Category: Blog

COVID-19 testing is the bottleneck in managing the pandemic. Can we open-source testing?

People in East Asia learnt from SARS, that open knowledge networks across society are the best way to enable people to contextually coordinate and adapt to a pandemic. Opaque decisions informing a command-and-control attitude cost lives and increase the dangers associated with broad interventions from above. I have indicated here and here why this is…
What culling corvids tells me about the UK government response to COVID-19

I spent five years of my life trying to work out why people around me were shooting so many corvids (crows and magpies). They told me the corvids were stealing their partridges and rabbits. What I saw was that it was fun to spend the day with some friends out roaming the countryside. I saw…
Scenarios for C19 in the UK

WHAT IS THIS? These are pen portraits of possible scenarios for viral contagion and government response in the UK. They give some broad indication of what the status of contagion will be dependent on accompanying government measures. I am trying to give myself a starting point for thinking how to plan for the next two…
Interferons, Plants and Viruses: One ‘likely’ way to prepare yourself for C19 and other viral infections

A longstanding Cuban antiviral is being reported as one of the medications used in China for people infected with COVID-19 coronavirus (C19). It acts as “a protective mechanism, preventing patients from getting worse, reaching a severe stage, with death as the outcome”. The antiviral is ‘Interferon Alpha 2b’. It has proven effective for viruses with…
What’s Next for The UK Left – 2

Part 2 – Notes For An Agricultural Revolution component of a Green New Deal. The UK does not have its Green Industrial Revolution or Green New Deal. At least not yet. The UK does not have a leftwing, progressive, green or labour government. At least not yet. What the UK does have right now is…
On Jackfruits and Halloumi

A tweet from the #ORFC conference I am following on twitter. My rapid reponse: I agree but there is a dimension that would need addressing if such a scenario were to be part of any blanket policy. This is the question of how and where you locate ‘britishness’ or ‘culturalness’ as property and territorial relation.…
How Fire Reveals Denial All Around

“Concerns about global warming, degradation of fragile ecosystems, and environmental and societal collapse have increased interest in lessons and solutions for today’s environmental issues. Popular writers have turned to a classic degradation thesis of deforestation and presumed desertification within the Eastern Mediterranean as a cautionary tale of how past societies have committed ecological suicide. However,…
What’s Next for The UK Left?

Part 1 – Notes For A Left Land Politics in the Global North The Left has remerged in the UK through working within the party political system rather than against it. We see this with the mass membership movement that has led Jeremy Corbyn to be repeatedly elected as leader of the UK Labour Party.…
Semiosis

This book was brought to my attention by the amazing reading group Anthropocene Exploratory. It documents successive generations of people who attempt to make an alien planet home. Where the first generation are self-selecting ‘refugees’ from an Earth ravaged by war and environmental disaster. The abiding feeling that hit me as I delved deeper into…
2040 FilmReview

This flash documentary attracted my attention as it explicitly describes itself as focussing on regeneration rather than conservation, protection, sustainability etc. That is it overcomes the two main principles of dominant environmental narratives; assuming people are by default exploitative and that the living environment or ‘resources’ are zero-sum and finite. Regenerative agriculture and agroforestry have…
Its not playing god when its done so stupidly: the case of mosquito population control by genetic modification

A recent study shows that the introduction of genetically modified mosquitos to control the population of free mosquitos in south america has at best not worked, at worst made the situation a lot worse. The story goes that with the spread of the Zika virus, amongst other viruses lethal to humans, the idea to try…
Disobedient Being – Prague Workshop

‘Despite the attempts of governing and bordering, no beings behave as they are expected to do. Indian migrants in the Gulf do not necessarily want to be naturalised, parakeets enjoy the London winter despite their tropical origins, boars eat sandwiches and roam in playgrounds despite the fact they are depicted as “wild”, and binational couples…
Zama FilmReview

Disturbing? Beautiful? Yes. But not in an abstractly exaggerated way. In a sweat meets mud, meets atmospheres, meets skin meets other skins way. A film that starts as intriguing, moves into the kafkaesque, wriths in a disconcerting expedition and ends with the cut of exhausted acceptance. This is a film all about entanglement, that laughs…
Upstream Colour FilmReview

An unusual almost verbally silent film that follows the flow of how multiple species’ lives are layered into each other. Where one life begins and one ends is not so clear, reflecting how entangled life is. It is not that there are not ‘individuals’ or ‘persons’, just that they are not bounded. This flow of…
Regenerative Guilds

Techniques of enrichment rather than sustaining, saving, degrading or exploiting a landscape, are numerous but remain conceptually dispersed or primitivized. These techniques challenge the premise that the environment (socially conceived) is fixed and finite and humans are by default exploitative. They challenge the political dichotomy of wild and domesticated, that supports the practice of saving…