Why photos of One Direction won't save us from global warming

New research from universities in the US, Australia and the UK has tested how different pictures make people feel about whether climate change is important, and whether they can do something about it… Researchers showed people images used to illustrate newspaper climate change stories. They mostly split into three categories: pictures of climate impacts, energy futures - meaning new energy sources like solar panels - and pictures of celebrities and politicians.

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Just Published: New Selected Poems by Robert Minhinnick (Special Offer)

Carcanet is delighted to announce the publication of New Selected Poems by Robert Minhinnick.

To order a copy of New Selected Poems at the special pre-publication price of £11 (RRP £12.95), please go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the code MINHINNICK at the checkout. Alternatively, telephone (+44)161 843 8730

New Selected Poems is a poet’s choice of over thirty years’ work. Minhinnick’s poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes ‘An Opera in Baghdad’ as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.

Cover photograph © Eamon Bourke

 

Bridgend's Fairtrade County status renewed!

It’s official! Bridgend’s Fairtrade County status has been renewed!

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M&S first UK retailer to become fully "carbon neutral"

M&S Report Summary June 2012M&S is the first major UK retailer to become fully ‘carbon neutral’, the company, five years after launching its sustainability project, ‘Plan A’.

The company also now recycles 100% of its waste. Of its food waste from stores, 89% goes straight to anaerobic digestors to generate energy and the rest is composted. And 31% of M&S products – £3bn worth — now have a Plan A attribute such as Fairtrade, organic or made from recycled material. The longer-term goal is that by 2020, all M&S products – nearly three billion sold annually – will have at least one sustainable characteristic.

The retailer had aimed to triple sales of organic food and drink by 2012. But while sales of Fairtrade products have increased by 88% -and organic products are popular in its 300 cafes – sales of organic products in store remain broadly the same as in 2007.

And it has also fallen slightly short of its target that by 2012 100% of wood, such as kitchenware and furniture, would be FSC or equivalent or recycled, reporting that the figure was 84%.

Guardian article

The full report by Marks & Spencer (large PDF file, will take time to load)