Media & Communications

Why GM Has No Place in a World in Transition

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The piece builds on Lynas’s previous much publicised conversion to nuclear power, arguing that if we are to apply the scientific rigour that underpins climate science to all other areas of life, in the same way that nuclear power is supported by the science, so is GM. While I strongly disagree with him on both, I want here to challenge Lynas’s conversion to GM, and the belief that if we are serious about climate change, we have no option other than to embrace GM.

North-South Divide And Tackling Global Warning

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As signs of climate instability increase, radical and rapid action is becoming ever more urgent…Yet even within the environmental movement there is no unanimity on this thorny question: should the countries of the South have the right to increase their emissions as they industrialize and “develop”?

Living Hero interview with Vandana Shiva

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Around the world civilian rights to food and water are being eroded by the patenting of life forms and by privatization of water systems. Some farmers have been hit with law suits for patent infringement, while they were planting heritage seeds. The outspoken, multi-talented Vandana Shiva, joins us to talk about these and other issues of capitalist globalization. She is a celebrated ecofeminist, grassroots activist, research physicist, author, and international advocate for alternatives to global corporate hegemony.

Nothing left to lose

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Rolfe Winkler wrote some good stuff in the wake of the Make Markets Be Markets conference held in the Imperial capital last week. I’ll get to that in a moment. The purpose of the get together, which was hosted by the Roosevelt Institute, was to push for much needed financial reform. Many of the usual suspects were there, including Simon Johnson and Elizabeth Warren. Rob Johnson, Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance at The Roosevelt Institute, wrote the introduction to the conference report (big pdf).

Peak Moment 164: The World of Ecovillages

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The ecovillage movement is gaining a lot of traction and in some surprising forms, says Diana Leafe Christian, the author of Finding Community: How to join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community. Drawing from ecovillages worldwide, she describes many examples of these “human-scaled, full-featured settlements.” Ecovillages aim to integrate human activities harmlessly into the natural world and be sustainable indefinitely. To succeed, they need to have multiple centers of initiative (e.g., business enterprises), and support healthy human development (like cooperation and having fun). (www.EcovillageNews.org).

We’re All Sunk

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It’s almost too easy to vilify corporations. What, with all the evil stuff they do. Take the coal industry for example, who blow up our mountains, poison our air and water, contribute massively to global climate change, and spend untold millionsof dollars on disinformation campaigns, lobbying Congress, buying Senators, and lying to block efforts to tackle the climate crisis. I mean, they are practically begging for our hatred, right? Right.

Magical thinking

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Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, she expresses the same frustration I’ve felt when dealing with our cult of positivity.

Transition Culture roundup – Mar 9

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-A March Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition
-Transition on ‘One Planet’ on BBC World Service
-Transition Sunshine Coast delivers EDAP
-“Genuine resilience results from expanding the human footprint”. Discuss

The Scalability of Biochar

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A popular idea at the moment to address climate change is biochar – essentially taking organic materials, charring them, and burying them in the soil…Now, the biofuel story has given me a bit of a horror of ideas that sound cool to environmentalists, are fine on a small scale, but are a disaster when scaled up by industrial society.  So I wanted to do a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of this approach.