Bird photos

Prompted by some great shots posted on Picturepost I've been exploring Photonet. Found this amazing picture of bee-eater plus dragonfly. We heard and saw bee-eaters in Greece earlier this year. Too far away to see their colours but from this guide I guess they probably were, like in the picture, European Bee-eaters as they're most common in that area.

Another side of rubbish

These BBC pictures from the world of rubbish collectors, working at night in the city, got me thinking about the scale of the task and livelihoods and alternatives. Looks here like a job being professionally done and for some the focus of their whole working lives. To me it looks a bit of a thankless task but I'm glad it's being done. I wonder how those involved experience it, what ideas they have about managing waste and how they feed back those ideas? The 'some's recycled' I find chillingly low key compared with countries where there are more incentives to reduce and recycle waste. Professionalism surfaces in this area also elsewhere e.g. among the zabaleen in Cairo . Do we appreciate the job being done here enough?

Browsing for inspiration

I love this picture of a horse, called 'The elements' by Wojtek Kwiatkowski. Thanks to Sumptuous for the link to Picturepost that got me there. Some wonderful posts on both!

Sustainable tourism?

I attended a keynote presentation from David Crowther today in a workshop on sustainable tourism. He was talking about sustainability as better use of natural resources we have and social resonsibility as issues of distribution of benefits so people at large are happy. He seemed to be saying that this doesn't necessarily mean lowering level of economic activity but that there is a lot of evidence that economic development of a society reduces happiness of that society. So do we make changes on grounds of human happiness rather than environmental values or do both come together here? His focus was primarily on social responsibility I think, downplaying the environmental dimension. He made light of the challenge of better use of resources, claiming it was largely a technical issue (does that mean it's therefore a done deal?...not sure what to make of this). But the distribution of benefits he saw as a much harder problem to which he wasn't offering an answer. It was quite a provocative talk with some interesting models and I felt it to be more conceptual than practical. I asked a question about whose values and ethics were in evidence in his kind of sustainable tourism which led on to some interesting discussion. Some insightful comments from Frank Go that the kind of tourism being discussed was mainly a western model to which China was beginning to subscribe but India may choose a different road and it might be helpful to align with the Indian model. Generally quite thought provoking.

It was also the second time in two days that I heard reference to Lovelock's current position as at one extreme in terms of saying its already too late for sustainable development and our level of resource use is completely unsustainable. I heard indirectly that Jonathon Porritt thinks of a spectrum from Lovelock to Lomborg and his position shifts a little one way and another. Good to hear that somehow.

Out in the woods today.....golden, glorious and ever so well behaved!

Wildlife photos of this year

Good to see once again some of the pictures from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition that exhibits at the Natural History Museum.

More on "scientific truth".

Some nice summing up of the recent case against how Al Gore's 'an inconvenient truth' should be used in schools from Catherine Brahic, online environmental reporter for the New Scientist:

For my part, I would say that strictly speaking, Gore oversimplified certain points, made a few factual errors and, at times, chose the wrong poster child (Mount Kilimanjaro should have been replaced by any number of Alaskan or Andean glaciers, for instance). It's unfortunate, but it remains the most comprehensive popular documentary on climate change science I have seen.

Also interesting to see the extensive and diverse discussion in the comments that follow it.