Could community-think help create a green design for life?

“Libraries gave us power”. So sang the post-Richey Manic Street Preachers on “A Design for Life“, a celebration of the local lending facility among other things. Libraries are a brilliant idea. Based mostly on trust, they give free access to a huge range of books, slightly out-of-date CDs and free Internet access. I got my taste for their bookish delights when I borrowed Glenn Hoddle’s first two — count ‘em — autoboigraphies when I was a young efreak (he apparently had enough material for two even before he decided that disabled people had it coming).

Hands up if you have a Nobel...

The genius of libraries drifted into my head during recent lectures on my LEnTIL (Leaders of Environmental Treehugging in London) course about how you harness the strength of community in tackling environmental problems (see previous blog). Such an approach, made famous by the recent Nobel Prize winner and professional old woman Elinor Ostrom, looks beyond the normal reliance on laws (stop polluting or we will chop your hands off) and markets (bankers making pots of money while helping clean up). Ostrum’s approach is for communities to make their own rules to tackle a particular problem, especially those of common ownership.

Ostrum said a few factors were crucial in ensuring such community-centred systems work: 1. You need a stable community which has a shared long-term vision for what you can achieve (on a wider scale this has implications for immigration, see Martin Wolf’s article this week in the FT) 2. System has to be cheap for users and those running it.

 

Laying tarmac, Babycham and how to save the world

I used to lay tarmac. When I say “used to”, I mean for a few hours of my life, a friend and I earned some honest money helping some bloke with a van tarmac people’s drives on a road in Kenilworth. This one short afternoon of proper labour was memorable for two reasons:

Kenilworth: Better than Warwick

1. My friend, whose job was to roll the tarmac flat, was wearing a pair of Nike trainers and not completely flat shoes (as you may guess, we had no idea what we were doing). As a result, the Nike swoosh was imprinted thousands of times on every drive we covered.

2. Getting people to pay through the nose to tarmac their driveway is easy. All you have to do is convince one person on a street to do it, then the entire neighbourhood is begging you to smooth over their now very-shabby-looking-in-comparison parking spaces.

So how can you harness such suburban petty jealousy when you are trying to convince people to live greener lifestyles? Kate Mackenzie, who blogs about energy for the FT, highlights a recent

 

How do you halt the population boom?

“How would you deal with the consequences of an ageing population?” asked my A-level General Studies exam, many summers ago (when they were still cold). While most of us scribbled furiously about the economic burden on younger workers, lifting the retirement age and how nice our gran was, a friend of mine wrote six words, put down his pen and walked out: “A selective cull of the elderly.”

Unsurprisingly, my friend failed, but his succinct response popped into my head recently as fellow students on the “Leaders of Environmental Treehugging in London (LEnTIL)” course at Empire of the Solar Panels College were debating population control.

Pol Pot or saviour of humanity?

As you may know, the world population is set to increase to around 9 billion by 2050. Rather annoyingly, a large lump of these new arrivals will probably want food, heating and access to Cable TV. As we are already pretty stretched for resources and scrambling to cut carbon, this is bad news. So what to do?

Do you stop producing so much food, a move that will definitely discourage population growth but may also encourage wars? Do you encourage people to start smoking, in the hope they will die younger? Do you introduce population control, a la China, a country where you cannot vote, criticise the government or report freely?

An alternative was proposed by Jonathan Porritt earlier this year, in an article that generated predictable hysteria

 

Stuck in Trafigura — Twitter and the toxic waste scandal

Not a day goes by without some person who writes in fewer than 140 characters claiming, often without proper punctuation, that he has changed the world. Twitter beats mainstream media to break earthquake news. Twitter helps Iran move towards democracy. Twitter helps cure RSI by cutting keyboard minutes (I made that one up). Now Twitter has helped save freedom of speech in the UK from an onslaught from the legal profession. Not bad for a service that also breaks news such as someone I have never met has just had a quite nice bus ride to Beaconsfield…

What's the Italian for polluter pays?

This latest fuss is about an appalling pollution case. In 2006, an oil trading company called Trafigura bought a load of very cheap oil, but could not work out how to get rid of the toxic waste from it (perhaps why it was very cheap). They tried to dump it in Holland, but were rebuffed by some tulip-loving Korfballers. Then some bright spark chose to dump it in that bastion of environmental regulation, the Ivory Coast. Apparently, and this is too good to be true, some bloke called “Tommy” said “No problemo, bung us a few quid and we will clean it up” despite having no expertise, equipment or idea (see brilliant Guardian report from earlier this year and other more recent reports with leaked documents/emails).

Perhaps not trusting the Ivorian legal system, a group of 30,000 people whose health has suffered because of the dumping are bringing a class action suit in London against Trafigura. At the same time, Trafigura have hired the most

 

London to ban cars on hot days — sound familiar?

Red Boris, white mop

Boris Johnson, mayor of London and congenital clown, held a wonderful press conference in Beijing during last year’s Olympics. Much press attention was focused on the albino-haired Tory and whether he would embarrass Britain when he was handed the Olympic flag on behalf of London (efreak’s mother was very angry he did not do up his jacket.) London, of course, will host the games in 2012. Despite an aggressive grilling from Fleet Street’s finest-on-tour during the conference, Bozza performed wonderfully well for 60 minutes, avoiding controversy, gaffes and charming the hacks. Then this happened (this is my best recall):

Boris: OK folks, I think we have sucked this lemon pretty dry. Last question: Yes, Andrew…

Andrew “almost brought down the BBC” Gilligan: If there was one thing you could do differently from the Chinese [who had received lots of criticism for various authoritarian actions], what would it be?

Boris: [awkward pause]. This is a nightmare. If I say nothing, then you will all scream ‘whitewash’. And if I single something out