Peter Smith

Sir Richard Attenborough & his Beaver Obsession Tributes pour in for this great man but it is fitting that just as his death marks and end of a venerated British Institution, his secret passion is flourishing and may be the best legacy of his life. Beavers are finally returning to Britain. And the story of beavers in Britain looks like a script for a future film; this battle of cinematic proportions is breaking out as we speak to save these beavers form the dark forces of dominion and insidious privilege that Sir Richard so detested. Many of Sir Richard’s most ardent admirers are today mourning his parting, but the many who understand his beaver obsession are preparing to do battle in the British countryside and stop the dark forces about to be unleashed upon the beavers in an attempt to remove them from the riverbanks of Devon’s river Otter. Sir Richard, though not  immediately taken by the profound story of the beaver was fascinated by his mother’s and brother ...

Hooray GDP is up, headlines are plastered across the papers this weekend. The UK beats GDP growth of all the major G7 countries. Britain can be proud of the work of our great financial leaders have done restoring the wealth to our country. But what does GDP measure, well the answer is not a lot. And a lot of our growth is just the fallout of lending more money into the housing bubble (which will come back to haunt us very soon, robbing the poor & hard working to feed the rich & lazy) As my Friend Fried Harrison points out in his thesis on 'ecocide'  http://www.sharetherents.org/thesis/just-prices-riches-nature/ "Driving the destruction are land-use and tax policies that reward speculators who engage in urban sprawl. We wreck habitats (deforestation), dump waste into the oceans, and even the heavens are littered with waste from disintegrating satellites. The catalogue of disasters cannot be blamed on nature. "People do not behave in such reckless ways wi...

"The Pricing of Everything" by George Monbiot: I loved Monbiot's latest lecture.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/jul/24/price-nature-neoliberal-capital-road-ruin He evens mentions Land Value Tax, but did not explore its link with the protection of nature and properly valuing nature. But there is one thing I disagree with in that we can use a system of valuing nature in our economic system, that does not have the downsides he so rightly points out in the failings of the Neo Classical economic consensus that is so fundamentally flawed. There is nothing wrong with ‘valuing nature’ the problem is not ‘valuing’ it properly, which Monbiot has been spot on. Efforts to value nature so far are complete rubbish, then even more importantly how does that value get internalised into our economy – again the neo-liberal ideas are pure rubbish in an economic sense.  But there is a way to value nature in a way that helps the economy and helps preserv...