Small society, Big Bang
As Professor Tim Jackson says in his TED talk we live in times where we “spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.” As we have written in Citizen Renaissance, our hyper-consumerist lifestyles are fueled by unsustainable credit-bubble, debt-based growth which...
Heading Our Way: Why the Re-Alignment of Trust is Good News for The Citizen
Today’s publication of the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, also covered in The FT, confirms the re-alignment of Trust in the wake of the great crises of recent years.
Only greed can save us?
I just read a tweet by someone who follows me on Twitter, via Solitaire Townsend, on a piece by New Scientist’s environment correspondent Fred Pearce which suggests that greed will save us from the impending perfect storm.
The coalition’s economic blind spot
Critics of Blair’s suggest that one of his faults was his keenness for neoliberal free-market economics in which corporations and the rich got richer at the expense of people and the planet. But where is the coalition on this? Read the Orange book and you can’t help but hear Thatcher’s voice muttering agreement in the...
The Rat, the Squirrel and Chimes of Freedom Flashing
It has been something of an odd couple of weeks, with some of my professional peers either brazenly speaking of lying (PR Week, February 3rd), or offering somewhat antediluvian points of view about what PR really is and how we go about our everyday business. Having recorded the BBC’s The Bottom Line with the erudite...
Copenhagen – a gathering of the peasants of the earth
So we didn’t get a deal. Yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the thousands of negotiators, media, world leaders and informed experts who crammed into the Bella Centre for two weeks in December. But this is a failure too for civil society, and not only those who travelled to Copenhagen formally (as NGO representatives,...
De-clutter
As it’s holiday time the subject of flying seems apposite. In this weekend’s Observer, comedian David Mitchell points out the confused state of the Government’s position on climate change and aviation. Ed Milliband has promised to safeguard cheap air travel so that we don’t have to “go back to 1974 levels of flying”. Mitchell comments:...
