With an aging population, Italy has a growing number of shrinking towns – and thousands that have been more or less abandoned. Here’s a story about how one town used community energy to revive their situation.
I wrote an article on climate and race for the ethics department at Tubingen University in Germany: “This is the racial injustice of climate change: not that the climate crisis discriminates against people on the basis of race, but that people of colour live in the places most affected, while causing very few of the emissions that drive the harm.”
Also on the topic of race, Natalie Obiko Pearson investigates the systemic racism of international schools – something that reflects my own experience of an elite school in Kenya, and how invisible it seemed to me at the time.
This striking graphic from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air tracks every shipment of fossil fuels out of Russia during the Ukraine invasion. You can watch them on a map, and see who’s contributed to the $46 billion Russia has made from fossil fuels since the attack began.
A new experimental electric car from Mercedes has travelled over 1,000 kilometres on a single charge, driving from Germany, through Switzerland and Italy to the French coast. It suggests that range anxiety is not going to be a permanent feature of electric vehicles.
Some highlights from this week:
How climate change is devastating Madagascar
Madagascar has always had a cyclone season, but this one is particularly bad. The country has been hit by a succession of five tropical storms and cyclones, with a sixth brewing in the Mozambique Channel right now. This, according to World Weather Attribution, is a climate change disaster. To be specific, climate change increases the…
What I learned from hosting a Little Free Library
When my family moved to Madagascar when I was little, we sent our belongings in a shipping container. It arrived a few months after we did, with lots of boxes of books. Since books weren’t readily available in the country, let alone in English, this was basically what we had to go on for the…
How to upcycle a skyscraper
This is the Amp Building at 50 Bridge Street in Sydney. It was built in the mid-seventies, with 45 storeys of office space. Looking rather tired, it was slated for refurbishment a few years ago, and just re-opened in a completely different form. The Danish architects 3XN removed the old glass and concrete facade, and…
The Earthbound Report 