Posted inEnvironment

Crimson carbon footprint

Disposable menstrual products are a huge source of single-use plastic packaging. Tampon applicators, for example, ultimately find their way into marine environments posing as detrimental a threat to marine life as plastic straws do In January, South Africa joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global plastic pact network which encourages multilateral collaboration to accelerate the transition […]

Posted inEnvironmentEqualityGeneralHealthLifestyleNews/Politics

Searching for a new political cosmology

This morning my eye caught a report about Brazil’s climate-change denialist, neoconservative president, Jair Bolsonaro — evidently in an attempt to divert attention from his own egregious responsibility for the fires that rage unabated in (what is rapidly ceasing to be) the Amazon rainforest — accusing Leonardo DiCaprio of ‘paying’ non-governmental organisations to set fire […]

Posted inEnvironmentEqualityGeneralHealthLifestyleNews/PoliticsTech

Education policy and the future of water

On Tuesday, I watched a video on the deteriorating water situation in the Arabic state of Jordan, which foregrounded to me the imperative, that countries give a central place to essential concerns such as the continued availability of water in their education programmes, from primary school through high school to universities. Unless they pay urgent […]

Posted inEnvironmentEqualityGeneralNews/Politics

Why Americans should vote Democratic in the mid-term elections tomorrow

The American midterm elections – halfway through the American president’s term, where voters decide on their representatives in the two houses of American ‘democratic’ government, Congress and the Senate (as well as on some state governors) – take place tomorrow, on 6 November 2018, and all indications are that these will be the most significant […]

Posted inEnvironmentGeneral

‘Only when the last fish has been caught, will you realise that you cannot eat money’

‘Only when the last fish has been caught, will you realise that you cannot eat money’. We are moving perilously close to the actualisation of my paraphrase of these words from the well-known saying attributed to Alanis Obomsawin of the Abenaki tribe northeast of Montreal in Canada. The usual wording of the saying is: “When […]

Posted inEnvironmentGeneral

Is humanity a rational species?

Most readers’ gut reaction to the question, above, would probably be something like: ‘Yes, of course!’ But please consider that the question is not whether humans are, on occasion, capable of rational behaviour. As it stands, the question bears on what would, if it could be answered affirmatively, be the supposed overriding quality of the […]