Recycling: Reducing waste or waste of time?
Martin Earnshaw | 12 October 2007 From hand-me-down clothes to the reuse of scrap metal, people have recycled throughout history. However, it was usually poverty that forced people to ‘make do and mend’. It is a sign of our affluence that we can now buy and throw things away without worry. We can afford to replace our clothes rather than mend them and ensure that we have good quality food at all times (a by-product of which is we can...
ESSAY: The political engagement’s off
Austin Williams | October 2007 The e:petitions web page was launched on Number 10’s website in November 2006 ‘enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.’ Presumably, someone thought that it would be a good wheeze to minimise the photo opportunities for aggreived members of the public to present a paper petition to the Prime Minister in full view of the waiting media. Oh well, back to the drawing...
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them
‘Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them’, by Philippe Legrain; Abacus, 2007. 384pp Reviewed By Steve Nash | September 2007 This is a thought-provoking and timely book. Thought-provoking in that it makes you think through your ideas about migration; timely in that it goes to the heart of society’s feelings about change and the modern world. The issue of immigration is never far from the news and raising the question of open...
ESSAY: Eating the greens
Austin Williams | July 2007 Tony Juniper, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth told a Local Groups conference in September 2006 that ‘environmentalists have had a reputation for being against change’. He went on to say that ‘this reputation, whether accurate or not, has enabled some of those who we seek to influence, to present us as a backward looking and conservative force.’ God forbid. But Friends of the Earth aside, the...
Something Stinks
Austin Williams | 28 February 2007 I’ve just finished reading Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” about London’s 19th C cholera epidemics. Until Dr John Snow located the source of the problem in the water supply, everyone believed that the killer disease has something to do with the all-pervasive stench of the city; the ‘miasma’ permeating the over-crowded slums of the city. Using painstaking empirical data backed up by meticulous...
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
Peter Smith | 15 February 2007 Did you give flowers on Valentine’s Day? Planning to give Easter eggs next month? (Maybe eat them if not give them?) Be warned: celebrations and vacations are increasingly the environmental campaigner’s hook to lecture us on our bad habits. Noting that cut flowers for Valentine’s bouquets are increasingly imported to the UK, green campaigners have voiced concern over ‘flower miles’ applying the...
Building Esteem or Housing Discontent
Dave Clements | 27 February 2007 The government’s obsession with child poverty has always struck me as a little strange. I don’t mean to pretend it doesn’t exist. But why child poverty? Why not address poverty itself? Children are only poor because their parents are poor surely, not because they are poor parents. Perhaps by foregrounding the vulnerable child, awkward questions about how people can be so poor today in an otherwise more...
In the dark about energy policy
Alastair Donald | 14 January 2007 The Times recently carried news of an ‘innovative’ plan to save energy and beat global warming. Apparently trials in Exeter suggest that removing lights and illuminated signage, and dimming thousands of streetlamps throughout Devon will be a useful way to cut carbon emissions and beat global warming. The manner in which city lights are viewed has changed over time, and offers some interesting...
Environmental Impact Assessments: Guidance Documents
Alastair Donald | 10 January 2007 Future Cities Project respond to DCLG’s consultation paper proposals from two publications on the subject of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) This paper responds to two publications: (i) proposed amendments to existing Circular 2/99 on EIA, and (ii) new draft EIA procedural and good practice guidance to replace the current publication “EIA Guide to Procedures”. The main changes...
Rod Eddington’s unedifying proposals
Austin Williams | 16 December 2006 Rod Eddington’s transport study is the latest in the long line of Treasury-driven policy initiatives designed to counter the lack of political certainty in government circles. While ministers are noticeable by their absence in real transport debates, refusing to discuss any clear initiative for fear that it might turn around and bite them on the bumper, it is much easier to have a third party do it...
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