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This week some unconnected people made brief, uncomfortable pronouncements on the state of the world that brought to mind the gaping inequalities that exist between the first and third worlds.

In Paris, amid the hubbub of a talking-head fest on sustainable agriculture, a UN policy wonk called Asad Naqvi warned that some people in the developed world “may have to sacrifice their quality of life and their economic growth to live inside the limits of the earth.”

At around the same time, about 4,000 miles south as the migrating bird flies in Kampala, Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni said his country cannot preserve the environment when it is still poor.

Museveni was talking about handing over a piece of forest land known to be a crucial hub of biodiversity for sugar production, but he could have been talking about his country’s new-found oil wealth, or the potential of its untapped gold and copper reserves.

Museveni spoke of Uganda entering a ‘revolutionary’ phase as it moves towards industrialisation, and senses his place in history as the man who moved the country out of the third world, perhaps raising the living standards of its 34 million people – some 12 million of whom live in poverty – along the way.

Back in Paris another UN suit, the apocalyptic Ulrich Hoffman, warned that many ‘critical benchmarks’ on climate change have been passed, and said a global temperature rise of three-to-five degrees Celsius is now inevitable, resulting in war, desertification and mass migration.

Museveni and his countrymen won’t heed Hoffman’s warning. A Western standard of living is within reach, and who would deny them this? Perhaps a more pertinent question is whether the developed world will act on Naqvi’s words.

The flames are dying down and the media hysteria is switching over from apocalyptic prophecies of dark hordes of ferral youths destroying the fabric of society to tired cliches from politicians declaring their terror and disgust at recent events and promising to crack down on anyone and everyone they can find in possession of a hoodie or some nicked Tesco’s own brand vodka. The local gossip, which for about two days was running rife across South East London has also died down to a lazier, less tense dissection of events over pints and cups of tea; the hyper-aware proliferation of imagined mobs marching on largely unscathed areas of the metropolis suddenly seen as the implausible excitability of people who, for the most part, wandered half dazed and half excited through the whole event.

So far, in the aftermath, I’ve heard numerous calls for harsher sentencing, national service, plastic bullets, tear gas and even a few knowing nods towards American style policing which, apparently, carries a more fitting level of brutality with it as far as some people’s perceptions go. The facts of their staggering prison population, generally culled from the poorest and blackest in their society hardly seems to merit a mention in the tumult of retributive outrage. Fortunately, however, there’s a standing divide between what I’ve heard from Londoners themselves and what’s been heaped on us from the outside world by way of analysis and judgement. Safe within the limits of the M25 reactions and realities have erred towards the pragmatic and away from the elated condemnation of politicians and journos with a nice moral line of their own to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

On the 25th and 26th of March we’ll be exhibiting at the UK Aware show, which aims to show off the best of renewable, sustainable and eco products and ideas to anyone with an interesting in living just that little bit greener. So being the warm and welcoming types that we are you can get discounted tickets from the UK Aware website using the imaginative code – KARAVANECO. That’ll save you £2 (making entry £5) and we hope you’ll free to share it with anyone and everyone. Hope to see you there.

Excellent London bike blog Cyclists in the City has been trawling Transport for London data so you don’t have to, and has extrapolated that, if current trends of car and bicycle usage continue, more people will be cross the Thames into Westminster and the City of London on two wheels every day than on four.

Here’s the article.

A simple point, well made – if motorists are no longer the majority users of a bridge, why are the bridges still designed around them? The cyclists particularly bemoan the forthcoming redesign of Blackfriars Bridge, where a car lane will be reinstated despite traffic running perfectly adequately during its two-year absence.

Image by Rev Stan.

The Economist has a section dedicated to feeding the world, taking as its peg that upcoming population milestone mentioned here recently. It’s worth a read, and some of it’s here.

Included is ‘A Prospect of Plenty,’ which suggests Europe’s hard line on genetically-modified crops may lead to the continent “marginalising” itself. And who wants to be marginalised, it seems to say, with the connotations of outsider-dom. Better to join the cool kids, they’ve got all the good biscuits and burgers.

The article’s already out of date – the EU has relaxed its rules for the amount of GM material allowed in imported feed wheat; that is, low-grade grain used to feed the animals used to feed the humans. It’s not a mammoth shift – couldn’t be much more marginal, in fact, with an increase from absolutely nothing to just 0.1% – but it is symptomatic of a wider narrative shift when it comes to GM food. The EU is also delegating the right to regulate GM foods to individual nations, and some are liable to stand at the farmgates with open arms.

Good news for Monsanto, Sygenta and the other ‘agri-business’ firms with their patented, proprietary seeds, and their sponsor the U.S. government. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office, U.S. policy on GM foods is relentlessly consistent.

The Economist article suggests GM could be the solution to feeding the 7 billion. Groups like Friends of the Earth are working hard to convince otherwise. Lurking on the edges of this battle for your breakfast is the burgeoning demand for crops to use as fuel. If we shouldn’t eat modified foods, can we at least use them to heat our homes? It’s as polarising an issue as the environmental movement knows, and it’s coming soon to a field near you.

The quietly-frenzied search for new sources of energy are taking humanity to new and unusual places – Norwegian fjords, Canadian tar sands, sub-Saharan deserts – as slowly, slowly, the money men tire of the risks riddled through all the familiar hydrocarbon-rich places. It’s hard to turn a buck when ‘local difficulties’ mean you have to abandon your employees in the desert temporarily scale-down operations.

Which is why, once more, holes are being dug in England’s northeast. Newcastle might have a certain reputation for, oh, bawdiness, but give me Saturday night in the Bigg Market over Tripoli or Baghdad. Rwanda has a whole other reputation, but that benighted land, purposefully treading a path to recovery, shares common underground with our friends in the north.

In both places there’s drilling for energy, but happily with no danger of catastrophic spillage into the Tyne or Lake Kivu.

Geothermal energy is said to be fully renewable. Those Icelandic geezers have been spouting off for a while, and it’s the same thing, buried deep. Hot water, draw through granite by geological faults, 2,000 feet down, powering homes for Geordies and Tutsis alike.

Tapping geothermal is relatively cheap, when put against the logistical horror of erecting offshore wind turbine arrays, the cost of building a new generation of nuclear power stations and disposing the subsequent waste, or plunging ever deeper into the Gulf of Mexico or the wilds of northern Canada or Russia.

Like the rest of the ‘solutions’ to the problems of powering the world, geothermal alone isn’t an answer, but the Newcastle borehole might supply the needs of a nearby shopping centre and could conceivably take St. James’ Park – right next door – off grid.

Haway the lads, as they say in Kigali.

Avonmouth Docks, which supplanted Bristol’s city-centre port as the west of England’s prime trade gateway in 1877, has applied for permission to double to six the number of wind turbines on site. The three turbines already in place provide 75% of the port’s power, and provide a dramatic sight for the relentless M5 traffic across the nearby Avonmouth Bridge.

A further three turbines will enable the port to not only cover its power needs in full, at least until its new deepwater container site comes on stream, but also to start selling electricity to the grid.

The turbines also provide a neat counterpoint to nearby Hinkley Point, the west’s nuclear power station, where despite local objections two new generating units look likely to be built on the Somerset coast. Not long ago, locals also organised against a proposed 12-turbine wind farm adjacent to the nuclear site. That idea was – shamefully – blocked by the local council, which expressed fears over what would happen were a turbine blade to detach and hit “something or somebody.” Now, EdF are ripping up 400 acres of land where the wind farm would have been positioned as preparatory work for the new generating units.

Central government has also dismissed proposals to tap the Severn Estuary’s legendary tidal power with a Somerset-South Wales barrage.

The southwest, an area known for its progressive thinking on issues like permaculture and environmentalism, needs to reassess its relationship with low-impact power generation. The irony is that it is the shipping industry, one of the world’s biggest polluters, showing the way forward.

The glory of a London unobstructed by effluent. This was the vision of the future that flashed into my imagination as I stood above the sewerage outlet on the Thames…our metropolis free from noxious odours affronting the nostrils, from unsightly deposits, form the miasma cloud of gases hanging above the rooftops. I grew lightheaded at this dazzling prospect. – from Sweet Thames, by Matthew Sweet.

It’s been more than 150 years since London’s cholera epidemic, and since John Snow identified the importance of contaminated water. But now, still, as little as 2mm of rainfall can lead to the city’s Victorian sewers to fill up and then – as there is nowhere else for the excess flows to go – raw waste spills into the river from 57 combined sewer overflows, designed as an alternative to sewage backing up into homes and streets.

Thames Water’s plan to deal with this – a hugely-ambitious 25-mile tunnel crossing the capital from from west to east, broadly following the course of the Thames some 75 metres below the river bed – has caused a great old stink in the fragrant surrounds of Barnes and Putney. Residents are opposed to a bore-shaft being drilled in Barn Elms, an open space that is home to playing fields and the excellent London Wetland Centre. Around 5,000 locals have signed a petition against the proposal, and local MP and noted environmentalist Zac Goldsmith is onside and recently took local plaudits for gaining an extension to Thames Water’s consultation process. However, Goldsmith is also making conciliatory noises towards the project and is making suggestions about how to square this circle.

No doubt the shaft construction would disrupt the tranquility of this green corner of southwest London, as it would at the more than 100 other shortlisted construction sites from Chiswick to Creekmouth, but Thames Water estimates the 39 million tons a year of untreated sewage that presently finds it way into the river could rise to 70 million tons in ten years unless this problem is tackled, and maintains this tunnel is the only way forward.

We’re a long way from cesspits and the Thames being essentially an open sewer, but cholera is still a major issue in the developing world and it’s only 10 years since an outbreak in South Africa. Joseph Bazalgette, the great designer of London’s immense Victorian sewer system, said its purpose was “diverting the cause of the mischief to a locality where it can do no mischief.” This stands today. The Thames Tunnel plan must be supported.

The rise and rise of energy saving light-bulbs continues a-pace pretty much everywhere, with Eco shops like ours being followed by corporate megaliths in promoting them as the regular choice as opposed to a special purchase but the process of evolution with new technologies like this moves far faster than either the individual or the market can.

The next generation of LED bulbs, despite beating the competition on quality, efficiency and pretty much everything else are still stuck very much at the stage of being a novelty rather than a necessity with the cost of fitting them throughout prohibitively high for most people. The stage where they can be looked upon as easy a purchase as the current energy saving crop still seems a long way off as the lack of a mass market keeps manufacturing systems low level and costs high, an efficiency belying quirk which blights all new technologies – especially green ones.

Anyway, we’re continuing to search for the best makers and suppliers of LED lighting and either as trail-blazers again or as just another outlet in getting them out there we’ll be adding them to our range sooner rather than later – and obviously we’ll let you know when we do.

Every day, in every way we’re getting closer to a wholesale sell off of English forests – and it is just England given that both Wales and Scotland have wisely opted not to cut down on public forestry holdings. So why the sale? Well, there’s a bit of a struggle on answering that one with even Tory Environment Secretary – Caroline Spelman – saying that they had yet to decide on a reason in a telling moment of confusion on Channel 4 news. It’d certainly be a stretch to claim that this is an expense saving operation given the limited profits of the sell-off and the minimal cost to value ratio of maintaining the woodlands under public ownership but no doubt some people will manage to profit it from it should they gain private ownership. No doubt to the detriment of both the forests and the public right to use them, a fact realised across all parties as a general shrug of confusion continues to be thrown up around the blinkered determination of the government to get it done.