our refuse to generate power, for example, the SEP can be uncloaked. It's The tired old maxim about thinking globally acting locally writ true.

The key to getting voters to get agitated is to give them small solutions that they can get their heads around and that they think are sensible to demand from politicians. Campaigning for carbon reductions is noble but I fear futile. No one I know, knowingly emits carbon. But I know plenty of people who would love to see their rubbish go to a local plant to produce sustainable power. I know lots of people who would rather take a train or bus to work, if only they could rely on them and they were cheaper.

To make a serious green agenda stick we have to break it down into do-able parts. One will knock on to another and the SEP can be banished harmlessly into space.

the supine activist

2010-04-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

Supine - adjective:

1.inactive, passive, or inert, esp. from indolence or indifference.

2. Lying or sitting down

I always liked the idea of direct action but am always disappointed that it usually just results in the be-dreaded horde smashing stuff up. Sadly direct action is now a wobbly catch call for a media stunt, usually 'radical' and often alienating, to raise 'awareness'. Does climate change really need more awareness or just action? Worse, well-intentioned actions are often hijacked and end up being shambolic confrontations.

Dirtmeetsthewater started as a direct action, in the true sense of the word (just getting off my arse and doing something), but not in a political way. We were keen to make a point for sure, but mainly just wanted a clean beach. I had low expectations that our little beach clean would radically change the amount of marine litter sloshing about in the Solent, but the upshot has been that other local organisations have picked up the ball and are running with it. The beach was cleaner for a bit and a lot of unexpected people turned up and did.

The problem is that too often participating in a direct action does actually involve doing something and that is beyond a lot of people. Not always because they don't care but usually because they genuinely don't have the time or feel passionately enough to get involved. In the grand scheme of things marine litter has a very small impact on people's lives.... But the sad truth is that we're not often provoked enough by an issue to get off our arses.

So the new face of successful direct action needs to be the kind that you can do from your desk or sofa. Telethons have long known that it's easier to raise money through the TV and phone lines than by rattling tins on the high street, so it's no surprise that organisations are now trying to harness the power of the supine activist.

Through howies' brainfood blog I came across BeThatChange which has taken this idea to a nicely designed, and (I think) a well thought-out new level. BeThatChange is solidly and loudly apolitical and although they're taking on the minor project of ending world poverty in general, seem grounded in their main aims for their current campaign WakeUp:WalkOut.

Using the big noughties C word - change - they're nicely specific in demanding that the government commit to a 42% carbon reduction as a first step. Rightly bemoaning the anticlimax of Copenhagen, they are suggesting that everyone 'walks out' on Monday 26th April. Stop what you're doing and walk out. Where their plan gets canny is that they then want to create frenzied media storms; mass texting MPs, youtubing streets full of agitators and twittering to the rooftops. This, perhaps more than the physical action of meandering outside, will constitute the new direct action.

I'm a Twitter sceptic (I fear that I just don't get it, or worse, just don't like it), but there has been plenty of evidence that Twitter-storms can lead to policy change or at least a very fast,dynamic and powerful lobbying. Law firm Carter Ruck felt the full force of the Twitterverse when they tried to protect a nasty energy company from negative press and The Mail's Jan Moir got what was coming too when she made one snide homophobic comment too many. Read any article about new media and what becomes clear is that it is now all about speed and mass. It doesn't take much - a few active friends with huge lists of Facebook friends or Twitter followers to get a movement genuine traction in the real world. And it happens fast.

I enjoyed being part of the rage-against-the-X-factor victory. It felt like a win for the angry and ignored who like it loud and real over a faceless, beige, unit-shifting, soulless industry puppet. And it was, no matter how trivial the aim. What the bethatchange guys seem to be hoping is that someone or something (a tweet, a youtube clip or a facebook campaign) will be the catalyst for another 21st century direct action and that meaningful change will result.

Sadly I think that their immediate demand of carbon reduction will not spark the public imagination enough as an issue to really catch a fire, but if they can find that magic lightning bolt that provokes a response.... well it's clear that the new tools for a new kind of direct action are there to harness the couch-bound masses' righteous anger. It taps into the current Zeitgeist of voting with your phone (think dancing-with-the-x-factor-on-ice). Immediate say-so over who stays and who goes. Dial o800 for radical change if you want to reduce carbon emissions and dial 0801 if you want to save the whales. Get involved but costs from mobiles may vary.

What it means for the beach clean and campaigns like it, is that we have to try and get those that are too busy or too idle to trudge down the sand, to get involved without having to use more than their texting thumbs. Think what you like about the apathy and callousness of that state of affairs but you can only use the best tools for the job.

http://www.bethatchange.com/

very special sunset

2010-01-27T06:30:00.000-08:00

a gorgeous sunset last night - my phone camera couldn't get close to capturing the intensity of the colours....but I tried.

a worrying planning application

2010-01-27T06:19:00.000-08:00

After all SAS' work on sewage drainage onto UK beaches, I can't believe that this is slipping through Cornwall County Council's net. Saw this alert on Drift surfing - get involved, especially if you live near, or visit, or just care abou Cornwall's beaches.

"Residents of the St Merryn area were last week made aware of a worrying planning application to put in a drainage [including treated sewage] pipe flowing onto the beach at Booby’s Bay in North Cornwall, which if granted will damage the surrounding area, the beach and the water quality, reports Adrian Philips of Fluid Juice. [Photo by Jamie Bott.]

It also transpired during a St Merryn Parish Council meeting on Thursday that the plan is not as was originally stated on the planning application “to drain surface water causing a wet garden” but is actually to drain the entire area to a depth of 3.2m to allow the construction of an intended new development at Little Polgarron overlooking the beach at Booby’s Bay, of which the first level is planned to be underground. The present water table is at approximately 1m below the surface. This lowering of the water table would affect a large area of both Special Scientific Interest and Outstanding Natural Beauty.

To make matters worse, it was also revealed that the developer intends all sewage to be treated on the premises and the resulting liquids to be disposed of through a soakaway and hence into the ground water and then drain through the proposed pipe onto the beach.

It seems unlikely that such a scheme could get passed by the planning department, but the original planning application [2009/00850] appears to have gone through very quietly. Now that we have the chance it’s important that normal people like ourselves stand up for what we believe is right – but we may not have much time so it’s important to lodge your comments and/or objections as soon as possible.

If you would like to know more please read the relevant planning application [2009/01754]. This area of the council’s website is REALLY slow, so it’s quicker to save the PDFs to your desktop and then read them.

If you would like to comment or object to the above proposal you can do so on the Cornwall County Council website."

Chris Jordan again

2010-01-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

I've blogged about Chris Jordan's amazing art before and I have also mentioned the Pacific Gyre - the vast Texas sized dump in the middle of the ocean - and here they are both featured.... sad and wonderful and moving and sad, and obviously sad.

http://chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11

'if the sea is sick, we're sick'

2010-01-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

From Drift Surfing - 'Save the Waves Environmental Director Josh Berry just sent over this short film, “Soundings.” Regardless of where you stand on Sea Shepherd, it’s hard to argue with Dave Rastovich’s simple breakdown of why the state of the oceans matters to every surfer everywhere. We immerse ourselves in the sea daily, it’s on our skin and in our mouths and eyes. If it’s sick, we’re sick–plain and simple.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj5xF1Udb-g&feature=player_embedded#

Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things

2010-01-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things is one of Stewart Brand's ideas for the future of environmentalism. He's someone who is crossing my radar more and more frequently - I know I'm slow - but he makes sense in a really positive, 'do something' way. Which dirtmeetsthewater likes very much. I found this on Howies' Brainfood blog and spread it forward here with props and acknowledgement as per...

"Stewart Brand has been at the forfront of Environmentalism since the 60’s in America. He says that he wants to foster an ‘un-idealistic, practical view about how to get things done’. He was the guy who got NASA to first publish images of Earth from the Apollo Space missions which changed our view of our planet forever. And for the computer nerds, you might like to know that he was there at the inception of the internet, developing a way of linking environmentalists via a system called ‘The Wall’. He has faith in human beings to do the right thing when given the opportunities and feels that the appropriate tools are key to this. He optimistically believes that we can create a world we believe in.

Watch his video on TED to judge for yourself. I learnt much from the talk I went, and I would like to share with you the information that is still ringing loud in my ears now, how does this information sit with you?

1. How do we frame a problem in a way that it’s solvable? (apparently engineers do this alot!)

2. Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things.

3. There is a movement for ‘open-source genetic engineering’ so farmers everywhere can use it to modify their crops as they have done through breeding for generations. This could potentially stop world food sources being controlled by controversial giants such as Monsanto (one of the biggest fears of anti-GM campaigners). There is a book called ‘Mendel in the Kitchen’ by an American couple who write about combining the best of organic growing principles and GM technology.

4. He believes that there is currently a regular mis-use of the precautionary principle. Many things have un-intended consequences both positive and negative and it is best that we keep an eye out for both.

5. The new 3rd generation of nuclear power generators have the options to be small modular reactors, that can de-centralize power supplies, even a floating barge in Russia. Uranium supplies are from stable countries such as Australia and Canada. Third generation reactors can use the waste from first and second generation as fuel. Amusingly, 10% of America’s nuclear fuel comes from old soviet weapons, how’s that for recycling?! New methods of uranium processing are being developed to prevent any waste from the process being used in weapons. "

Note to self - the solutions are nearly always found by doing something, not by stopping doing stuff. Yes less can be more but Pig Will was the leader. Pig wont had to become Pig me too.....(courtesy of Richard Scarry)

what's in a name

2010-01-14T16:37:00.000-08:00

We named our son Robbie so when he grows up he can be, Rob, Robert and of course Bob. In Italy he will be known as Roberto. So what's in a name? He is named after his Grandpa - a good man - but he carries a great moniker and i did have a little think about who he might emulate. No pressure then son.

Robert Plant - if you don't know you can't be in my gang

Robert Smith - he of the Cure and the godfather of goth

robert johnson - made a deal with the devil but invented the blues

robert cray - handy with a strat

robert palmer - smooth

robert wyatt - for shipbuilding....the song

Robert Rauschenberg - messy art

bob dylan....do I need to explain?

bob marley - likewise

bob geldof - a hero

Rob Trujilo - Bass player with Metallica & Suicidal tendancies

Robert Louis Stevenson - pirates
Robert De Niro - for Deerhunter
Robert Carlyle - for begbie
Robert Plant - again
Robert Redford - for the Sundance kid
Bobby Moore - for '66

Bob Weir - Guitar & Vocals, The Grateful Dead

Bob Willis - for Headingley '81

Robert Altman - for the Player and MASH

Bob Seeger - for Hollywood Nights' drumming

Bobby Gillespie - for Screamadelica

Bobbie Kennedy - for trying to step out of a shadow

Bobbie Darin - for mac the knife

Robert Frost - yankee poet

Robbie Robertson - for The Band

Robbie Coltrane - for Tutti Frutti

Robert Mitchum - for the Big Sleep & Cape Fear

Robert Downey Jnr - for weird science

Robert Duval - for Colonel Killgore...'smells like victory'

Robert Shaw - his boat wasn't big enough

Rob Lowe - for The West Wing & St Elmo's Fire

Robert Fripp - in the court of king crimson...mainly unlistenable but you have to at least 'know it'

Robert Kubica - fastest Pole

Robert Maplethorpe - flowers & fisting

Robert Powell - he was Jesus afterall

Robert the Bruce - jock King

Robert Burns - jock poems

Bob Kane - Creator of "Batman & Robin"

Bob Woodward - all the president's men

Robert Menzies - Former Prime Minister ofAustralia

Rpatz - coz hes soo like omg in heat magazine

Roberto Baggio - scored some goals. missed one penalty

Roberto Benigni - life IS beautiful

Roberta Flack - killing me softly

Sponge bob - he of the cuboid legwear

and yes robbie williams

so a pretty good name

as long as he has tiny bit of marley/dylan/willis/plant/wooodward/truiljio...then I'll be proud.

dirtmeetsthewater

moving home

landscape photography

More Biomimicry Please - A new source of inspiration for wind farms

The Gathering - an SAS POW action

A Grain of Sand Picture Gallery

Strange beautiful bunkers

Sky Truth - a smart new tool for environmental protection?

what's the environmental priority for the next 40 years?

tree houses - don't require much explanation

some people look for a beautiful place

WAR - what is it good for? Waves Are Resources

bonkers civil engineering is the way forward

Stuart Maconie: England will fight for access to its coast

The best way to clean up an oil spill is not to have one. The second best maybe to make a meal of it.

Want To Clean Up An Oil Spill? There Are Some Microbes Looking For A Meal

just a great picture

I love a good cloud

we all take the same pictures

Norway does a great line in highway 'rest stops'

Huge solar photovoltaic farm opens in France

turtle is disappointed

abandon responsibility and embrace frivolity

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

just when you start to despair someone big does something huge

DE-DESIGNATING BATHING WATERS DEVALUES OUR BEACHES

things I learned while my plane crashed | Video on TED.com

Rio Ferdinand – red devil turned unlikely green guru

SAS: Warning for our beaches

This doesn't sound good

Union leaders warn over coastguard cuts

the hottest fires

holy shit, what a ride

a small act of generosity

Oil spill clean up idea: swarms of sailing drones

SAS Win

GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT

are you happy?

is this blog too earnest?

Gawd save us - another Quango

"The short answer to that is, no."

Wind turbines and solar panels turn viaduct into generator

opting out of the social future?

(click on the image to see the details)

Papier-mache milk “GreenBottles”

Private Eye are on to Save Our Woods

Save Our Woods

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.”John Burroughs (1837-1921), American Naturalist.

'The Government wants to sell all publicly owned forests. This can’t happen'

'The BP oil is all gone!' Oh really?

Modest suggestions for anyone trying to save the world

For sale - Cameron's green credentials

For sale - Cameron's green credentials

Johann Hari writes in the Independent, 'Why do the Tories think timber companies want to buy the forests? To abandon the work they do and become druids?'

Southampton water in the snow

South Devon Coast

Big steps

The Government Responds...

amazing volcano

is all plastic all bad?

Subaru's zero-landfill car plant

fawley before the leak

oil leak closer to home

why are clean beaches important?

Visualizing the BP Oil Disaster

the price of good beaches

Chris Huhne

bluebell woods

Guido’s Advice to Newbie MPs

Eneropa

Organic seaweed farm powers bio-hydrogen airship

Change - yeah yeah blah blah

Duh! story of the day

I love a good oil spill

James Cameron's truthbombs

History of medicine

Power, Dr Emmett Brown's way

throwdownthrees

devil's dictionary

is climate change the biggest SEP?

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.”
John Burroughs (1837-1921), American Naturalist.