Doors of Perception

(Summer re-run: first published July 2009) This scary hand smashing through the wall to get you is the logo of last month’s Insead conference on social entrepreneurship. Its slogan was “Reaching For Impact”. I’ve written critically here before about the assumptions that underly “design for development” - so I won’t repeat the whole argument. And as I said here we are all emerging economies now. So let’s just say that I’m troubled about the term “design for social impact” when the desired impact is on someone else’s turf, not on the designer’s own. The language of Nesta’s new “Re-boot Britain” programme also strikes me as off-key. A complex society in transition is not best imagined as a faulty machine.

(Summer re-run) I'm reading reading a moving and important book by Sharon Astyk called "Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front". Uniquely among recent books on life after the Peaks - energy, protein, biodiversity etc - Astyk does not write to scare us all witless. She does not write about elaborate ways to fix The Economy. She does not even furnish a shopping list of green tools and equipment that we can all buy as evidence that we are Doing Something. (This latter prohibition is a particular disappointment to Kristi and me: we've been compiling a shopping list of high-end fruit dryers, choucroute kits, and grain grinders, that we were about to send to our friends before

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last year that Japan's debt path was 'out of control'. Simon warned of "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default". [The IMF expects Japan's gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, 227pc next year, and 246pc by 2014]. I really don't understand this scaremongering and negative thinking at all. Japan must be full of money, because there are so many beautiful things to spend it on. Last year, for example, I visited a gorgeous shop in Tokyo called SunFruits. In it, one of these melons was on sale for only 21,000 Yen [euros

(Summer re-run: first published 12 March 2009) The criminal over-development of the Canary Islands – and the loss of biodiversity and social capital that followed - was financed by the same banks and speculators that our governments are now trying so desperately to save. Given the desecration of these beautiful islands, the bankers who financed it all do not deserve to be saved. A more fitting fate would have them turned into biomass and returned as fertiliser to the land they have despoiled. These uncharitable thoughts are prompted by my visit this week to the second Biennale of the Canary Islands Its theme is “Silencio” - but it took me a while to get into this spirit on arrival