Big Kudos to anyone who can tell me [no Googling] which obscure science fiction writer used the title. He was obsessed by P. K. Dick too, man had quite good taste.

Anyways, people from Okcon came over on Sunday, after the conference, and one of them showed me, Window Farms, what great fun and a good mixture of the geeky and the greenie, all in one package.

To quote the BBC website, verbatim:

Monthly forecasting

The weather beyond about a week ahead stretches even the most experienced weather

forecaster. Complex numerical weather forecast models from the Met Office and the

European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) are run many times for

the month (and season) ahead to build up a picture of the likelihood of different weather

types affecting the UK.

So, when your 'government' or 'industry', either national or local tells you that they are going to mitigate, you may reply 'mitigate what, exactly?' If there are man-created instabilities we don't know exactly what they will bring, a good reason to rachet back all our economic nonsense. However, if we manage to break the Atlantic conveyor and our winters start getting really cold (this year is nothing much, think Moscow), this may solve some of our problems for us.

Well, with the sacking of the drugs advisor we see a certain pragmatic absurdity (big tobacco and big alcohol are fantastic revenue earners and a large slice of what we jokingly call 'industry') creep into government's thinking. Science yes, but not if it involves (makes quote gesture) 'evidence' and 'independent thought'.

Why does this matter so much to environmental activism? Well most of the descriptions of the current problems, likely outcomes and remedies are science-based.They are not based on what would suit us (although I suspect that life without cars might be rather pleasant) or pragmatic/political deals with the devil or (our current political/industrial posture) greenwash and tokenism. We're going to actually have to do something and measure it.

Went to Oxford to a meeting at OSS Watch. This is an open source advisory service for higher education and further education. During this, and all the associated anoraky discussions that make these things such a pleasure (to me, anyway), I met Paul who has written a fine apple map for Frome.

I think in the next few weeks, we might think about an adaptation for Hackney or for the whole East End?

Interview at Buddhist Economics Conference This is a transcript of the interview I gave in April during the Buddhist Economics conference. I've put it here because radical-economic-replumbing (to coin a phrase) should be (my opinion, of course) part of any comprehensive green agenda.

It's the hard bit though, we believe so firmly that economics works in only one way. My central tenet is that exchange and storage of value is merely technology but one that we have allowed to master us, in recent (well, 500 years or so) times. It's within our gift to correct it, if we should so decide.

Actually, Schumacher said it a lot better than anyone, up to now, bringing us back to a Buddhist Economics conference in a predominantly Buddhist country.

Since I've been talking to a number of people about this recently, I thought I'd post it, as well. For example, the goal of an ALMO or government department is to spend the budget by the end of the fiscal year, energywise, anyway this is the 'wrong' goal, a deep defect which will always lead to waste and inefficiency.

Secondly, on the level of saving energy, this observation about the visible meters, is immediately useful and has many wider implications about visible feedback (real-time pollution levels, for example).

Here's a link to the recent book, too.

About three years ago in Thailand, I was talking to Professor Apichai about community currencies, especially the village coupon currencies (which are low-tech, no computers there). He explained to me that some of the national currency  that entered the system to back the currency was generated by the sale of manure. So I've been thinking of adapting this idea to the western city.

Simply put, we make a deal with the council to be credited for the kitchen and green waste that is mass-composted. Them we use the credits and compost for further projects, starting a small but very virtuous circle.

This is unlike Recyclebank because it is large scale and the credits are not used for consumer 'rewards' (which creat other negative externalities) they are used for green projects and, in general, for collective benefit.

I'll post the complete paper, when I've finished it!