Tag: Essex

New Vernaculars

James Piers Taylor3 Comments

There was a heat dome over the north. It was in the news about the USA and Canada, but it’s also been in the Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, in the febrile crescent above the Arabian Sea arcing from Oman to Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, during a Zoom call with a colleague in Milan she mentioned it had been 41°C there in the previous week. Temperature records have been broken in British Columbia, Washington, Portland, Moscow, Lappland, Helsinki, Northern Ireland. All this in a ‘cool’ La Niña year.

Continue reading “New Vernaculars” →

Climate Emergency

James Piers Taylor3 Comments

rebel-for-life

On 8th December I posted on social media about trying to find a point of agency in the face of the wicked problem of climate change – partly re-energised by the Extinction Rebellion actions:

‘I’ve never been a member of a political party, I’ve always been against it on the basis that joining a political party seemed to indicate you supported implicitly everything their representatives ended up saying or doing, no matter how idiotic, and even the barmiest parts of their manifestos. No thanks, I favoured the Groucho Marxist position. Continue reading “Climate Emergency” →

The Wild East

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English Activities

‘The landward farms produced not only corn, cattle and sheep but great herds of half-wild horses and ponies with a sprinkling of donkeys. They roamed free as the wind over the wide rough grass marshes bordering the sea-wall. When the day came for them to be rounded up and sent to market at Wickford and elsewhere, the scene was like something out of the Wild West. Rough riders on horseback, with cracking whips and yelling in broad Essex, hustled the horses, with flying manes, flourishing their tails like banners, into wooden corrals where they could be sorted out, branded and taken quietly up the lane to the farm on the way to market.’

– James Wentworth Day, A Garland of Hops (1978) Continue reading “The Wild East” →

Get out of Debt!

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My ecological footprint across biomes, calculated in 2013

Back in the middle of the first decade of the C21st, Essex County Council briefly ran a website http://www.agreeneressex.net/ with a purpose to ‘take sustainability on’ in Essex. That link is dead, and many of the plans it presented are also lifeless now,  but some of the site remains preserved here at the Internet Archive for review.

Around 2006 the site reported on Essex’s environmental footprint, highlighting that if all the populations of the world consumed natural resources as we do in Essex, we would require 2.9 planets to sustain it. It doesn’t source its calculation, but the number is broadly in line with the UK’s environmental footprint around the same period as reported by the World Wide Fund for Nature in Ecological footprint of British city residents.  Continue reading “Get out of Debt!” →