Category Archives: Environmental politics

Environmental politics

GDP as ‘fairytale’

August 2, 2006 – 5:45 pm

To a new book club last night, where the topic of discussion was
Capitalism: As If the World Matters, by Jonathon Porritt.

It is an attempt, we concluded, to reframe “green” thought going back to the seventies into a form and vocabulary with which economists and businesspeople might be comfortable.

In the discussion I managed to make some economists very uncomfortable (sorry!) by suggesting that GDP was a “fiction”, which another commentator later modified to “fairytale”. That might sound a bit extreme, but the point I was making is that it has as a measure no absolute value – it is just a collection of figures that everyone has agreed means something. (A bit like money.) Of course the obvious feminist example of this is that it doesn’t count unpaid (but clearly valuable) outputs of labour such as caring and housework.

We were discussing the difficulties of creating/agreeing a “green GDP measure”. My view on this is select a few sensible figures, produce a formula to plug them into and push it hard; don’t try to get a “perfect”, exactly balanced measure, because such a thing doesn’t exist.

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Environmental politics

Pick that nursing home carefully

July 26, 2006 – 8:30 am

There are a lot of “cor isn’t it hot, here’s how to cool down” stories around in the UK media at the moment repeating the same statements of the bleeding obvious, as we’re well into a second week of 30-plus temperatures (in London at least). But the Guardian has an interesting, thoughtful piece today combining global warming reflections with practical advice – it has me looking now at my balcony windows wondering if it would indeed be possible to fit externa shutters. (Interestingly this piece says that internal blinds are useless, since by then the heat is already in the room, which makes sense when you think about it.)

And it reports that even after the scandal of 2003, when 30,000 died across Europe, primarily in France, the deaths are starting again this year – usually oldies who are literally being broiled alive from within. (And it isn’t even August yet.) The fault lies in their environment, building design ill-adapted to the realities that we are fast moving towards every summer being a 2003, and ignorance among communities yet to make behavioural adaptations.

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Environmental politics Women's history

Did you know a woman founded the Soil Association?

July 16, 2006 – 11:06 am

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s “life of the day” is Lady Evelyn Barbara Balfour founder of the Soil Association, long-time promoter of organic farming. (That link will only work for a few days – but if you find this after that contact me and I should be able to help.)

She sounds like a formidable woman:

In 1915 Eve Balfour went to Reading University to study for a diploma in agriculture. In 1918, claiming to be twenty-five, she secured her first job working for the Women’s War Agricultural Committee, running a small farm in Monmouthshire. She managed a team of land girls, ploughing the land with horses and milking the cows by hand. In the following year, in conjunction with her elder sister, Mary Edith Balfour, she purchased New Bells Farm, Haughley, near Stowmarket, Suffolk. During this period she played an important role mobilizing local opposition to the unpopular tithe tax levied on agriculture by the church and presented evidence to the royal commission.
…
During the 1930s Lady Eve, as she was commonly known, became critical of orthodox farming methods, being particularly influenced by Lord Portsmouth’s text Famine in England (1938), which raised doubts about their sustainability. His book inspired her to contact Sir Robert McCarrison, whose research into the Hunza tribesmen of India’s north-west frontier had shown a positive relationship between their impressive health and stamina and methods of soil cultivation. Her interest in organic farming can also be traced to her contacts with Sir Albert Howard, a British scientist who developed the Indore process of composting based on eastern methods.

Of course she was a woman before her time, but it is still astonishing that she only received an OBE weeks before her death, “while the very next day Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government announced the first ever British grant enabling farmers to convert to organic methods”. (It is – note to editors – not entirely clear if this was a day after the OBE or the day after her death.)

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Environmental politics Science

Life’s too short to wash dishes

July 15, 2006 – 10:30 am

… and now it is definitively the green thing to do. (Whew!)

A study by the UK pressure group Waterwise…. showed that new, water-efficient dishwashers used as little as nine litres of water per wash, although the average was between 12 and 16 litres. By contrast, washing and rinsing dishes by hand used as much as 63 litres.
According to the study, just under 30 per cent of households in the UK use a dishwasher, compared to 5 per cent in 1977. But growth rates have slowed and the number of households with dishwashers in the UK compares poorly with other European countries.

I’ve had a dishwasher ever since I’ve been in London, and couldn’t possibly live without it. (Having unfortunately misplaced along the way a former boyfriend who used to be so disgusted by the piles of dirty dishes in my sink that when he arrived for the weekend the first thing he’d do was wash them up – his mother had trained him well.)

Staying on the practical science side, a fun bit of whimsy: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 new web addresses have been created.

Of the internet addresses available, more than three quarters are already in use, and the remainder are expected to be assigned by 2009. So, what will happen as more people in developing countries come online? The answer is IPv6, a new internet protocol that has more spaces than the old one: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 spaces, in fact. “Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,” said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out.

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Environmental politics

£20/day congestion charge. Excellent

July 13, 2006 – 8:28 am

Still only talk, buy London’s mayor is talking about a £20 congestion charge for Chelsea tractors. Even people with more money than sense like their owners are, I suspect, going to notice £100 a week. On some things we are, however, glacially, heading in the right direction.

And even the talk will hopefully make people think before they buy one.

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Environmental politics Science

Water for whom, or what…

July 7, 2006 – 8:39 am

One of those “only in America” stories – “Americans will spend $22bn (£11.9bn) on luxury bathrooms this year“. It is, says one designer, “a mini-living room now”. Except in most living rooms there’s not lots of water being used, water heated usually by non-renewable energy sources.

It fits rather neatly with another story from the Guardian today – a third of the world’s species of amphibians are threatened:

Fifty of the world’s leading conservation experts are calling for an urgent rescue mission to save frogs, newts and other amphibians from extinction. They believe fast action is needed to save the planet’s 5,743 amphibian species after research showing that 32.5% are threatened. Up to 122 amphibian species have become extinct since 1980.

Not a perfect equation, but less water, and money, on bathrooms, and more in natural environments, certainly couldn’t hurt.

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