The Great Glasshouse

It wasn't the brightest of days for our visit to the National Botanic Garden of Wales last Monday but we were passing and it was still very worthwhile. Norman Foster's 'raindrop' , the largest single span glasshouse in Europe, was impressive in its design, the interior design of 'the Great Glasshouse' was done by Gustafson Porter. Filled with mediterranean plants, on a cool rainy day it was a lovely place to be.

The cranes are back

Interesting to hear on Springwatch that wild cranes are back in Britain. There are recent pictures of them at Horsey in Norfolk on the Birdguides site. I've not known them here in my lifetime so think it'd be exciting if they did start to survive here once more. I wonder what might today be in their niche though. Is this trying to turn the clock back? Restoration or conservation?

Your majesty, please save us from ourselves

Monbiot's on form - with a letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asking him to ignore our Prime Minister's request to increase oil production. He does point out a lot of contradictions and I'd be interested to see responses to this letter.

Environmental responsibility

We're in the process of developing a new course on Environmental Responsibility for next year, drawing out aspects of ethics, policy and action. Interesting how many different meanings are found in this term which I suppose is hardly surprising as there' s a large literature around different meanings of the constituent concepts of environment and responsibility. Interesting for example that we can be perceived to be responsible and irresponsible at the same time and that one person's expression of environment will be nearly all about biophysical factors whereas in another's biophysical barely features. For me there's often some big starting assumptions in evidence about what we can be responsible for and about the relationship between individual and collective responsibility...and whether legal or moral responsibility is in mind. Interesting paper from Alexander Dahlsrud who analysed 37 definitions of corporate social responsibility and drew out five dimensions: environmental, social, economic, stakeholder and voluntariness.

Even in Bedfordshire

...can hoopoes be seen...and a couple of red-footed falcons...allegedly. Nice pics from Steve Blain.

Making the connections

Interesting comment from Jonathon Porritt who was taking stock of how our sustainability and environment agenda has changed over the past year:

So, food security is back on the political agenda. Climate change is omni-present. Peak Oil is rising. The credit crunch is the new player on the block. Resource wars are looming. Rainforest destruction just won’t go away. Species loss is as bad as ever, but no one cares – for now. Water shortages are chronic.
But much, much more worrying are the linkages between all these notionally “separate” phenomena. The synergies, feedback loops, interdependencies. At long last, people are starting to make the connections – and are even beginning to link all those separate symptoms back to their root cause: today’s literally insane notion of getting richer by trashing the planet and screwing the poor.

Human behaviour and climate change

Phil Downing, Head of Environmental Research at Ipsos Mori, gave a seminar yesterday at the OU which I attended. It was part of a short series we've held over the past couple of months to explore what systems ideas have contributed to the discourse on climate change. Phil and his colleagues' work on public attitudes to climate change was of interest to us in terms of trying to understand multiple perspectives on our various systems of interest in the context of climate change. Two points he made that I found interesting from a systems point of view. One was 'rebound effect' - where people save money on say saving energy and then spend it on a flight to New York or a high energy using plasma TV. This is an example of an unintended consequence of an intervention. Reinforces for me that human behaviour isn't straight forward and can't be simply 'controlled'. The other point of interest was his mention of 'cognitive polyphasia' - where we can hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. There's something illustrated there about ideas not being independent of contexts and the dynamics of our thinking and beliefs. Does make me wonder about interviews that aim to find out what people think though.