A couple of fantastic articles

Both of these articles use a really interesting digital interface, incorporating the text with images/ videos/ animations/ links. I think this is a fascinating new direction for journalism, turning an article into a more visually immersive and interactive experience.

'It's Not Climate Change, It's Everything Change' by Margaret Atwood

'How will we fill 9 billion bowls by 2050?'

'This Changes Everything' - the film

I'm so excited for this:

How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

Link: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here’s how we can move beyond the impasse. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/how-to-talk-about-climate-change-so-people-will-listen/375067/

Last night I went along to this film screening of ‘Hot Air’ (click here for the youtube trailer.) There were countless moments in this documentary when I had to hold my head in my hands, or found myself swearing out loud. Especially when one MP being interviewed said something along the lines of: 'Coal is not a renewable resource. It’s a bit like having money in the bank if you’re dying. So the best thing to do is to mine it, and use it, to benefit the economy while you can. In that way, you could almost say that coal is a renewable resource!’

The documentary follows the tactics employed by the government over the past few decades to deny, spread doubt, and delay any action whatsoever, regarding climate change. This in favour of expanding our coal industry - only marginally cheaper than other energy sources yet entirely unsustainable and environmentally destructive. The New Zealand government’s total inaction regarding climate change - and the 25% increase in our carbon emissions in the past couple of decades, the opening of more coal mines, nationwide deforestation for new dairy farms, and withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol - is absolutely shameful.

Jeanette Fitzsimmon’s talk afterwards was no doubt the highlight of the event. While the film finishes on an unresolved note, leaving the audience shocked and feeling as if the situation is hopeless, her common sense optimism restored my sense that change is possible. But as she puts it, change doesn’t come from the government. That is, parliament cannot - or will not - initiate change, as the documentary proved all too well. As she puts it, the government will be the very last to respond to climate change and they will only do so once the general public have made it loud and clear that that is what we want.

Basically what I got out of this event was the sense that it is my duty not only to make positive change on a personal level, but also to do as much as I can to contribute to the noise.

An interesting concept that Jeanette mentioned was that in traditional Maori culture, the standard of forward thinking was to ask: will this last for the next 7 generations? Whereas our government only thinks three years ahead…

Everything You Do is Unethical, So Get Off Your High Horse Already | VICE | United States

Link: Everything You Do is Unethical, So Get Off Your High Horse Already | VICE | United States

Every single thing you do is unethical. If you didn’t just dab yourself with a wet, Dr. Bronner’s covered rag this morning in lieu of a shower, consider yourself an unethical fuck-up.

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert

Link: Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert

“What is wrong with us?” Naomi Klein asks near the start of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, her ambitious new polemic. Her answer turns upside-down the narrative that the country’s largest environmental groups have been telling.

“Klein contends not just that emission trends can be turned around in time, but that pretty much everything else that’s wrong with society today—inequality, unemployment, the lack of access in large parts of the world to electricity or clean water or health care—can be righted in the process. Climate change, she writes, “if treated as a true planetary emergency,” could “become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”