Green Futures Articles

At this year’s annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), researchers came up with some startling stats on what we are doing to our world.

• Ice now covers 15% less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago. The Arctic permafrost is melting in places -which could aggravate the greenhouse effect by allowing the release of huge amounts of carbon hitherto locked up in the frozen soil.
• Ice is vanishing from Africa. Its highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, has lost 82% of its ice cap since 1912.
• Surveys from space reveal that half of the earth’s land area has been transformed by human activity. The breakdown shows that the grazing of livestock represents by far the most widespread use (26%), followed by ploughing for farmland (11%) and forestry plantations (11%), with 2-3% taken over by housing, industry and roads.

The AAAS’s Atlas of Population and Environment is published by the University of California Press. AAAS, +1 202 326 6417 www.aaas.org

“A quiet revolution in villages and market towns up and down the country” is what Countryside Agency chairman, Ewen Cameron had in mind. With foot-and-mouth, of course, he got a revolution that wasn’t so quiet. And despite everything that appears to have been changed forever by the current crisis, there’s still a lot of valuable material and ideas in The State of the Countryside, the third annual assessment by the Countryside Agency.

This is no static snapshot. On the contrary, Cameron sees it as a blueprint for rural renewal. It contains specific proposals - in particular for revitalising the former central role of market towns. To drive this along, the Agency plans to establish 20 ‘beacon towns’, which would provide a hub for the delivery of all kinds of service.

Squarely aimed at the business market, and timed for the introduction of the Climate Change Levy this April, a new Green Electricity Marketplace (GEM) service warns that the resulting new demand for green electricity is likely to outstrip the still very limited supply. “Those businesses that act the quickest will be able to snap up a cheaper, green tariff,” says GEM director, John Green, encouraging them to visit his website (www.greenelectricity.org) as the quick route to comparing competing quotes from the electricity suppliers. He promises an up-to-date list of what’s on offer, and advice to enable businesses to make an informed choice.

But which of the tariffs is a ‘best buy’ on ethical grounds? Ethical Consumer magazine’s comparative chart offers guidance on this aspect of the choice for the would-be purchaser (and there are so far only about 17,000 people in the UK signed up for green electricity schemes).

The public acceptance of new technologies depends increasingly on genuine involvement in the debate around risks, needs and options. It’s no longer enough for government or industry to push out information in a one-way flow; we need - and demand - new and interactive forms of discussion. That’s the (heartening) conclusion of Wising Up: the public and new technologies, a new report on research at Lancaster University’s Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC), commissioned by Unilever UK and the environment think-tank Green Alliance.

It’s less heartening to reflect on the existing shortcomings in our society’s handling of technological risk. But Wising Up’s authors Robin Grove-White, Brian Wynne and Phil Macnaghten say government and industry must now work together, to understand “how best to stimulate wider public discussion about the ways forward”. It is no good officials pretending, for example, that a lack of firm evidence of risk means there is no risk.