The prolific American author Upton Sinclair died 40 years ago, but his novel Oil, published in 1927, has recently had a second coming, being the book upon which the Oscar-winning film There Will Be Blood is based.
Another of Sinclair’s pearls was also recently made famous, this time by Al Gore, when he recalled one of the author’s quotations in his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. (more…)
Writing regularly about climate change and related issues is great – up to a point. However, the prospect of being able to chip something in to the actual science part might seem a little far-fetched for those of us such as this correspondent, whose science career careered to a halt after Leaving Cert Chemistry and Biology.
All is not lost, it turns out. I have in fact been running my very own climate modelling study – so far I’m 38 hours and 46 minutes into it, with only around another 1,541 hours left to run. (more…)
Nature is under relentless assault, entire ecosystems are being obliterated, an area of natural forest the size of Croke Park is burned or cleared every second. Around every 12 minutes, yet another species goes extinct.
The news is, to put it mildly, pretty bleak. Many of the postings on this blog are similarly downbeat. The waves of bad news seem to push further inland all the time.
Today, rather than battle with words, I’d like to let this short video clip below do the talking. The music, ‘Comptine D’un autre été’ is by French composer Yann Tiersen. This piece was made famous in the film ‘Amelie’.
It lasts barely two minutes and 12 seconds, and has been overlaid with some sublime aerial photography. The clip is from a Discovery Channel series called ‘Planet Earth’.
For me, it’s a moment of rare harmony between the overwhelming perfection of nature and man’s capacity to create, rather than destroy. Enjoy.
‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former’. That’s the view of no less an observer than Albert Einstein.
Though his judgement may seem a little harsh, the strange story of bottled water may well bear him out. Barely 30 years ago, nobody bar a few oddballs drank bottled water. Most people rightly scoffed at paying for something that came straight from the tap, free of charge. (more…)
‘Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution. Today corporations govern our lives. They determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work and what we do’. That’s how author Joel Bakan opens his famous 2004 book, ‘The Corporation’.
Bakan’s book paints a singularly unflattering portrait of the average corporation – grandiose, manipulative, deceitful and ruthless in pursuit of its objectives – to make as much money and exert as much power as possible. (more…)
You only have to look at a map of Ireland’s rugged western seaboard to get some idea of the power of wave and wind in shaping our coastline. In Connemara the sparse tree cover leans away from the sea at unlikely angles, such is the power of the prevailing winds that batter the coast.
The Tearfund is a UK-based development agency which has come up with a novel idea for this Lent. Instead of cutting down on treats, how about reducing your carbon instead?
They are clearly placing the effects of climate change as a justice issue, as right now, people in the Third World are paying for our excesses in droughts, famines and other climate-driven crises. (more…)
The year 1900 is little more than two generations ago. It’s the year before my maternal grandmother was born. At that time, she was one of some 1.6 billion people then alive on the earth.
A hundred years, two World Wars and countless other setbacks later, and global population is edging towards seven billion. That’s more than a quadrupling of the planet’s population in a single century. There has never been a (human) population explosion like it in the history of the world, and there never will be again. (more…)
Our closest living relatives on this planet are the 625 species of primates. We share over 98% of our DNA with them, so the similarities are more than skin deep. In the whole of the turbulent 20th century, not a single species of primate went extinct. Things now look a good deal less certain for our evolutionary first cousins.
In 1996, 15% of all primate species were listed as ‘critically endangered’. Four years later, this figure had risen to 20%, and by 2005, a shocking 162 species were on the critical list, that’s 26% of all primates. (more…)
