The rise of public bikes in DC

I left Washington DC in June and was amazed on a visit back this weekend how much seemed to have changed in the urban environment in this short time. The biggest change I’m thrilled about is the launch of a new shared bike scheme – Capital Bikeshare – already now the biggest in the USA. [...]

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Surviving on the driest continent on earth

Today is Blog Action Day. This year’s theme is water. Australia is the place which is being hit hardest, first, by climate change. It is the canary in the coal mine. Parts of Southern Australia have been in drought for 12 years, a drought without historical equivalent. At what point do we stop calling it [...]

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Earth Hour: Good idea, bad framing

So this Saturday is Earth Hour. For the uninitiated Earth Hour is call to action that asks people to turn of their electricity for one hour in recognition of climate change. Earth Hour was started in Sydney, Australia, in 2007 and has since been taken global by WWF. Their website says: In 2009 hundreds of [...]

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My flatmates: media superstars

Having recently moved into a share house for the first time since leaving Australia K and I are really enjoying having flatmates again, especially because we’ve got such good ones. One thing I like about share houses when they work is the sense of family which develops, a looking out for each other which goes [...]

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Blog Action Day | The work that needs doing

Climate change is the over-riding challenge of our age. Even as I sometimes despair of our capacity to take action there is a small thrill in living in such a historic time. The whole of human history has come to this and we must make a choice as a civilization to adapt or, in all [...]

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How late is too late?

Last night The Day After Tomorrow was on cable. It was one of the spate of big-budget Hollywood disaster porn films which came out in the late-nineties and early noughties which I had not seen before. The disaster in this film is a sudden and catastrophic ice age, triggered by the melting of the Artic [...]

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