Indigo Jo Blogs

Been wondering recently why you can't get The Ecologist in the Whole Foods shops in London? (These include the former Fresh & Wild stores.)

The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature a few issues back which was not entirely laudatory, stating among other things that the chain does not recognise unions. (In the UK, they have to recognise if there is enough support from the staff for the union.) There were a couple of letters in the current issue, one of them from an un-named current employee, who said that the "offending" issue had been removed from the stores, as was any member of staff who had to take time off for family reasons or who "exercised their freedom of speech". It also notes that the store throws out a huge quantity of food (perhaps inevitable with their huge buffets) and that a third of marriages between staff fail.

Continue reading "Whole Foods and free speech" »

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This week it's appeared that serious consideration has been given to building a third runway, and a sixth terminal, at Heathrow Airport. The project will require the destruction of an entire suburban village, blight another tract of London with flight noise, and put a whole lot more traffic on the roads around Heathrow.

Continue reading "London's where we do stuff, innit?" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

BBC NEWS | UK | Organic move to cut food flights

The Soil Association, the organisation which advocates for and certifies organic food in the UK, is considering stripping organic status from food which is air-freighted into the country, because of concern about the greenhouse gases these flights cause. According to this BBC report, the bulk of what is flown in is "highly perishable or out-of-season produce".

Continue reading "Mission creep" »

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Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The emperor’s green new clothes

Melanie Phillips lapped up the recent documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle", a polemic produced by Martin Durkin, a veteran of the old Revolutionary Communist Party who metamorphosed into a libertarian clique in the 1990s (the same clique which was successfully sued for alleging that stories about concentration camps in Bosnia were fabricated). Durkin himself has been behind three dodgy documentaries, the most notorious being Against Nature, broadcast in 1997, as well as programmes promoting silicone breast implants and genetically-modified food, ignoring evidence (including from his own researcher in the first case, who quit after two weeks to avoid having her name on his documentary) that they are harmful, not beneficial as he claimed. How Mel can take material from so tainted a source at face value, and uncritically and triumphantly promote it, is beyond me.

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Guardian Unlimited: Pundits who contest climate change should tell us who is paying them

A follow-up to George Monbiot's three articles in the Guardian's G2 supplement last week on global warming, all edited extracts from his new book Heat ([1], [2], [3]). In this article, he notes how sceptical writing here as well as in the US has been influenced by corporate lobby funding from both the oil and the tobacco industries, both of which have an interest in casting doubt on strong scientific opinions. One such outfit has even suggested that we just let climate change happen and then adapt - never mind the fact that those with most to lose are in the poorest parts of the world and least responsible for the emissions which cause climate change.

The third of the above linked articles is well worth a read: it's about how the entire air travel industry is entirely unsustainable and that it's next to impossible to make the efficiency savings which would remedy this.

Continue reading "Love miles (and corporate lobbying)" »

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Guardian Unlimited: George Monbiot on climate change and oil giant ExxonMobil

This is a lengthy article, which appeared in today's G2 supplement in the Guardian, by George Monbiot. It is about the "global warming denial" industry, which is based around organisations in receipt of corporate funding, which promote isolated (and sometimes retracted) pieces of research which goes against the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is caused by human activity. These organisations include major US conservative think-tanks. (I notice that one of the websites mentioned has already posted a snide remark about the article on their front page, denouncing it as "moonbattery" without actually attempting to address the facts he laid out.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Society Guardian, a supplement to the London Guardian, yesterday published two features on ethnic minority participation, and specifically Muslim participation, in environmental campaigns and in rural activities. Cause for all cultures explores why ethnic minorities are so under-represented in such campaigns; the possible answers obviously include the predominanly urban setting in which most non-white people live in the UK which leads them to be more interested in urban regeneration rather than "green" issues. It does mention unfamiliarity and the fear some people might have of being attacked, but the real issue of racism in the countryside ([1], [2], [3]) isn't mentioned. The greening of Islam is, as you might expect, about Muslim involvement and Muslim environmental campaign groups, including a protest in London by Bengalis to draw attention to the effect of rising sea levels "back home".

Posted by Indigo Jo at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)