Nine people, thoughts and quotes for 2009

Yes I love lists. Here’s one with nine in it, which by a freak act of nature is the number of the new year that we have entered. I hope I don’t run out of juice by number five:

1. Slow-tech – It’s the title of a book by author Andrew Price. He’s putting forward a philosophy of robustness and efficiency which is more rounded than seeking short-term technological fixes to long term problems – this seems to fit chasing follies such as Code Level Six houses. And he’s arguing our current bunch of solutions are “neurotic” – he offered the example of Formula 1 cars when speaking on Start the Week last month. They last two weeks while ones built int he 1930s are still going now – “we are in an over-wound world trying to do too much too quickly.”
2. Lord Stern – Just listened again to his interview with my new favourite journalist Jarvis Cocker, who edited the Today programme last week. The current economic crisis could slow down our work on the climate crisis “if we let it”. Stern is optimistic – the ideas, technology and will are there for us to act. But we can’t underestimate “how big a challenge” this is. “we need to put together the biggest international collaboration the world has ever seen.”
3. Che Guevera – Perhaps a rather bonkers choice and one made rather hastily after watching the first part of the Steven Soderburg biopic (and not catching the downbeat second instalment where everything goes pear-shaped). What’s that pin-up revolutionary got to teach us? Admittedly this is largely from the film but I’d say instilling belief amongst people, whether you believe this is woefully misdirected or not. And where’s the pin up for environmental change? We haven’t got one yet.
4. The Green New Deal – “Finance will have to start to return to its role as servant, not master, of the global economy.” Timely words.. issued in July, just weeks before everything went tits up. The Green New Deal report is still required reading.
5. “Success is buried in the garden of failure.” Former Yes keyboard player Rock Wakeman in the heartfelt, fascinating and hilarious documentary on Prog Rock Britannia on BBC Four.
6. Clay Shirky – I’m still leafing through Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. I’d describe him as a social scientist. I think he’s a seer on how all the buzz about new forms of communication can really spell change. I still have yet to see the examples and ideas that he cites becoming a reality in sustainability circles – a Sustainability 2.0 if you like, where the collaboration Shirky claims is on the horizon through new ways of communicating can be harnessed to tackle climate change. Many noble attempts, little real delivery as yet. Perhaps an event like this – the Social Innovation Camp – could spark such action.
7. “There’s a general sense of weirdness – wars which last for ever and are going nowhere, and policies which are nothing but rhetoric… they bear no relation to the facts..” one of many quotable lines from Gethsemane by David Hare, a brilliant expose of New Labour
8. Should we bring back stone to construction? Sculptor Emily Young was put the case for it as a more spiritually inspiring building material on the Saturday Live show on Radio Four. She grew up in Rome and says she is struck by the power of stone buildings in the City of London. “Concrete buildings don’t have that,” she said. Not sure about the sustainability of stone.
9. “Let’s go back to old times, and it will be progress,” Giacome Puccini.

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