Making farming cool again

Michael Pollan is one of the clearest, most compelling advocates to common sense approach to food than pretty much anyone else that I've come across. There's an excellent download of hos talk, available for free, just here. Good background reading for anyone coming to play at Hay on Earth this year.

Fancy a Flutter

The Clock of the Long Now is a short, thought provoking book that's worth a read sometime soon. One interesting project that's spun off the Long Now Foundation's website is also something worth keeping an eye on. You can take bets and make prodictions against people ranging from Kevin Kelly to Warren Buffet. You'll need to stick around for a while to pick up some of the winnings:

http://www.longbets.org/bets

Take your eyes off the road

Take your eyes off the road from Andy Middleton on Vimeo.

It's getting ever more important to find ways to connect to wider communities, and find out what's going on in the next field. It's easier sometimes than others, and this moment of awareness in the Gwaun Valley in Pembrokeshire whilst on an 80m  tour of north Pembrokeshire by bike with tyf-er Ross, was magical. Stopping occasionally to notice what was going on made it all the more so.

Fast chocolate

A lovely story popped into my inbox this week that hints at low we value our imagination. Warwick's University's chocolate powered car is a great example of innovation and story telling. Carrot fibre is excellent for strength, as is starch. If we can innovate like this, surely we're capable of imagining our way to an 80% descent from carbon that gets us off oil. I'd rather eat chocolate than power racing cars, but that's a different story

Warwick chocolate car

Doversity

Reparum res venio velociter according to Babelfish

Make good things happen quickly according to the art of do.

On Tuesday I spoke at a government funded community climate change event with Emma Louise Hardman and Emma Metcalf from the Do Programme.

We started to map out Do Connect, a time line of the real action that is needed to make an 80% reductions in CO2 emissions in 5000 days

Do Connect is about business, community and government learning to play together and put actions on paper, with dates and names. For real. Now. We're taking this to 400 people in the next two weeks.

It’s about the art of making good stuff happen, without asking too many questions or procrastination, with good intent and good people. That’s why it feels so good.

Lots more of that coming up at the Do Lectures, which we're busy shaping up now, topped up by an excellent morning of laid back cappuccino meetings in St Davids. Ross tells me that the October intake of the Do Programme is looking good too. Do dandy.