Media & Communications

ODAC Newsletter – Aug 27

by

Cairn Energy announced this week that it had found evidence “indicative of an active hydrocarbon system” off Greenland. The news comes in the middle of a bidding round for oil and gas exploration licences there. The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the region contains approximately 90 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, but producing the stuff would combine the extreme challenges of deepwater drilling, extreme cold, and ice. Any accident would be massively harder to deal with than Deepwater Horizon because of the country’s remoteness…

New work centers and HTSP

by

A few days ago I gave a keynote address to the International Society for Ecological Economics which was held in Bremen, Germany. First time teleconferencing for a keynote, which was a nice, minimal carbon way to get the message out. Afterwards, people in the audience asked for some more detail on high-tech self-providing [HTSP]. Here’s my answer to them…

Reviving anarchy for the sake of sustainability

by

One thing that fascinates me about political theorist Murray Bookchin’s writing is how prescient it is. His essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was written in 1965, six years before Earth Day, and almost a half-century before now. Yet its content is as relevant as ever, if not more so, given society’s increasing interest in all things “green.” Bookchin even references future ramifications of climate change, long before many had even considered it.

Brother, can you spare a paradigm?

by

I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a while now about the need for a paradigm shift. This began when I came up with the title for a paper: ‘Let’s Twist Again: Time for a Real Copernican Revolution’. Don’t worry, this is the sort of party game academics get up to – yes really! My own favourite is ‘Haydn Sikh: The Adaptation of the Classical Form in Britain’s Minority Religious Communities’, or something like that.

Deconstructing Dinner: Climate Friendly Eating (Conscientious Cooks VIII)

by

On this part 8 of our Conscientious Cooks series, we listen in on a really interesting panel discussion hosted in 2008 by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (or CUESA) located in San Francisco, California. The panel was themed around the concept of Climate Friendly Eating.

Natural solidarity

by

A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.