Dr Laura James's writings

The metaphors we use change how we think about things. Benjamin Santos Genta writes for Aeon about this, and in particular how many of our metaphors relate to war. Might an argument be better as a dance than a battle? (I've been trying to demilitarise my work language for a while; it's not always easy. You can, though, feed two birds with one scone, but that works less well with international colleagues.) ReliefWeb reports on research into the value for money of recent humanitarian innovations . It was good to see my old colleagues at Field Ready featured. Field Ready piloted a new model of localized medical product manufacturing in Syria, involving healthcare worker training, enhanced digital technology, and partnership-building between local medical device suppliers and medical facilities. Their pilot significantly reduced the time, costs, and carbon emissions of medical device production and repair without compromising product quality. TripleLine found that the aggreg...

It's always satisfying when projects you have been involved with demonstrate great results: https://twitter.com/ResearchEssex/status/1504867213840420870 Cofarm is in our third growing season, and starting to think about how best to grow - we're getting quite a lot of interest from people interested in creating Cofarms locally. The tricky bit as usual is having the time (or money) to properly plan how to scale up, and to support potential new sites, and writing up the playbook.  Now Play This 2022 was a lovely hybrid festival of experimental game design exploring play and democracy, and much of it is now on YouTube .  If you missed earlier editions, such as 2021's climate-themed festival, you can catch up on those too. https://twitter.com/chris_m_h/status/1504533322986369030   Working at Field Ready I learned how not all 'maker' (or humanitarian) interventions are helpful - something is not always better than nothing. I was reminded of this by Tarek Loubani's ar...

Clearing out old tabs...  Another amazingly thoughtful and insightful article from Rachel Coldicutt: Conley’s framing seems revelatory because care work is often characterised as a bundle of physical acts and emotional feelings, but in reality it involves predicting eventualities, mitigating the mitigatable, and softening the blows of the unavoidable. Care work is the anticipation of grief is a beautiful articulation of care as a thoughtful and a thinking practice; a constant loop of recognising and managing risk. Taking care involves noticing and remembering, writing lists and prioritising; doing the right things in the right order to get to the best outcomes in the circumstance. When I remind my son to put a jumper in his school bag on a sunny day, it’s because I’ve looked at the weather forecast and know it will be colder later. Likewise, when we reply to a government consultation, it’s because we’ve looked at the proposals and know the outcomes will be unjust or unworkable. Bo...

The 2022 edition of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor came out from the New Climate Institute. It sheds light on the differences between well-publicised pledges of 'net zero' from 25 very large companies (which comprise maybe 5% of global emissions).  Thanks to Chris Adams for sharing! We found that the headline pledges of 25 of the world’s largest companies in reality only commit to reduce emissions by 40% on average, not 100% as suggested by the terms “net-zero” and “carbon neutral”. ... The signal sent by the reference to “zero” is a helpful concept, but the “net” can be problematic. Global emissions need to be reduced to net-zero, so companies need to think about how they can completely eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions. Here the concept of “zero” is helpful because it changes the mindset from “marginal reductions and optimisations here and there” to a “full transformation”. The “net” is not helpful if companies start creative accounting just to de...

The highway in BC which was comprehensively destroyed in the dreadful floods in mid November actually re-opened in December, thanks to astonishing engineering work.  Meanwhile, Colorado's latest fires suggest the return of the urban firestorm - a very different proposition to the rural fires which are more familiar. (HT Nathan Schneider for the link) Why do education secretaries hate online learning, asks Martin Weller : On the one hand, all Governments like to berate education for not fully preparing students for the modern workplace . They unveil plans about how they will be a modern, 21st century, digital economy. And yet, successive education secretaries have berated online learning, which one would think was an essential component in realising both of the previous aims. And not just offer up some valid criticisms around issues of retention or engagement, say, but they use terminology that portrays online learning as, at best, a lazy, cheap option and at worst, some f...

DW has a great article about the sustainability of wind power - covering all the aspects from recycling turbines, to bird fatalities, to mitigations such as "a ring of tiny air bubbles used during construction activities that dampens noise by around 90%". Thanks to Joanna Bryson. Laurie Macfarlane writes about land . Highlights mine. Although there is much hype around the promise of impressive Negative Emissions' Technologies (NETs), such as carbon capture and storage, to date the only proven NET is the restoration of forests, peatlands and other natural carbon sinks. ... In the case of carbon emissions, the approach enables those who invest in projects that will sequester carbon from the atmosphere to claim carbon credits (or carbon ‘offsets’), which can either be ‘netted off’ against the owner’s emissions, or sold on to other emitters via emissions-trading schemes. ... over the past decade, a number of large-scale emissions-trading schemes have been establi...