Times Have Changed

Can you imagine Parkinson – or any other interviewer – following this line of questioning? I found it too uncomfortable to watch all the way through. Credit to Helen Mirren for staying sane. She later commented that Michael Parkinson was being a ‘fucking sexist old fart’. Truedat.

As for the douchebags below – they’ve been told by Steve Coogan.

Link Loving 17.02.11

• Rob Hopkins brings together entrepreneurship, social enterprise and sustainability. Hooray!
• More Transition joy with this short film about a Potato Festival in Stroud. Leicester did one too. I’m not kidding.
• Umair Haque welcomes you to the Age of Dilemma. Right on the money as always.
• The State of the World’s Forests reports that India and China are actually reforesting. China alone has contributed over 30,000km².
• Jeanette Winterson in a wonderful 5-minute interview.
• What is it with upstate New York politics and sex/nudity scandals? NY Times.
• Radio 1 presenter Scott Mills went to Uganda for a BBC3 program to look at that country’s attitude to gay issues. Good, honest interview.
• The Equality Trust launches a photo competition to illustrate the problems identified by the influential book The Spirit Level.
• David Roberts has a fantastic piece on Grist.org about the two prisms to look at climate change through – economics, and science. Prescient, powerful and right on.

The New Home Front

A new pamphlet, The New Home Front, seeks to find lessons in the UK WWII effort for today’s need for transformative social and economic change. Written by Andrew Simms (of nef fame) and Caroline Lucas MP, it finds many useful comparisons – and certainly shows how quickly change can happen, but it’s ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied.

In my eyes, there are three key differences;

1. There was an enemy. He was evil, he had a moustache, and his name was Hitler.
2. There was a war on – and everyone knew it. Everyone knew someone in the army, and very soon everyone knew someone who had died. The war experience was real every moment of every day – what you could buy, where you could go, what work you did, what was on the radio, who was famous, what politics was about. There was little escape from the reality of war.
3. The systemic goal changed. Rather than growing the economy, the primary goal between 1939-1945 was to defeat the Axis forces. This meant new priorities emerged, new decision-making processes, some things sped up – others slowed down. Rover’s factories only produced/repaired cars for the war effort and airplanes. The system re-organised in order to achieve the new goal.

When comparing those three to our situation –

1. We are the enemy. My consumption, my lifestyle, the economic/social systems in which I live are the enemy. It’s difficult to hate myself and my life all the time.
2. I only have to think about climate/poverty/all the other shit going down if I want to. *Oh look, the latest US series is on a box-set and there are cheap holidays in Slovenia this winter!*
3. The systemic goal has not changed.

Solitaire Townsend, my old boss at Futerra, used to talk about the look of incredulity her grandmother gave her when she compared climate change to WWII. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about”, she would say. I’m certainly not applying this to the New Home Front project – I wish it every success – but I want to be realistic about it’s limitations.

If this topic grabs you, this book by historian Paul Addison is very good.

“Cutting spending on low carbon technologies now would be like cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939.” Tim Yeo, Conservative MP

The Roots Of Egypt’s Pro-Democracy Movement

I’m finally reading Bruce Watson’s fantastic ‘Freedom Summer‘ – so this half hour piece from Al Jazeera was especially relevant. This human portrayal of the young people who from the April 6th Youth Movement – so instrumental in organising the protests – is educational and inspiring.

There are lots of evident lessons learnt from the great work of Gene Sharp, the nonviolence strategist, and Srdja Popovic – one of the leaders of Otpor, the youth movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

The keys to success;

• Unity
• Discipline
• Planning

h/t Eric Stoner

Victory!

Forest sell-off? Abandoned.

Mega-factory farms being built? Stopped.

New coal fired power plant? Scrapped.

All in one day. Don’t ever tell me campaigning doesn’t work.

Link Loving 16.02.11

• Jo Clarke at Otesha UK decides that morals come above prizes, and won’t be entering the Climate Week Awards (brought you by RBS).
• Christian Jarrett looks at the relevance of the Seven Deadly Sins today from a psychological perspective. (I have been trotting out the phrase, ‘today, the Seven Deadly Sins have become the Seven Virtues of Consumerism..’ for a little while.)
• This is pretty rare – an interview with a millionaire asking them if their money has made them happy. Insightful, depressing and hopeful all at the same time. “There’s a saying that buying a boat only makes you happy for 2 days – the day you buy it and the day you sell it – and you can apply this idea to lots of things.”
• Learn about spatial statistics. It’s interesting.
• Nick Pearce smacks down the ugly idea of ‘deficit denial’ once and for all. And he won the Clash of the Think Tanks (with my vote), so you should pay attention.
• Hanna Thomas explains feminism using Kate Nash’s words and what looks like cardboard.
• Penelope Trunk does it again. Funny, informative, and useful career advice as ever.
• Anna Rose has some more evidence for temperature rises down under – birds suffocating in the heat.
• Seth Godin reveals why theme parks make us queue for a ride even if the park is empty, or why a full restaurant is more fun than an empty one, even if you know the food is precisely the same.

The Future Of European Train Travel

I’m so excited to see Loco2 launch in Beta this week. My friend Jamie Andrews has been a passionate advocate for low-carbon, high-enjoyment travel since we met in 2008 on our adventure to the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland.

Loco2 allows you to book train tickets across Europe using their clean and clear map-based interface. Built on the idea that travelling to a summer rave on the Croatian coast is just so much more fun when you have an adventure through Italy, the Alps and France on your way there, I expect Loco2 to be one of the success stories of the new green economy within the next decade!

Empowering Green Innovators Stateside

Green For All has just launched a micro-grant fun to support their fellows doing some extraordinary work.

Can you watch this and not be inspired?

Mubarak #Fail

Cross-posted from Global Dashboard.

As campaigners start to chase down the billions that Mubarak took with him, many outsiders are trying to figure out how the Egyptian revolution came to be. During the heady three-week protests, cameras naturally focused on large crowds full of anger and hope. But were they missing something?

Creative, humorous protest.

Activists in Tahrir Square released fake press releases to major news outlets, to give them a voice in the rolling coverage. (They didn’t have highly placed Washington lobbyists of course, unlike the regime.) Before the protests started, viral jokes about Mubarak were spreading through social networks and eliminating the problem that Steven Pinker calls ‘individual knowledge vs mutual knowledge‘.

This subversive protest can’t have been too much of a secret though – even CNN had a comment.

h/t Eric Stoner

And for the 80’s fans amongst you – this classic by Chicago get’s a thematic overhaul.

President Mubarak Apologizes Through Song – watch more funny videos

Financial System #Fail

As a campaigning community, we really screwed up in 2007-10. We should have been all over the credit crisis, the financial bail-outs, the golden goodbyes to people like Fred Goodwin, the Ponzi schemes. Some tried – People & Planet and their RBS/climate investment campaign and FairPensions, but for too many of us, we simply didn’t engage because we thought we didn’t understand the issue.

Enough of that.

This is a campaign by Positive Money, the monetary reform campaign group. It argues that there is one spending cut that makes a lot of sense – the benefits we give to bankers, or otherwise described as, the power banks currently have to create money. For free.