Posts tagged as:

Lovelock

Whole Earth Discipline

by Bryan Walker 25 January 2010

When James Lovelock, Edward O. Wilson and Ian McEwan jostle to praise a book I assume it will be worth attention.  Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto doesn’t disappoint. The title echoes the Whole Earth Catalogue which he founded over forty years ago as an ambitious reference aid for skills, tools and products [...]

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Carbonscape and the new Victorians

by Bryan Walker 2 January 2010

Buried among the emails which accumulated while I was in hospital was one from Carbonscape, the NZ company working on biochar, drawing my attention to an article in the UK Sunday Times. It missed proper attention until I tidied up my inbox yesterday, but even a few weeks late I think it’s worth reporting, [...]

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Fighting for the least bad outcome…

by Bryan Walker 19 August 2009

I watched Stephen Sackur interview James Lovelock on the BBC’s Hard Talk programme on Tuesday evening. It was a depressing experience.  Lovelock largely reiterated the things he said in The Vanishing Face of Gaia, reported in my review here.   I listened to it all again. His familiar and seemingly detached expectation that most of the [...]

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The Weather Makers

by Bryan Walker 25 July 2009

When I set out to establish my understanding of the science of climate change Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change was the next book I read after Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes. Kolbert provides a most valuable introduction, but Flannery immerses the reader in the full range of the [...]

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Has it come to this?

by Bryan Walker 30 March 2009

James Lovelock is renowned for his Gaia theory: using metaphor to illuminate science, he has argued that the earth is a living planet, a self-regulating system made up of organisms, surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere interacting to provide conditions favourable for life. Three years ago, in The Revenge of Gaia, he declared that [...]

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Immigrant song

by Gareth 2 March 2009

According to the Washington Post, “Climate fears are driving ‘ecomigration’ around the globe” [reg req'd, full text at Climate Ark, extracts at the ODT], and the example the paper chose was NASA computer expert Adam Fier and his family, who have moved to New Zealand:

…a place they had never visited or seen before, and where [...]

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It’s too late

by Gareth 16 February 2009

The Sunday Times has published a second extract from James Lovelock’s new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, covering his distrust of renewable energy, and his promotion of nuclear power as a key part of adapting to climate change. It’s an interesting read, worth it because it forces us to confront the [...]

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The boatman’s call

by Gareth 9 February 2009

The Sunday Times has begun publishing a series of excerpts from James Lovelock’s new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, due out at the end of this month. It makes bleak reading for climate optimists:

So are all our efforts to become carbon neutral, to put on sandals and a hair shirt [...]

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Carbonscape and the charred potato

by Bryan Walker 21 January 2009

This column was published in the Waikato Times on 20 January
A couple of months ago a young company called Carbonscape opened a new plant in Marlborough. It makes charcoal from wood waste, hardly an exciting matter one might think. But beyond its traditional use as a fuel, charcoal may hold enormous potential for a sustainable future, for [...]

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Climate Wars

by Bryan Walker 22 December 2008

Gwynne Dyer’s new book Climate Wars explores the all-important political dimension of addressing climate change. Military history is Dyer’s speciality. One origin of this book was his dawning awareness that, in a number of the great powers, climate-change scenarios are already playing a large role in the military planning process. The other factor persuading him [...]

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