Across the lane from us there used to be about 40 acres of dense woodland, now there's almost nothing but lumber...
[See how it looked just a few weeks ago in my reply to this post.]
#Photography #ThickTrunkTuesday #Trees #Woodland #Environment
Chip Butty
boosted
"The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas"
Paul Brown on his life as an environment writer.
Tom
boosted
More good news.
"Our whole organisation was basically premised on the idea that there were people who were willing to let a bunch of young idiots on to their land indiscriminately, to make fairly massive decisions that would affect land value. We didn’t have any evidence that those people existed at the start. We just kind of assumed, or prayed, that they did.”
"The government subsidies are simply huge: a nuclear tax is being levied on hard pressed consumers. What is the government thinking of? The fossil fuel industry, which has thrown its weight behind nuclear power, is of course delighted; all these decades of new construction without any electricity to show for it gives at least another decade or two of unabated burning gas"
Paul Brown on his life as an environment writer.
STOP OCCUPATION 🍉 S. Costa
and 1 other
boosted
In defence of the status quo, we are made to belief that asking for richer public space, safety for our children or a higher quality of live is 'Radical Activism'. 🌳🚲
You are not a radical. They are! 🚩
#ClimateChange #deforestation #ActNow #environment #EndFossilCrimes #ClimateCrisis #Science #warming #Nature #climate #development #gasemissions #ClimateEmergency #climatecrisis #wildlife #ClimateAction #photo #photography #GlobalWarming #pollution #news #earth #amazon
More good news.
"Our whole organisation was basically premised on the idea that there were people who were willing to let a bunch of young idiots on to their land indiscriminately, to make fairly massive decisions that would affect land value. We didn’t have any evidence that those people existed at the start. We just kind of assumed, or prayed, that they did.”
Wegwerfprodukt: Bundesregierung kündigt Verbot von Einweg-E-Zigaretten an
Das Umweltministerium hat im Rahmen der Bundesratsentscheidung über das Elektroschrottgesetz angekündigt, Einweg-E-Zigaretten gesetzlich untersagen zu wollen.
I fully agree with this as it reduces e-waste and hopefully encourages reuse of reusable vapes. We can't just keep producing more and more of something without giving thought to full lifecycle from sourcing of raw materials to end of life and recycling, recovery of materials.
#environment
#vapes
#e-waste
STOP OCCUPATION 🍉 S. Costa
boosted
Digital Elevation Models, Old Maps, And Cultural Heritage—Geospatial Assets For The Digital Humanities
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https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1507385 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #water #hydrography #remotesensing #earthobservation #landscape #humanimpacts #landforms #DEM #elevation #LiDAR #oldmaps #historicmaps #culture #society #infrastructure #community #change #DigitalHumanities #geography #cartography #environment #culturalheritage #Nederlands #LingeRiver #engineering #precisionmapping #understanding #history
Digital Elevation Models, Old Maps, And Cultural Heritage—Geospatial Assets For The Digital Humanities
--
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1507385 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #water #hydrography #remotesensing #earthobservation #landscape #humanimpacts #landforms #DEM #elevation #LiDAR #oldmaps #historicmaps #culture #society #infrastructure #community #change #DigitalHumanities #geography #cartography #environment #culturalheritage #Nederlands #LingeRiver #engineering #precisionmapping #understanding #history
Chewie
boosted
"One study suggests the #Amazon provides around $40,000 of value per square kilometre of standing forest each year, giving it a fair asset value of around $3trn, about 50% more than the retailer that shares its name." "carbon price of $25 per tonne would squeeze out cattle ranchers, since landowners could make more money by allowing reforesting." "the EU’s emissions-trading system charges €80 ($93)"
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/10/23/the-obvious-economics-of-preserving-the-amazon
https://archive.is/QxNYH
"One study suggests the #Amazon provides around $40,000 of value per square kilometre of standing forest each year, giving it a fair asset value of around $3trn, about 50% more than the retailer that shares its name." "carbon price of $25 per tonne would squeeze out cattle ranchers, since landowners could make more money by allowing reforesting." "the EU’s emissions-trading system charges €80 ($93)"
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/10/23/the-obvious-economics-of-preserving-the-amazon
https://archive.is/QxNYH
meanwhile, in the #UK: "LONDON — The British government is divided over whether to stump up the cash for a flagship environmental pledge meant to protect tropical forests, jeopardizing a potential announcement by Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the COP30 U.N. climate summit in Brazil."
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-treasury-cop30-brazil-tropical-forest-pledge/
#environment #Amazon #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ukpol #politics
"One study suggests the #Amazon provides around $40,000 of value per square kilometre of standing forest each year, giving it a fair asset value of around $3trn, about 50% more than the retailer that shares its name." "carbon price of $25 per tonne would squeeze out cattle ranchers, since landowners could make more money by allowing reforesting." "the EU’s emissions-trading system charges €80 ($93)"
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/10/23/the-obvious-economics-of-preserving-the-amazon
https://archive.is/QxNYH
Participatory Urbanism: A beginners guide
I recently did a speech to my local Rotary Club about a Participatory Urbanism project I am working on. To my surprise, the audience appeared equally interested in the whole Participatory Urbanism concept, as much as the project itself. So I thought it would be good to put together a quick explainer, which I can point people to, if they are interested.
Participatory Urbanism is an approach to city planning and development that actively involves citizens in the decision-making processes, right from the start, to create more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable urban environments.
Urban planning, once the exclusive domain of architects, developers, and policymakers, is slowly opening its doors to the people who live in the neighbourhoods they are shaping. This movement—known as Participatory Urbanism—is about putting residents at the centre of urban change. Unlike what we see right now, where residents are on the periphery of any decision making.
Participatory Urbanism invites community members to co-create the future of their cities. It moves beyond consultation into real collaboration, where local knowledge, lived experiences, and collective imagination become essential tools in the planning process. Whether it’s redesigning a park, rethinking traffic flow, or creating more inclusive public spaces, the goal is to make cities not just more efficient—but more just, vibrant, and responsive to human needs.
This approach goes by many names. You might hear it called “collaborative urbanism”, “community-led planning”, or “co-design”. In digital spaces, it intersects with “civic tech” and the “smart citizen” movement, where data and tools empower residents to advocate for better services. In the physical world, it often overlaps with “tactical urbanism”—those DIY, grassroots projects that temporarily transform urban spaces to test new ideas.
What unites all these threads is a simple but powerful belief: the people who live in a place are experts in their own right. By making space for their voices, we build not just better cities—but stronger communities.
Right now we get community participation really, really wrong. Most civic systems are hierarchical, with decisions made by a few “experts” behind closed doors. Public participation is often tokenistic—last-minute, limited, and on the civic leaders’ terms. It feels disingenuous, formal, and uninspiring, excluding genuine input and creativity. The same voices dominate, while people are sidelined and are not truly at the centre of decision-making.
Participatory Urbanism ultimately means reimagining our cities as places shaped by the people who live in them. It shifts power from top-down planning to collaborative processes where residents have a real say in decisions that affect their daily lives. This approach fosters more inclusive, equitable, and responsive urban environments by valuing local knowledge, creativity, and lived experience. When communities co-create their neighbourhoods—whether through planning, design, or stewardship—cities become more vibrant, just, and resilient. Participatory urbanism is about putting people at the heart of urban change, ensuring cities are not just built for communities, but built with them.
There is no one single way to implement Participatory Urbanism. Lots of cities are trying to do it right now and we see lots of different ideas and models emerging. In reality there never should be one single approach/method/model because that flies in the face of the whole idea of consulting local residents. An approach that suits one city may not work in another. Fortunately there are lots of examples we can look at from around the world, and take inspiration from. I wrote about Bologna, Italy’s approach here: https://owgf.org/2024/08/02/should-we-follow-bolognas-model-for-participatory-urbanism/ There is also the Transition Network working on providing ideas for communities that want to organise, which I posted about here: https://owgf.org/2024/08/04/transition-togethers-free-step-by-step-guide/ Also a quick web search for “Participatory Urbanism Tools” will deliver more results than you can poke a stick at.
Our Wonderful Green Future will be a co-designed by the people, for the people.
This post was created in #WordPress and can be viewed in the #Fedivers at: @owgf.org@owgf.org
OWGF has a Fediverse companion profile at: https://mastodon.world/@OWGF
OWGF is also on #Pixelfed here: https://pixelfed.social/OWGF
#Environment #OurWonderfulGreenFuture #OWGF #Regeneration #SolarPunk #StrongTowns #sustainability #Urbanism
Sorry, no caption provided by author
Rainway - plants and physical barriers to slow water down the street
Community gathering outdoor under a large canopy, people listening to a man playing a guitar.
Street plantings in Bologna, Italy
We Need a Ban, So Where’s the Plan?
“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.
It has been unsettling to watch Scottish politicians line up behind Unite the Union’s “No ban without a plan” campaign to keep Scottish oil fields flowing. I understand Unite’s position on this. They don’t want to see their workers harmed during the largest economic transition Scotland needs to undertake since the oil fields opened. They’ve been promised a “Just Transition” for those workers. And it hasn’t been delivered. The politicians signing up to the “no ban” pledge are the very people who should have come up with “the plan”. They not only didn’t, many have spent their time actively pushing against those who have tried to instead even as news breaks that many of those workers at Grangemouth will be losing their jobs anyway – casualties of being pointed at for headlines but never being heard.
To watch both the Scottish and UK Governments roll back on their pledges for no new oil developments has been extremely concerning, especially as they try to do the very political thing of twisting words to their limit to reduce their actions to the Minimum Promised Deliverable – the least they can do and still claim to have “kept” their promise. The UK Government is trying to claim that because the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields were initially proposed before they came to power then it won’t count as “new” if they issue a licence. While the Scottish Government’s “official” position is that they won’t endorse a “new” field unless it meets “environmental criteria” without ever stating what those criteria should be or what an oil field would have to look like in order to pass them.
The major problem with this is that the courts have already stepped in and made clear that companies that produce polluting products are just as liable for the mess they make as companies who produce pollution directly. You might have heard about the different ways pollution is measured. There are three “Scopes” to it. “Scope One” emissions are the emissions your company produces directly (the gas emitted by the flare stack of an oil rig is Scope One as are the emissions caused by transporting people and material to and from the rig). “Scope Two” are emissions caused indirectly but as a result of the operation of your company (if your oil rig gets its electricity from a coal power plant, the emissions from the plant are counted as your Scope Two emissions). “Scope Three” emissions are those caused by the use of the products your company produces. That is, the emissions caused by someone burning the oil you extracted and sold to them.
Until recently, highly polluting companies (from airports to oil companies) pledged that they were on the path to becoming “Net Zero” but only as a result of reducing (or “offsetting”) their Scope One and Scope Two emissions (the Scottish Government’s INTOG project is all about powering oil rigs with wind turbines for this purpose) but they declared that their Scope Three emissions were, in the words of Douglas Adams, “Somebody Else’s Problem” and therefore didn’t really exist.
The UK Courts have been challenging this idea, making it clear that Scope Three emissions actually are the oil extractor’s problem. Add to this the 2019 Sea Change report from Friends of the Earth Scotland that stated the simple maths – the UK cannot meet its climate obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement unless it pledges to not open any oil fields currently not open and pledges to actively close down existing oil fields well before they reach the point of maximum “economic” extraction. It might be supporting current workers to ask for a plan before the oil ban but there also can be no plan for the oil sector that does not include a ban.
Anything less is a climate denying fairy tale and time is rapidly running out to enact it. Indeed, given that 2024 was likely the first year we breached the +1.5C limit mandated by the Paris Agreement, the politicians who signed it have already failed – everything from here out is damage control but the IPCC has been clear that the damage CAN be controlled but only if we accept that every fraction of a degree of additional warming matters and makes the job harder.
There are no more excuses and there is no more time for trying to wriggle out of previous pro-oil commitments. Every politician in Scotland and the UK has to face up to their own obligations and start implementing the rapid phase out of oil from our economy (both domestic and as an export) or make way for someone who will. Do it fairly and with regard to the workers involved, but do not let that obligation be an excuse to miss climate targets or to extend oil extraction indefinitely into the future. Do it with and for the workers, but do not let that obligation be an excuse to capitulate to the oil barons who were never and will never be our friends in the climate emergency. If there can be no ban without a plan then my question to the politicians is simple: “Where is the plan?”
(Image Credit: Extinction Rebellion Dundee)
