Insight

Oxford Storey - Cobbled Holywell Street marks a clear boundary between cluttered Old Oxford and much later developments to the north. One of the most delightful streets in the city, it is lined by predominantly pastel coloured 17th and 18th century houses, as well as New College’s imposing Holywell Buildings on the left hand side. Towards the end of the street, is the Holywell Music Room, which was opened in 1748 and is said to be the world’s oldest surviving concert hall. Regular recitals and chamber concerts are held here in an auditorium that seats 250.



The country tit cannot hope to survive the urban jungle against the magpie mafia and cockney pigeon. It must adapt or, like my blackbird, die. …
Like birds, we instinctively adapt our senses to what we hear and see round us. We are creatures not of habit, but of context.

Simon Jenkins, Guardian, Dec 8


Government is very limited in its power of making men either virtuous or happy; it is only in the infancy of society that it can do any thing considerable; in its maturity it can only direct a few of our outward actions. But our moral dispositions and character depend very much, perhaps entirely, upon education.
William Godwin: An Account of a Seminary (1783) quoted by Woodcock (1963: 58)



Masaai women in spectacular bead dresses ..were less aware of the global context but intuited that their droughts were somehow to do with all the tourist buses ….In contrast to a Western tendency to see the costs of climate change more in terms of animals – the archetypal polar bear - their emphasis was very much on the impacts on people and crops.

Carbon markets - as with all markets - require that someone own the carbon being traded or, more specifically in this case, the right to release a quantity of carbon dioxide into the atmospheric commons.

Oxfam Campaign: Climate Change



And whilst it is true that language almost always precedes any commitment to action, many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are now persuaded, in this instance, that linguistic usage has become not so much a precursor to action as a substitute for it.
Jonathon Porritt, BBC, Green Room, 23 Nov


In a world of unprecedented wealth, almost 2 million children die each year for want of a glass of clean water and adequate sanitation. Millions of women and young girls are forced to spend hours collecting and carrying water, restricting their opportunities and their choices. And water-borne infectious diseases are holding back poverty reduction and economic growth in some of the world's poorest countries.
Poverty, Power and Inequality



A prototype networked river - Imagine a network of pollution-monitoring sensors every 50 metres along a river bank, each of them transmitting data. Upstream, a sensor is dropped into the river every hour. It floats along monitoring flow and water quality, compares data with the static sensors on the bank, and uses a cheap GPS chip to store location references. All data is collated by base stations on a series of bridges, and cross-references with local agricultural activity, weather information from the Met Office and mapping data from Ordnance Survey. The result would be a continuous real-time map of water quality - a composity of intelligent data which feeds into hydrological models to inform policy planning and pollution mitigation.
IPM-NET, Sensor KTN, www.eci.ox.ac.uk



Researcher David Cowen and his team at Central Science Laboratory showed that applying slag to wheat growing in greenhouses had no effect on yield, but caused the plants to incorporate the silica and express it as spiky structures on their leaves. These spikes put rabbits off their feed, abrading their teeth and giving them stomach-ache (Pest Management Science DOI:10.1002/ps.1302). The neat part is that since humans eat the grain, not the leaves, it deters the rodents but has no effect on us. In trials, slag-treated crops saw losses fall by over half. Slag seems to have no adverse environmental effects, other than the sight of it. Indeed, it acts as a fertilizer in rice paddies and sugar cane fields. This looks like a very green solution: no pesticide, no poison, just a neatly targetted deterrent. A lot of bunnies are going to get slagged off, though.

Madsen Pirie, Adam Smith Institute



A UK parliamentary group has said that "the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are 'difficult or impossible to meet' without curbing population growth," the BBC reports. It links a high birth rate to poor health and education, and low environmental quality. Richard Ottaway MP, a panel member, said that "No country has ever raised itself out of poverty without stabilizing population growth."
Aeon Mcnulty, Adam Smith Institute