Nice LED-light fountain.

Nothing to do with anything really, but I liked this lovely LED-light fountain at Granary Square near my home in Camden, London.  Proper posts soon, I promise.

Corby by-election - will it help the Green Conservatives?

Okay, so Labour have won the recent by-election in the Northamptonshire constituency of Corby. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Corby is an interesting bellweather for a whole swathe of English constituencies in the Midlands - old industrial core, with a rural conservative hinterland. If Labour can win these kinds of seats, they can win the election.

More interestingly for me though, this was a campaign marked out by the prominent role that renewable energy seemed to play (at least this is how it looked to an outsider). The Tories candidate was anti-wind, and was busted by Greenpeace describing on camera how he encouraged an anti-wind independent to stand. UKIP is also anti-wind, and more importantly anti-environment in every way I can see. Whatever its arguments with the EU, it is choc full of the kind of anti-science climate deniers who justify their stance with a romantic cry to libertarianism. A lot of its members also seem to be scarily nationalistic. The important point is that these issues managed to push wind power in particular into a prominent position in the election - and they lost.

They lost badly. The combined votes of UKIP and the Conservatives were still smaller than Labour, and would have left Labour with a larger majority than the outgoing Conservative MP had actually enjoyed. Will this help to communicate to the Tea Party fringe of UK politics (in the Conservative right and UKIP) that they are not speaking for mainstream opinion? I doubt it, but it may at least take the wind out of their sails, and bolster the Tory's green wing. The downside is that it may goad Cameron into doing something rash on Europe in an attempt to win some credibility with his party, although I hope he has more intelligence than that.  

Rewilding the New Forest

I was in the New Forest the other week. For those who don’t know it is an area of forest and lowland heath in Southern England, about 500km2. It is a lovely place and I have been a few times. It is also deeply unsatisfactory. Despite its size, it is completely criss-crossed with road, paths, cycle paths and other bits of human infrastructure. There are many fences too, and houses dotted here and there. Looking at it on Google Earth is like looking at a chess board with no parallel lines. It feels in short, like a very large city park.

Now, given where it is, it is a wonderful resource, but it could be so much better. Do we really need so many paths? Do we need a road that runs right through the middle, cruelly cutting it in two? Would it not be a wonderful  plan, a wonderful dream , to begin to make it a bit wilder, a bit more conducive to wildlife and everything that goes with it?

It wouldn’t take much to make a real difference. Close a few roads, send them around the outside. Reduce the number of paved paths, reduce the amount of signs. There will still be space for many paths, but as someone who has attempted to go off-piste in the New Forest, I can safely say that you hit a path about every 100 metres. And many of them are big enough to drive a car down! Enough.

At the same time, the New Forest ponies, charming though they are, are clearly over-abundant. In many areas the levels of grazing resemble a city lawn. Yes, I know grazing is a natural process, but in the absence of predators, and with so many deer and semi-wild ponies, the ground is stripped bare.

No doubt there will be some who say that this is crucial to maintain the New Forest the way it is, but I suppose I don’t want it to be the way it is. I want it to be better. A 500km2 heart of darkness in the Home Counties. Okay, that may never happen, but we could make a start. 

My book is launched

Hi everybody, this is just a quick post to say that my new book Desert Energy on large scale solar power in the desert is finally launched today!! It is being published by the lovely people at Taylor and Francis and is a really good introduction to the world of large scale solar power, which is one of the most promising technologies we have for tackling the environmental and energy crises we face.... It covers the basics of the technology, politics and background, as well as providing a good status report on where the technology is and some of the problems it faces... obviously in such a fast moving area as this tings will change, projects will collapse and new companies and ideas will emerge, but this will give you the tools you need to understand what is going on!

You can get it from Amazon etc, or from the publishers (link above). E-books should be available at some point in the future.

Okay, advert over... :)

Wonderful wildlife - dolphin film and minkes

Just been spending some time in the wonderful western Highlands - that magical area around the mainland and the Inner Hebrides which must be one of the most amazing places in the UK and probably the whole of Europe. On the mainland are beautiful oak forests dripping in moisture that provide homes to wildcats, pine martens, eagles and deer, while the waters around the islands and their coastlines teem with seabirds and provide feeding and breeding grounds to dolphins, otters, whales and basking sharks. Just fantastic.

Do shopping malls kill business creativity?

I've been thinking about shopping Malls and too-shiny reconversions, and why I don’t like them. It's not just that they can be a bit soulless, and are a commercial takeover of what could be public space, it is that they seem to me to be an active drag on innovation, and local business creation.

Think about it. Most new-build shopping centres, or revamped industrial spaces, contain large shops, with lots of glass frontage. Such spaces are expensive and simply too big for most new companies. At the same time the large frontage essentially lets itself to highly branded chains. These factors - large size, and large frontage, produce high prices and mean that it is very unlikely that these are places you would be able, or even willing, to set up a new hole in the wall shop or take your first steps into retail.

Compare this with the dynamic around Shoreditch or Columbia Road in London, Leith Walk in Edinburgh or many other local high streets. The diversity of shop sizes and aspects available, make it much more likely that a new business will find a niche to fit it, while the proliferation of space retail units puts off large chains which rely on standardised portfolios and familiar layouts and branding. The ability to sublet spaces (even if not officially) and arrange pop-ups aids this process, as does the ability to hold markets and set up stalls. I have often thought that if I lost my job, and could not quickly get another, I would set up a little shop or pop-up somewhere, and see how it went. I might even sell food at the weekends. Then I realised that this approach would not be applicable in whole swathes of the country, urban and suburban, that simply have no infrastructure to allow such small and fleet footed businesses to come and go.

I am often impressed with the entrepreneurial spirit in cities like London, and the citizens' willingness to take matters into their own hands and create opportunities, whether for money or fun. Unneeded spaces are co-opted, often without explicit permission, while others are used in ways that might not be expected. While this is undoubtedly due in part to critical mass, and also the types of people who move to big cities, it is also I think in part to the diversity of physical infrastructure, and architecture, available to be exploited. A uniform physical space breeds a uniform thinking and a uniform economy, and should be opposed for that reason alone.

Sometimes we get it so wrong

I was in a meeting with a major company the other day. As part of my day job I am involved in trying to get some ambitious pro-environment legislation passed. This business wanted to plug their new product, which is probably much better, but still not great. So as usual there is the discussion over whether we should accept the less-shit-but-still-worrying tech or hold the line and be purists. Usually you have to compromise at some point, even if only inside your own brain. The trouble is, that sometimes something happens that makes you think that we are approaching this from completely the wrong direction.

Yes, some of the technologies we were discussing are essential, and some are so useful that you would be either a kamikaze campaigner or a fool to deny we should try and find workable replacements for. But then there is silly string. As in stupid pink string from an aerosol. At some point in the meeting it transpired that one of the products we were debating on finding a less-shit alternative for was that essential of western civilization, party string. From a can.

Ah well, says the industry, they can't use green chemical A, because it might explode in little Richmond's face. Fair enough, I don't want that. So does this mean we should use the dubious chemical instead?... grumble grumble... I suppose so. Or maybe not. Call me a fanatic, but I don't think we need silly string at all. If we can't find an environmentally friendly way of making it, then perhaps we should let it slide into obscurity. Let it go. Above all, don't let it block the passage of more important changes.

The trouble is of course that there are so many useless but slightly fun things in the world that would have to go the way of the dodo if we used that logic that it is hard to know where to start. Plastic footballs, balloons, the toy spiders in Christmas crackers. Etc etc etc etc. To suggest in a policy meeting that something might actually be completely useless in the first place normally just draws amused stares or sympathetic smiles, followed by a reminder that these things do matter to the manufacturers of silly string, as though that is a good enough reason.

This is obviously just the tip of the iceberg, but to my mind it is a useful example of the need for those involved in the nitty gritty of the environmental struggle to appraise what it is we are really doing, and perhaps everyone, from policymakers to campaigners should be forced to take a step back and examine what we are actually arguing over.