Can we afford policies to address child poverty? First, Yes. Second, Can we afford not to?
Food is our most fundamental form of consumption
Sustainability is a way of thinking and a way of being. It’s a way of embodiment, it has nothing to do with study, it has nothing to do with opinion, it has to be with way that you be, that you are.
The extravagant users…if they are getting the same utility as the lowest users – having the same sorts of experiences, then why do they need all these things?
I realised that there’s not much you can do to improve things (in urban planning) if you don’t address transport…it affects many of the public spaces between the buildings, it impacts on the energy we have to use to get from place to place, and it also has a big impact on household expenses.
The 95% certainty is itself problematic, because it is a very high level summary of lots of different details…if you pick the science apart there are some areas where we are much more certain than that, and there are other areas where there is a lot uncertainty…the basics of how the greenhouse effect works and […]
Pillaging the planet for every last ounce of resource in the hope that we can continue to live our lives exactly as we’ve always done is not sustainable growth.
An intuition of what is a kilowatt hour..it’s a fundamental thing about our society that you need to know now. And people’s intuition tends to be stunningly bad.
To respect the others’ point of view and try to understand it. This applies whether it’s warring nations, difficult negotiations in business or designing something for other people to use.
Once you accept that government can decide without due legal process which of its citizens, or perhaps worse still, other countries’ citizens, can be put to death, because you judge them to be a threat, then we are in a very dangerous situation.
Far too often problems are individualised, young people are told that to succeed they have to do so at the expense of others – “to get ahead you have to stomp on others” (yet) we know we are far stronger when we act collectively
Despite our increasing IQ, the bombardment of conflicting information combined with a paucity of training in critical thought renders us bewildered cynics, unable to manage our increasing complex world
You can’t always spot a good farm from the over the fence – a tidy farm is not always a good farm – sustainable farming is more about decision making, about seeing the benefits of a triple bottom line approach
We have a target gazetted to reduce emissions by half by 2050, and if you look at projections, they’re way up, double by 2050. How do you join those things up? There’s currently no government statements around that. The target was put in place in 2011 but since then it’s hard to find any mention […]
The fossil fuel era is a hang-over from the hunter-gatherer era. Finding fossil fuels is something that is a bit speculative – a form of hunting, and digging it up is a form of gathering. We’ve moved away from that, most of us, 10-12,000 years ago in relation to food, we just haven’t done […]
As a society we are currently at 14% energy efficiency – most of what we use we waste. This is the major barrier to development.
Environmental/economic tension is rising and this overlaps with questions of social equity – who is benefiting from extraction and who is suffering ills from that?
