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~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 13th 2012

The Economist had a leader last week on "panflation" or the devaluation of everything. There are now six- and seven-star luxury hotels. Over the last 25 years the proportion of A-level students getting A grades has risen from 9% to 27%. The ticket inspector has his job title upgraded to Chief Revenue Protection Officer. The footballer gives 110%.

The current water shortage in England is another example. There are posters on the sides of double-decker buses warning Londoners that "WE ARE IN DROUGHT". But we aren't really. If we were a little smarter, we wouldn't even be short of water. We just manage the water that we have very badly.

A report on BBC Radio 4 last night said that England and Wales loses 3.3 billion litres of water a day through leakage. That's enough water (we were told) to fill Wembley stadium three times every day. Or enough water to fill 1,320 Olympic-size swimming pools every day.

Even though Londoners are experiencing the lowest level of rainfall since 1976, and even though we waste 3.3 billion litres a day, someone from the Environment Agency could still say, "This drought has been dealt with very well. No-one has gone without water."

One of those droughts, then, where there's water to waste.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 24th 2012

Over the last three days 200 artists and scientists have met at a conference in the north-east of England to discuss how "to energise the creative response to climate change". The first afternoon in Newcastle had a small shock in store. One of the speakers was Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist", who lives nearby. He told a largely incredulous audience that he didn't think climate change was nearly as scary as people made out. What was scary, he said, were the measures we were adopting to tackle climate change. In his view, the cure was going to be worse than the disease.

If Ridley was right, the TippingPoint attendees should have packed their suitcases there and then, and headed home to energise a creative response to some other topic entirely. But I didn't meet anyone over the next two days who had been converted by Ridley's brand of rational optimism.

Ridley quickly got into a heated exchange with Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change, when he said that climate science was an extremely well-funded line of work. Anderson told the audience exactly what his comparatively modest salary was as a professor and challenged Ridley again and again to tell the audience what his own salary was—an invitation that was brushed aside, with increasing irritation.  read more »

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, December 23rd 2011

It's snowing in the Rockies. A bit. They're still waiting for the "big dump" that sets the resorts up for the whole season. Vail is the largest single mountain ski resort in America, and in Vail Village the trees are covered in Christmas lights, there are gas fires in the street and the pavements are steaming as the snow lands on them - they are heated from underneath.

Our hotel in Beaver Creek has an outdoor pool and five hot tubs, all exhaling moist warmth into the freezing air, uncovered during the day and mostly unused until après-ski time. There are patio heaters outside restaurants, heated underground car parks, and of course the ski lifts churning away all day and the piste-bashers grooming all night... It's all a stark reminder that downhill skiing holidays are high energy as well as high altitude.
 
In our room, though, there is a slice of a tree with the word "CONSERVE" scorched into it, ranch style. We are invited to participate in "helping preserve and protect natural resources" by placing this sign on our rumpled bed in the morning. If we do so, the staff "will prepare it using [our] existing linen". That is to say, they won't change the sheets. For a night, anyway: "a full refresh of all linens and towels will be provided after the second night". A snowflake in a snowdrift, you might say.

Rebecca Willis is Intelligent Life's associate editor, and a former travel editor of Vogue

A verdant forest is more beautiful than a razed wasteland; a tree grander than a stump. But in a certain context, the gnarled nether roots of an exposed stump can impress too. They convey a message of time and patient growth, and lend a sense of the towering giants that once stood on these empty pedestals. They are poignant reminders of something that once thrived and is now gone.

In seeking to bring awareness to the cause of deforestation, Angela Palmer, a journalist-turned-artist, has brought stumps from destroyed rainforests to Europe. Called "Ghost Forest", the installation features ten stumps (seven different species) from a commercially logged rainforest in Ghana, Western Africa. Ms Palmer has displayed these massive natural sculptures in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2009 and then at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. The trees are now on the lawn in front of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where they will remain until July 31st.  

These stumps have come a long way, but they tell a story better than any article or painting. Ghana has lost 90% of its primary forest over the last 50 years. Ms Palmer hopes that by transporting this group 3,000 miles, she can convince people to save the rest.  

Why do you lay the stumps on their sides instead of upright?    read more »

It's not Faust, Galileo, Oppenheimer, Bohr or Heisenberg: the scientist now capturing the imagination of contemporary playwrights is James Lovelock, a climate-change guru. He has been depicted twice on the London stage in 15 months. Last year the gleefully independent author of "Gaia", "Revenge of Gaia" and "Vanishing Face of Gaia" inspired the reclusive glaciologist in Steve Waters's superb double-bill "The Contingency Plan" (reviewed in More Intelligent Life). The playwright told me Lovelock’s appeal was that he was a highly visible and contradictory character who “embodies some of the fault lines within green politics”.  read more »

The current design of Manhattan makes it very easy for residents to forget they live on an island. This past winter the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned architects, landscape designers, engineers and artists to address the effects of climate change on New York Harbour in a project called "Rising Currents". The designs are now on view at the museum in an exhibition of the same name.

The idea of these landscape projects is to help reclaim the waterfront as an essential part of the city. Indeed, water threatens to be a greater part of the city's identity whether New Yorkers are prepared for it or not, as current weather predictions put the harbour under water by 2080.

“Oystertecture“, a recent presentation from one of these design teams, represented by Kate Orff of the Manhattan-based SCAPE Studio, gave the audience a sense of how oysters could become New York’s salvation. Oysters, it seems, are no ordinary molluscs. The bivalve offers solutions to sea-level rise, storm surges and water quality. As Orff explained, oysters "agglomerate to make rich reef mosaics, and reefs are the most effective way of attenuating waves, because they go deep into the water column, stopping the velocity low, where it starts to do damage.” One oyster alone can filter 50 gallons of water in a day–ingesting algae, detritus, sediment and pollutants. Oyster reefs also protect coastlines by acting as buffers against erosion.  read more »

Despite having hosted the Winter Olympics twice before, only on Sunday did Canada succeed in winning a gold medal on its own snow-covered soil. The medal itself, earned by Alexandre Bilodeau, a champion mogul skier, also represented a unique environmental achievement in Olympic history, as it was made in part from recycled materials. Specifically, the medal included metal salvaged from the circuit boards of electronic devices, otherwise known as e-waste. Bilodeau’s medal—along with the other 614 Olympic medals and 399 to be awarded at the subsequent Paralympic Games—helps to both highlight and combat the growing environmental problem posed by e-waste. Electronic devices that were once considered luxury items are becoming as commonplace and personal as toothbrushes. Because they contain toxic heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and beryllium—as well as recyclable metal and plastic components—safely disposing this flood of phones, computers and televisions when they break or become obsolete is a challenge. By teaming up with Teck Resources, a Canadian mining company, the creators of this year's Olympic medals—Omer Arbel and Corrine Hunt, both Canadian designers—have brought new attention to the issue and prevented 6.8 metric tonnes of e-waste from ending up in landfills. London, the site of the 2012 summer games, is expected to feature green medals modelled on Vancouver’s example.  read more »