We’re Equals Aren’t We?

Today is International Women’s Day.

Link Loving 07.03.11

• Adam Curtis with a great piece (and documentary from 1982) on why the West did not see the Middle East democracy movements coming.
• Talk about displacement – South African farmers are being invited by the Georgian government to move to the Caucuses and settle.
• You will never look at ducks in the same way again.
• Bill McKibben’s quote of the year. ‘I’m not a communist. I’m a Methodist.’ Great piece in the WashPo undermining the crazyness of Glenn Beck.
• Frank Luntz reveals what he thinks are the 11 phrases for 2011. If you haven’t read his book ‘Words That Work‘, I can highly recommend it.
• Richard Black on our sixth mass extinction. Ah.
• For USA readers, Summer of Solutions is now opening applications.
• Can someone make a London tube version of this please? This is so beautiful! (Make sure to wait when the lines cross.)
• Jonathon Porritt reveals the attack on Sustainable Development by the government. Foolishness defined.
• Hanna Thomas takes down a douche-bag you won’t have heard of, but will soon dislike, Ezra Levant.

What Is It To Be Young?

This Is How You Talk About Population

Oh right. That thing. That no environmentalists want to talk about. (Except old white men who are losing hope.)

Taking the point that what matters is resource use, not total numbers – and the inherent global justice issues – to ignore population completely is as bad as arguing that we don’t need to worry about energy because there’s plenty of fossil fuels around. Population as an issue will continue to come up, so we may as well have a sensible, well-framed, suitable argument to make.

So – this is how you talk about population.

• Real people and real voices – not the scientific/mathematician speaking about numbers.
• Commitment to health – maternal and infant health particularly.
• Woman’s right to choose.
• Majority world/Global South voices front and center demanding access to contraceptives.
• Lots of cute babies.

A Million For A Billion run by the Population Institute.

Link Loving 06.03.11

• Tom Baker discovers where War on Want came from. A wonderful story.
• A manifesto for women facing an all-boys-club workplace. Fantastic. (via the ever-wonderful @hannathomas)
• This project wants 10 young people to go into the jungle for five months and help save orangutans and replant forest. The voice-over man sounds terrifying.
• Natalya Sverjensky finds a truly remarkable headline.
• Lesbians That Look Like Justin Bieber.
• The language in this Financial Times article belongs to 1910 not 2010. Scramble for Africa relived.
• Nicholas Milton reports from the first debates George Monbiot is having with the public up and down the country.
• Awesome rap from Wisconsin that frames that dispute very nicely.
• Fredrik Stanton on what negotiation lessons can we learn from the Congress of Vienna, 1815. I knew my history degree would come in useful one day.

A Sequence Of Lines Consecutively Traced By Five Hundred Individuals

This has much to tell us about how ideas spread and mutate I think…

h/t Ze Frank

Your Dream Job

I may be partial to reading the Zen Habits blog once in a while, and some of Leo’s posts do strike a real chord. A recent post on creating a job you love describes very much what I’m doing – and I wanted to share this section that felt particularly true to me. ‘Getting good’ at making change is partly what this blog is about – an opportunity for me to learn, and to share that learning. Thank you for being part of that.

Get Good

“If you want to make a living at what you love doing, you need to get good at it. Some of you are already good at what you love — you’ve been doing it for years, either on the job or as a personal passion. Others are just starting out, but that’s not a barrier — you just have to put in more time and effort.

I was already an experienced writer when I started Zen Habits (I’d been a journalist for about 18 years), but I didn’t know a thing about blogging or teaching people to simplify, improve their lives, change their habits. I knew about how to do that myself (though I was still learning) but I’d never taught anyone. So I learned: I read other blogs, read personal development sites and books, read blogs about blogging, studied the best, figured out what they did that made them successful. It takes a lot of study, a lot of analysis, a lot of trying and doing and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

I made a ton of mistakes. That’s a good thing. You can’t get good at anything without making a huge amount of mistakes. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes — they’re stepping stones to greatness. Try everything, see what works, see what doesn’t. Stick with the things that work.

Put in a lot of hours of practice and doing. The more, the better. Reflect on what you’ve done and what you’ve learned, write it down. Put it in your blog so you can help others learn, but more importantly you’ll force yourself to learn from your own experience.

Get good. Others will gladly pay you if you’re good.”

Read the full post here.

Link Loving 05.03.11

• A beautiful short visual story about a son, his father, and the sky. By Chris Fairless.
• Kirsty Schneeberger tells the story of how young people created UN policy in Cancun.
• The Scottish Government’s review of behaviour change initiatives concludes that they should intervene in the social and
  material contexts rather than focus on individual choices.
• George Lucas wants to change the way we learn.
• Two radically different ideas of what the world will be like in 2050 – one from HSBC, the other from Citigroup.
• Warren Buffet thinks that America’s best days are still ahead. Always the optimist…
• Two years on, and Micah Sifry thinks that the White House ‘Recovery.org’ site still stucks at public engagement.
• UN Climate Negotations release their very own ‘progress tracker’ site. Interesting.
• Conspiracy theorists look away now – Google patents face-recognition software.
• Using chewing gum to vote which corporation sucks more. Genius. The Consumerist.

3D Without The Glasses

This is insanely cool.

h/t Ze Frank

High Speed Rail In The UK

“Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.”

That was the catchphrase at Cancun at the end of last year, and I wonder whether the same principle doesn’t apply to High Speed Rail in the UK.

Bright Green has two great articles giving you the pros and the cons, and for me – it has to be something I get behind. High Speed (HS2) is perhaps one of the wedge issues between those who envisage a hunker-down/local economy/apocalypse scenario, and the (naively?) hopeful/positive globalisation/renaissance vision held by others. I can’t put myself entirely on either side – but with the information I have, I’m convinced I want to see HS2 as part of a sustainable future.

Some brief rebuttals to the cons piece;

• Carbon emissions may not be wildly below flying – but that does not take into account where the emissions are released. Aviation emissions have up to three times the climate impacts as ground level emissions.
• These measures assume the current electricity mix remains the same. That obviously cannot be allowed to happen. As we green Britain’s energy supply, we green HS2.

I have real concerns around the justice/planning issues, and there is a compelling case to focus first on the more urgent capacity issues. But to that challenge I would say – do both!