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Into the light: on exiting not just the figurative but the literal cave…
“You ‘green types’ want us all to go back to living in caves…” If I had a pound for every time I have heard this… Well, let’s just say, I could afford a very big cave indeed. Although, of course, as a ‘green type’ sitting inside our ‘caves’, as our homes seem to have become, is the last thing I actually want – especially during a pandemic when it was much safer to be outside, as government regulations reflected to some extent. However, I believe we could have gone much further during the last couple of years and we would have benefited so much from doing so. By failing to…
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Post-Brexit Environmental Principles: Government and risky business
The UK Government recently carried out a consultation on its Statement of Environmental Principles. The Statement will have legal status through being referred to in the Environment Bill, still slowly making its way through Parliament and now in the House of Lords. This Bill is supposed to repair the damage done by Brexit pulling the UK out of the shared EU arrangements for environmental protection. One might think that the issue of risk – and particularly the risk of “low probability, high impact” events would have shot up the Government’s agenda as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is an event which few predicted and yet the possibility of such…
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The Permanent Pandemic – Is a post-Covid world possible?
For more than a generation of economic globalisation, to turn the old adage on its head, it seemed to many that “wealth is health”. In the bargain, as everything, including health, came seemingly to rest on the willing shoulders of money, huge fortunes were not only made but universally sought, in what has come to be called an “aspirational world”. In a grim reminder of the fact that we have in effect been encouraged to escape reality itself in the name of “freedom”, the coronavirus pandemic has been here during the last year to rap us on our knuckles that health is still wealth, that, as John Ruskin had it, life is the…
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A Timeline Of The Plague Year: A Comprehensive Record of the UK Government’s Response to the Coronavirus Crisis
A Timeline Of The Plague Year is a book co-authored by Ian Sinclair and Rupert Read. It is edited by Joanna Booth and self-published. You can download a copy of the book for free from the book’s website. Or, you can purhase a print copy at lulu.com. Praise for A Timeline Of The Plague Year “With the success of the vaccination programme, the fear of mass deaths is fading. But unless we know how we ended up with the highest death rate in the world we cannot hold our government to account or make the necessary changes to prevent another public health catastrophe. This detailed timeline of what went wrong…
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A letter to real power: a letter to us
When I heard that Culture Declares emergency was organising a series of ‘Letters to Power’, I thought to myself: “Rupert, you should probably write one”. You see, I have spent much of my life attempting to talk to, persuade, even beg those with power – our elected leaders, heads of banks and businesses, big organisations or media companies, for example. I have written many, many letters to power before. Though to be frank, it’s been largely pointless; while some appear to listen, most fail to hear and even more refuse to act. Trying once again felt a bit like bashing my head against a brick wall. I felt my enthusiasm…
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Communities Need to Take Contact Tracing into their Own Hands
The UK’s “world class” tracing scheme, designed to prevent a second deadly Coronavirus wave, is unlikely to work at full speed until September or October. The NHS smartphone-based tracking app is a failure. We now have no tech help with contact tracing for a few months at least, and no guarantees even then. With the Government’s efforts failing, how could community-based methods work instead? As lockdown is lifted, a bottom-up contact tracing effort may be crucial in preventing a resurgence of mass deaths when new outbreaks occur. The independent SAGE group strongly contested Government data relating to the first full week of its ‘Test, Trace and Isolate’ programme, saying that…
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Imagining the world after COVID-19
Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised by two vast failures of imagination: 1) Many people and most governments —particularly those of the United States and the UK – have failed to imagine exponential growth and how bad it can get. What are the underlying reasons for this first failure? Normalcy bias It is very hard for human beings to imagine things radically outside their experience – especially things that spiral out of control. A “normalcy bias” makes us very poor at being ready for what are called “black swan” events. Uncertainty, “fat tails” and precaution are little understood. Crude, over-simplified versions of “evidence-based” analysis predominate. There…
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The coronavirus gives humanity one last chance – but for what exactly?
Many of us who are awake to the climate nightmare cycle through periods of despair on the one hand and desperate hope against hope on the other. We veer between not seeing how we can possibly make it through the long ecological emergency, and declaring that we must and will. Between being tempted to give up, and throwing our all into a no-holds-barred defence of Mother Earth. The general election of December 2019 was a gut-punch. There had been hopes that it would be ‘the climate election’. That, in the era of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Fridays for Future, at last we were about to get a real political move in the direction…
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Opinion: A Green Brexit is possible
The Cummings (aka Johnson) administration is probably deliberately seeking to drive the UK over a cliff into a ‘no deal’ Brexit. Wringing our hands about this is pointless. Since the general election, Brexit is actually happening. Our task now is to work towards it sooner or later being a good one, a green one. This hard-Brexit, hard-right government is seeking to race to the bottom in making ‘trade treaties’ with far-flung nations around the world (most notably of course Trump’s America) – tending to increase our ecological footprint (and cancel much-needed regulations that protect both our health and nature) at the very moment that that footprint desperately needs reducing. Once…
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Leaked documents show the UK is recklessly at risk of jumping into Trump’s arms
Following the leak of documents from six rounds of trade talks between the US and the UK, it is clear that decisions are being made behind closed doors that represent pretty grim outlines to post-Brexit Britain. The direction of conversation in the talks appears to be designed to deepen the UK’s dependence on other (i.e. American) economic systems, while isolating us from our EU neighbours by compromising our environmental, food and health standards. It will be difficult to remain protected via old regulation as our political alignment drifts further from what we knew as part of the EU. So it is vital that we are vigilant to protect our food,…