Words, ideas, videos
The future is not written, but there are several excruciatingly safe bets about the years ahead. atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane will continue to rise poor people will suffer the resultant impacts of #climatebreakdown hard and first the state will try to suppress social movements which seek to do anything about rendering these... Continue Reading →
So, the International Sustainability Transitions conference has come and gone. A fine event, with a huge number of scholars delivering papers, speed talks, with plenty of time for schmoozing and boozing. I wrote already about the problem of manels and 'What is to be Done', but that was before I had a) delivered my own... Continue Reading →
It's been a while since I posted, because I have been a) thesising b) writing a book chapter (intimately related to a) above)) Still, this and a book I just read (see next post) deserve recording for posterity (or at least until the electricity systems collapse). My friend Mark Carrigan (top bloke, btw) has just... Continue Reading →
It makes my flesh crawl. That 'one team' bollocks, where our lords and masters (be they corporate or state) make out as if 'we're all in this together' - to quote the words of some already forgotten Tory Prime Minister. Yeah, right. So, I really want to read 'The Good Soldier Schweik' (after my thesis.... Continue Reading →
Goering is alleged to have said that whenever he heard the word culture he reached for his revolver. For me, whendver I hear the word 'trap' I think of my Elvis. Specifically, 'We're caught in a trap. I can't walk out....' Meanwhile, this from an article Nair, S. and Howlett. 2015. From robustness to resilience:... Continue Reading →
I went to a meeting (won't say if it was activist or academic or whatever - that's not the point). There was explicitly 'no agenda'. And we were then, without warning, asked to introduce ourselves (say what we had done, were doing and what we wanted to do around this particular issue/topic). And did they give... Continue Reading →
Manchester Tyndall Centre today hosted a provocative and highly interesting seminar. Professor Andy Stirling, who spent the 80s in the trenches for Greenpeace, had schlepped up to deliver a seminar on “Emancipating Transformations.” What they? Read on for an (almost) blow by blow account. [My multiple two centses are in square brackets like these.] Stirling... Continue Reading →
Nature as redeemer, nature as escape, nature as the solace for our "gridded, controlled, mannered urban lives." So far so romantic. Well, nature is on the road, and she’s gunning for the lot of us. We’ve poked the beast, and now it really is waking up. On a quiet day, you could hear it snoring.... Continue Reading →
According to the American humourist Dave Barry “Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate.” (As in, meetings aren't just ego-potlaches, they're also for the recycling of anxiety and responsibility). While meetings might be full of wankers, they’re surprisingly joyless experiences. “Nesta”,... Continue Reading →
“There was a period of about three years (1987-1990), however, when it became fashionable for physicians to reduce the rather long MR imaging times by using anisotropically shaped (i.e., non-square) imaging pixels in studies of the spine. As it turned out, this resulted in a prominent dark line appearing within the spinal cord. The dark line was a Gibbs... Continue Reading →
