Portfolios of the poor
on Nov 16, 2009 in development poverty As Muhammed Yunus found when investigating poverty, one of the key reasons that poor people are unable to lift themselves out of destitution is that they do not have access to credit. The banks simply do not trust the poor to be able to repay a loan,...

What we learned this week
on Nov 15, 2009 in miscellaneous Just one of the 177 republicans in the US House of Representatives voted in favour of the Obama administration’s healthcare bill. That one is Joseph Cao, a Vietnamese American from Louisiana. Well done sir. The rate of deforestation in Brazil...

2012 and the end of the world
on Nov 14, 2009 in media 2012 Who would you call if you thought the world was ending? For many people the answer appears to be NASA, who have set up a special web page reassuring people that the world is not going to end in 2012. Apparently the movie has caused a fair degree of p...

Reply from Lord Griffiths
on Nov 13, 2009 in equality A couple of weeks ago I wrote to Lord Griffiths about some comments he had made about inequality. I suggested that his view that inequality was a necessary side-effect to wealth creation wasn’t acceptable, and recommended that he read The Spiri...

The oil depletion dilemma
on Nov 13, 2009 in current affairs energy and fuels peak oil sustainability IEA The International Energy Agency released their latest World Energy Outlook this week. It’s a crucial report, as these are the ones that the US and UK governments, among others, base their energy projections around. Bizarrely, the IEA are the mo...

Tom Hodgkinson on making wealth history
on Nov 12, 2009 in websites “I”ve often said that far more sensible than a ‘make poverty history’ campaign would be a ‘make wealth history’ campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the few...

Time’s Up, by Keith Farnish
on Nov 12, 2009 in books sustainability keith farnish time's up Environmentalists are often accused of wanting to send us back to the dark ages, but in three years of researching and writing about green issues, I’ve only come across a handful of people who actually advocate a complete undoing of industrial...

Midway – message from the gyre
on Nov 11, 2009 in art conservation waste chris jordan midway photography One of my favourite photographers, Chris Jordan, has a new project: Midway – message from the gyre:...

Climate change and national security
on Nov 10, 2009 in climate change politics military To the dismay of environmentalists, it was Lord Stern’s review of the economics of climate change that really shook the British government into action. From which, presumably, we can only deduce that as far as the government is concerned the cl...

inoculating us against reality
on Nov 9, 2009 in consumerism corporate responsibility shopping advertising I saw an interesting juxtaposition of billboards on my way through the station forecourt this morning. The first was for the Prince of Wales’ rainforest project, Rainforest SOS, and right behind it was a billboard from the Brazilian tourist boa...