Is global warming now irreversible? Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes it is and that catastrophe is inevitable. His reason, (in The Guardian)
‘I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but [...]

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Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.
Read more in The Independent…

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Maude Barlow’s new book about the water crisis is a call to arms to protect a fundamental human right.
From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world’s water woes. Her newest book, Blue Covenant: [...]

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Where are you going?
‘Do you treat life as a journey, with a destination or as a stroll, with no particular objective?
If you do see life as a journey - what is your destination, where are you going? ‘
Neill Crofts is founding father and the brain behind a  great new concept: Authentic Leadership & Authentic Transformation. [...]

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The creation of an independent Kosovar state highlights the singular relationship between the Albanians of this former Yugoslav territory and their cousins in the Republic of Albania. The scholar and translator Robert Elsie reflects on a turbulent, unfinished history.
Read more at openDemocracy…
or take a look at the BalkanInsight website…

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“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises
A great exhibition on view in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, [...]

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Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic [...]

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Jacqueline Novogratz is pioneering new ways of tackling poverty. In her view, traditional charity rarely delivers lasting results. Her solution, outlined here through a series of revealing personal stories, is “patient capital”: support for “bottom of the pyramid” businesses which the commercial market alone couldn’t provide. The result: sustainable jobs, goods, services — and dignity [...]

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