revelation

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discusses Oedipus with Ralph Fiennes,

'The process of revelation in the play is as interesting as what is revealed. ' more ...

other people

Nick Elliot, ITV's head of drama (1995-2007), gives his advice to dramatists writing for mainstream ITV and BBC1,

'the key word is empathy. Ordinary viewers need to identify with a sympathetic leading character or set of characters. (These are hopefully played by a relatively small band of actors that inspire loyalty and affection. Usually these actors had some comedy in them and didn't take themselves terribly seriously.) This means avoiding characters (and actors) who are cold, supercilious, cool or trendy.

Avoid situations that ordinary people in ordinary Britain find hard to relate to - metropolitan life, showbiz, journalism, politics, fashion, business. And if you only know those worlds get out of London and meet some other people.



Don't be dark and depressing and don't give us a message of despair or cynicism. We're probably looking for some entertainment so give us colour, pace and a clear concept that can be marketed and understood.

Finally - and this bit is sometimes difficult - don't give us something we've already seen or is very similar to something on another channel.'
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unimpressed

Jonathan Raban writes about Sarah Palin's appeal,

'Importantly, she’s unimpressed by ‘science’, whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction.'

more ...

glorious mud

Our leading land artist Richard Long talks to me about mud, Bristol and his relationship to green politics. more ...

low-priority issue

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of 'The Death of Environmentalism', argue that

'Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press' top 20 priorities. By contrast, public concern about gasoline and energy prices has shifted dramatically. '

Gas prices have become the second-highest concern after the economy. more ...

polluter pays

Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz applies green principles to the financial crisis

'In environmental economics, there is a basic concept called the polluter pays principle. It is a matter of fairness, but also of efficiency. Wall Street has polluted our economy with toxic mortgages. It should now pay for the cleanup.' more ...

cuts

The UK's Met Office says cutting global emissions by 3% a year from 2010 offers the only possible hope of avoiding a global temperature rise of more than 2C. more ...

focus

'a vision that uses the environment and its complexity as the focus of all that happens, rather than merely as grim set dressing or allegorical overlay.'

Time magazine nominates science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson as one of its environmental heroes. more ...

platonic ideal

Clive James does another of those rare interviews with Tom Stoppard.

James: You made philosophy dramatic. So did Plato, of course.

Stoppard: Yes, but I made it funny.

(Part 2: 04.15) more ...

green radio

The UK's only green radio station Passion for the Planet has been
shortlisted in the BT Radio Station of the Year Awards. more ...

hair raising

If every man on Earth grew a beard, the resulting saving in shaving-related energy would be enough by itself to head off disaster. more ...

on his bike

Great post from No Impact Man. An open letter to NY State Senator Jeff Klein, who yesterday called me a f---ing assh-le after nearly hitting me with his Mercedes. more ...

on target

The National Theatre has set itself a target of a 20% reduction in use of gas and electricity (taking 2006 as a benchmark). Today it published its annual report. So far there has been an 18% reduction in gas and 10% reduction in electricity. more ...

d'oh, baby, d'oh

At the Republican convention in St. Paul, Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in chanting 'drill, baby, drill'. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet - is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. "Typewriters, baby, typewriters." more ...

close, not so close

Global warming? 'I believe it's just God hugging us closer'. Tina Fey does Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. The Daily Dish gives us what Sarah Palin says she says about climate change and what she's actually said. more ...

man and beast

If you thought Darwin was a dangerous thinker, the New Yorker reminds us that Machiavelli was equally controversial and just as misunderstood,

The Prince offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight. more ...

small brother

Big Brother panders to greed, vanity and voyeurism, says Edward Skidelsky. And from a liberal standpoint, there's nothing that can be said against it. But there's a new ethics emerging,

'One small example can be found at Tinker's Bubble, Somerset. Here, a small community of environmentalists farm 40 acres of woodland, orchards and pasture. The land is held in common. No grid electricity or fossil fuel is used; power comes from solar panels and a wood-fuelled steam engine. The community's aim is to "live lightly on the earth"—to contribute as little as possible to the portending environmental catastrophe.'
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soccer moms pose ethical dilemma

Peter Singer warmly endorses Dale Jamieson's new book on environmentalism and ethics:

'The “soccer mom” who drives her kids to sporting events and music lessons seems to be a model of virtue – yet she and millions of other equally virtuous people are, collectively, bringing about climate change. To take account of these large collective-action problems, we need a radically new set of virtues.' more ...

the rest is silence

One of the most literate and prolific bloggers around, Andrew Sullivan also articulates a brand of green conservatism. But in the last couple of days, Sullivan's blog has gone almost silent - leaving just a few tantalising clues. One is a quote from Wittgenstein (which translates as 'What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence'), a second is a picture of a sunset, and a third is a clip from Desperate Housewives, where a small boy called Andrew is forced by his mother to apologise to a neighbour. There's feverish speculation among his fans that Sullivan's heated attacks on Sarah Palin have led to calls from his employers at Atlantic Monthly for an apology. And Sullivan won't.
Lunchtime update: 7.27am (his time), and he's back. more ...

going down

London theatres emit 50,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum and the Mayor's office, Nica Burns from SOLT and the Theatres Trust are confident this can be reduced by 60% (from 1990 levels) by 2025 without any negative impact on the quality of the work. more ...

mental exercise

Tom Stoppard says theatre is 'first and foremost a recreation. But it's not just a children's playground; it can be recreation for people who like to stretch their minds.' more ...

looks interesting

The best way to get people to go green, says No Impact Man, is to do what Tom Sawyer did,

Tom Sawyer had to paint a fence. So he sat on the ground and concentrated with all his might and made painting look like the most interesting thing he'd ever done. Soon enough, Huck Finn came along, saw how interested Tom Sawyer looked, and asked if he could paint, too. more ...

data doesn't sizzle

One of the characters in the climate-change comedy Sizzle says that too often scientists believe 'the only solution is to use what always works, which is data.'

'Having data is crucial', writes the New Scientist, 'and abandoning scientific objectivity would be a huge blunder. The biggest mistake, as Sizzle makes amusingly clear and real life makes tragically so, is assuming that data and logic alone will motivate people into action.' more ...

missing tragedy

In his 1968 article 'The Tragedy of the Commons', the science professor Garrett Hardin used the word "tragedy" as Aristotle did:

'to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character's actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. "Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."'

Ian Angus argues that the evidence for this simply isn't there. (HT: Arts and Letters) more ...

the ether

The director and performer of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, David Hare and Vanessa Redgrave, discuss art and politics. 'As a political writer,' Hare says, 'I believe certain things that non-political writers don't believe.' Chief among them, that your circumstances change who you are. 'There is no neutral ether.' more ...

green words

Should we say 'climate change' or 'global warming'? I wrote about how neither phrase quite works. BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth picked up on this and interviewed MEP Caroline Lucas, Futerra's Ed Gillespie and myself on what green words to use and what one word or phrase we'd like to ban. Programme repeated at 11pm tonight. more ...

break

This blog returns Monday 1st September. more ...

artists on science

Flyover covers art in the American outback. It says, 'We have scientists on the arts, but where are the artists on science?'

In the UK this picture is changing, thanks in part to Cape Farewell and Tipping Point. A big moment will be the publication of Ian McEwan's climate-change novel. more ...

barely articulated

Novelist and travel-writer Jonathan Raban suggests the real dividing line in America's 2004 general election was over environmentalism:

'Beneath the talk of Iraq, health care, terrorism, gun control, abortion and all the rest lay a barely articulated but passionate dispute about the nature of nature in America.'

(Interview, not article, online.) more ...

ABC on scepticism

'Scepticism about climate change is still given astonishing prominence in some western media.' (Rowan Williams) more ...