Unlike large dams, now widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and ineffective, micro-hydro involves the use of small mills and dams to provide clean energy and an alternative source of income for rural communities.
The community of Machynlleth has gone beyond just investing in someone else’s wind turbine. They’ve clubbed together and planned, built and paid for one of their own.
Within two years, Britain could be facing a series of blackouts and the ignomony of importing the resource it once considered so plentiful from a host of politically unstable countries.
An invisible electrosmog engulfs us, destroying the health of many who do not even know why they have fallen ill. Why is no one listening to the mass of evidence telling us we are frying our brains?
Since colonising Tibet in 1959, China has ripped out virgin forests, dug up minerals and metals, and dumped nuclear waste with little regard for the fragile ecology of the Tibetan plateau.
For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Usually, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In 1998 Monsanto took Schmeiser to court.
Haiti is a failed state: one of those places that just can’t seem to get its act together, despite the best efforts of benevolent Western powers. Or so the mainstream media would have you believe. Yet history tells us a more complicated story.
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, renegade logging firms are stealing the land of impoverished communities and stripping it of the trees on which the whole world depends. Greg Nasmyth boards a 700-tonne icebreaker to join a group of Greenpeace activists in their bid to stop them.
‘If we could think locally, we would take far better care of things than we do now. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, "What will this do for our community?" tends toward the right answer for the world.’ Wendell Berry
In February a report by George W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) suggested that fast food workers might in the future be classified as manufacturing workers. A CEA report asked: ‘When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a “service”, or is it combining inputs to “manufacture’ a product?’
In 1993 Tory MP David Willetts wrote a pamphlet called The Opportunities for Private Funding in the NHS, which proposed using Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and other commercial mechanisms to provide health services in the UK. Conservative ministers thought Willetts’s proposals too radical. They were consigned to the shelf until 1997, when the New Labour Government put them into action.
I’m sitting opposite the large Coca-Cola bottling plant next to the village of Plachimada in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Plachimada is a farming village of about 800 families, many of them tribal. The ugly factory looks rather out of place in such a beautiful setting, the Western Ghats mountains clearly visible in the distance.
The Channel 4 documentary, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, put forward the idea that carbon dioxide did not in fact cause global warming, but instead was a product of global warming. It also suggested that the Earth frequently enters cold and warm periods of climate, and that the current warming was simply a natural phenomenon. We put these arguments to Stephan Harrison, an Associate Professor in Quarternary Science at Exeter University and a Senior Research Associate at Oxford University…
