We've had an amazing response to the Natural Change Project that we designed and led for WWF-Scotland. Many people have also asked to learn more about how the programme is facilitated...

"When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data.

"But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse."

Many of our current technological and institutional responses to climate change are actually making us less resilient to coping with it.

This fascinating academic paper on 'Panarchy' and complex systems suggests that the more interconnected and efficient a system is, the less capacity it has to cope with change - turning contemporary approaches to building social resilience on their head...

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art15/

Richard Heinberg's August newsletter makes very interesting reading,

'But why are both the U.S. economy and the larger global economy ailing? Among the mainstream media, world leaders, and America’s economists-in-chief (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) there is near-unanimity of opinion: these recent troubles are primarily due to a combination of bad real estate loans and poor regulation of financial derivatives...

...But what if this diagnosis is fundamentally flawed?'

See the full article: http://heinberg.wordpress.com/

Alan Milburn’s recently published report, 'Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions' points to a tricky and fundamental paradox.

What to do with financial instuitions that are too big to fail? Simply make them smaller!

Some suggestions from the US include having an upper size limit for companies or establishing insurance to protect the innocent.

Lord Myners has apparently ‘made the City think’. This is a good thing in any case – but particularly good in that he was concerned to distinguish between ‘investors’, who are good at buying and selling shares, and ‘owners’, who have an interest and care about the companies they own. He wanted more owning, floating ideas such as greater voting rights for those shareholders who stay with the company, as in France.

What is sad is that this common sense approach to a real problem was characterised as ‘radical’.

Not only has the recent collapse in the global economy devastated peoples lives, it appears to have pushed the ever-increasing threat of climate change from people’s minds. Yet could the economic crisis present an opportunity to build a sustainable future?

Join Nicholas Stern – renowned author of The Stern Review and A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, Leo Murray – Media Producer of The Age of Stupid, and Andrew Price, author of Slow-tech: Manifesto for an Over-wound World, as they discuss how our economically destructive past could become an environmentally sustainable future.

The debate will be chaired by Louise Macdonald, Chair of RSA Scotland and Footprint/WWF Natural Change Project participant.

http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/climate-for-change--from-economic-crash-to-eco-recovery