Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 21

Five examples of highway removal

A few weeks ago I wrote about how highways can divide communities and create long-lasting social problems in cities. Removing highways and bringing neighbourhoods back together can be a powerful act of restoration and regeneration, and it’s great to see the US government committing funds to doing this in several major cities. As a follow up, here are some examples of where highway removal has already been done, and the difference it has made to those places.

Seoul – The Korean capital put hi...

Who tops the Happy Planet Index in 2024?

As some people have been warning for over half a century, Gross Domestic Product is unfit as a measure of progress. GDP growth only tells about how much economic activity is going on, and nothing about whether it’s useful or not, or who is benefiting from it. And yet every politician with a chance of senior leadership in the UK is passionately committed to the idea.

One reason GDP persists is that it’s a nice simple number, and so anyone looking to critique it is expected to present their al...

What we learned this week

It’s been an odd experience this week seeing articles from the BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera and the Guardian, all describing a collapsed dam in Old Kijabe, and knowing that there is no dam on that river – see this week’s post. There have been three more landslides since the big one that made the news, and it is still raining. If you can support my friends that are pumping water, clearing mud and organising aid, please donate through the Kijabe Forest Trust or Eden Projects.

A work related link to pa...

Can you stand with me for the Kijabe Forest?

When I was a teenager I attended a high school on the slopes of the Rift Valley in Kenya, and we used to go hiking in the Kijabe Forest. We would climb over the fence at the back of school and scramble up onto the railway tracks. Then we’d follow them around the contours of the hills, and cut off into the woods.

One favourite spot was where a river came down the escarpment. You could jump from rock to rock up the river and come to a series of waterfalls. Or could you climb down from the trac...

The value of repair

On the off-chance that you’re in Helsinki some time soon, you’ll be able to drop in on what sounds like a very good exhibition. FIX: Care and Repair is being held jointly across the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum, and it celebrates the idea of repair as part of Finnish culture.

“The skills to fix and repair garments, houses and furniture have been passed down through the generations,” says co-curator Sara Martinsen. “The fact that woodwork and handicrafts are still part...

Book review: Rooted, by Sarah Langford

Sarah Langford didn’t expect to write a book about farming. She is a lawyer and lives in the city. But she was the grandchild of farmers, and events led her and her family back into farming almost by accident. This book tells her story, along with the stories of other farmers at a time of profound change in the sector.

As the book describes, farming’s reputation has changed in recent decades. At the end of the Second World War Britain was intensely vulnerable when it came to food. Ration...

What we learned this week

Carbon Brief’s State of the Climate shows how 2024 has begun with a series of record warm months, making this another record breaking year. Already.

Interesting to see names like RSPB and National Trust among the supporters of the Restore Nature Now march on Saturday 22nd of June. Could be one of the larger environmental protest marches of recent years if you’d like to attend.

I’m in the market for a new fence at the moment after a couple of panel casualties over the winter. And this new ...

Britain’s first biophilic school

Now that I’m spending more time working with schools, I expect I’ll end up writing more often about school related climate solutions. I make no apology for that when it’s a story like this one: Britain’s first biophilic primary school, which opened in December 2023.

St Mary’s Voluntary Catholic Academy, in Derby, was burnt down in an arson attack three years ago. It’s now been rebuilt from the ground up, in what is being described as the country’s greenest school.

Others have made that c...

Voice of vanilla

80% of the world’s vanilla comes from Madagascar. Producing it is a highly specialist form of agriculture. Vanilla is the only edible food that comes from orchids, and orchids are jungle primadonnas of the highest order. It’s not easy work, and it’s not well paid, despite the very high value of vanilla to the global food trade.

Voice of Vanilla is a film-making project to document the lives of vanilla farmers. It’s a work in progress, and the team are currently raising funds to make a featur...

Book review: Abolish the Monarchy, by Graham Smith

Over the Easter holidays I had a stump to dig out in the garden. It was going to be a long job, so I decided to choose an audiobook to accompany the task. Something I wouldn’t normally get round to reading. And since I was going to spend all day hacking at something obsolete but hard to uproot, a book about abolishing the monarchy seemed ironically appropriate.

I can feel some readers bristling already, so let me summarise my views of the monarchy so you know where I’m coming from. My in...