Since I posted on sustainable suburbs a couple of months ago, I’ve been alerted to the Forum for the Future’s seminar on the same subject. The main themes were about density and connectivity. The seminar report is a little bald; James Goodman’s blog post gives a more rounded flavour.
I’ve been away for a week, with limited online access, and while away happened into Bristol’s Architecture Centre, which was hosting a small but rich exhibition on ‘Suburban Futures’, and almost completely unadvertised, at least from the street. 86% of the population of England live in suburbs, so making them sustainable is a valuable project. [...]
There’s another kerfuffle about getting rid of plastic bags, since one of the government’s waste advisers has suggested that government plans to ban plastic bags, or charge for them, are a diversion from more pressing environmental issues. While it is true that plastic bags represent only a small amount of waste, or of oil use, [...]
I’ve meant to write before about the Transition Initiative, which is in my view one of the most radical things happening in the UK at the moment - radical because it is local and community-oriented, radical because it is a thought-through response to both impending energy shortage and climate change. (If only the government was [...]
Just as we’ve got used to the idea that the moment of ‘peak oil‘ might be upon us (at the moment 2005 is the year of highest oil production) new figures suggest that the figures for world coal reserves might have been inflated. The widely held view that we are sitting on hundreds of years’ [...]
This will mostly be familiar material to anyone who’s been following the arguments about sustainable economics, or is familiar with the critiques of the limitations of neo-classical economics, but nonetheless there’s a useful seven-point summary (really six) at the WorldWatch Institute site. Two points to highlight are the emerging potential of the commons as a [...]
One of the most consistently interesting thinkers online about the long-term future of industrial society is John Michael Greer, who takes an impressively long-term and wide ranging (if also pessimistic) view of civilizational change. In his recent post Back Up The Rabbit Hole, he speculated on the way in which the ‘ultra cheap energy’ [...]
The most interesting new word I’ve heard so far this year is ‘solastalgia‘, buried in some notes that Matt Jones made at a recent lecture by Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. It was coined five years ago by an Australian, Glenn Albrecht, and seeks to capture notions of place-related distress. Albrecht was quoted in an Australian [...]
I’ve just noticed an interesting article on the recently re-launched ‘History & Policy‘ site which suggests - by looking at the historical evidence - that our chances of reducing energy consumption without sanctions or limits being imposed is, frankly, wishful thinking. Even though we have in the past achieved the energy efficiency gains needed now [...]
The first post I wrote on this blog, in April this year, was on the arts and technology consultancy Proboscis and their Snout collaboration, designed to help communities develop “environmental authoring” tools to monitor their local environments. Now Nokia has trialed a phone which would do some of the same things, including some environment monitoring, [...]
