Valentine’s Day is the culturally appointed moment when we affirm our love and appreciation for our partner. En mass we get amorous and consummate our passion. Naturally capitalism feasts on this kind of mass behaviour. In today’s world Valentine’s Day comes with a price tag and the costs are not just financial.
Initially the idea of making a stand in China Town went down like a proposal for a pay toilet in a diarrhoea ward.
I am writing to express my concern at the practice of shark-finning in Costa Rica.
Christmas is a time for family, tradition, good food and coming together to remember what is important in life. Right? Wrong! Christmas has been hijacked by the Dark Side and now is ‘the retail event of the year’ or, put another way, the peak of the annual consumption calendar, or, put another way, exactly what is killing the biosphere.
Shocking news just in: nations of the world are sending their wankiest people to Cancun after word got out that it is just going to be a giant international circle-jerk.
Nations of the world are coming together at COP 10 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, to face up to the fact that our efforts to rein in the current mass extinction crisis have failed. In an attempt to put the issue on the political map, biodiversity is being allocated a monetary value much as the Stern Report’s did with climate change.
Are you tired of the 9-5 grind and stressful commuting? Are you fed up of not having enough time for friends, family and interesting pursuits? How would you like a 3 day weekend?
All the eyes of the world are turned to the beaches of the most dominant nation of our times. The world is watching closely as this pivotal culture wrestles with this unprecedented environmental catastrophe. Will Obama use this as his movement to make a clean break and fundamentally restructure the energy infrastructure in the same way that 9/11 was used as the catalyst to restructure US foreign policy?
It is time to wake up and freak the fuck out. BP and the American government want you to sit tight and imagine that this environmental catastrophe is being fixed by responsible people. Don’t worry. Keep calm and carry on. Do not adjust your television. Go back to sleep.
These belching behemoths are cooling towers. In the UK’s creaking, outdated power stations coal is burnt to heat water to steam. The steam is sent through turbines at high speed generating electricity. Once through the turbine a huge amount of energy remains in the hot water. For some reason the geniuses who designed these power plants decided that instead of using this heat for something useful like… er… heating they would call it ‘waste heat’ and fart it into the sky. Some power stations also fart the heat into rivers killing fish. Great move guys!
The mile high club is for irresponsible yuppies. The cool kids are getting down and dirty 45m below sea level. A secret and fruity underground society has been spicing up European travel with sexy visits to the water closet while hurtling under the channel tunnel. Is our fast track to the world’s most romantic city fast becoming a giant Tunnel of Love?
What we buy and what we give has far more of an effect then we might think. Whilst all products have an ecological footprint impacting some part of the planet; some have dire, specific consequences for both ecological systems and people. Beef from the Amazon, palm oil products from South East Asia and farmed tropical prawns are well known examples. Less well known is that a massive surge in sales of cheap roses imported from Lake Naivasha in Kenya is ‘bleeding that country dry’ and drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the dusty edge of a rapidly retreating, once beautiful lake of regional ecological significance.
Yeah we love animals! We love animals so much we chop them up on an industrial scale stick them in tins full of gravy and then feed them to other animals we call ‘pets’. In 2007 sales of food for cats and dogs alone amounted to US$ 45.12 billion . Ironically this is almost the exact cost as an estimate for conserving total global biodiversity, $42 billion (UNEP 1992). The hot spot approach could make total biodiversity conservation even cheaper.
Our societies are highly competitive places as a result of the highly competitive processes driving the selection and dispersion of our genes. We are genetically predisposed to behaviour patterns that have now become pathological when multiplied by six billion people in the modern world. Now on a global scale our competitive resource acquisition is unbalancing the planet’s eco-systems and could lead to humanities untimely extinction. However, unlike the peacock, we are aware of what we are doing.
