Nobody ever rioted for austerity.

Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.

Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?