Arthur Koestler [1905 – 1983] made a major impact by shining a light on the need of fair, humane conditions for people in detention. He published harrowing accounts of his own imprisonments at the beginning of WW2 and lobbied against capital punishment, which was still legal in the UK at the time. In 1962, he personally initiated and sponsored the Arthur Koestler Award.
Disability is diverse and subjective. Many people develop long-term health conditions, and when that happens, two things occur: firstly, everything becomes intensely medical, to ‘cure’ or ‘manage’ the condition. Secondly, there’s no handbook for becoming or identifying as disabled. Sometimes there may be a cognitive dissonance regarding what condition a person lives with and an acceptance of that as disabling.
With on-going environmental destruction around the world and insufficient action being done to tackle climate change, the question arises: why is humanity seemingly bent on making the planet uninhabitable?
It’s bin day and you’ve done your job: carefully separating the plastics from paper, paper from cardboard, cardboard from glass, and food waste from everything else. By the evening the streets are cleared and your recycling is out of sight and mind. But where has it gone?
Living in the Middle East, we are lucky enough to enjoy year-round sunshine and beautiful beaches where we can easily explore the underwater world and the coral reefs scattered across the coast. Unfortunately, coral reefs around the world are dying due to damaging activities such as coral mining, pollution, overfishing and climate change – to name just a few issues.
This week, we interviewed Dr. Morgan Phillips, co-director of the Glacier Trust, an NGO that enables climate change adaptation in Nepal. Morgan is author of the upcoming book Great Adaptations.
Disability representation in publishing is on the rise. The Publishers Association stated in their 2020 diversity and inclusion report that the proportion of people within the workforce with disabilities has risen from 5% in 2018 to 8% in 2020. Despite this increase, disability remains under-represented: according to the Publishers Association, there are 13.3 million disabled people in the UK – just under one-fifth of the population.
The term ‘Just Transition’ has come from the trade union movement and encapsulates their demand that workers do not lose out in the move away from fossil fuels towards a zero carbon economy. Those whose jobs will be lost need to be given support and training to move into new jobs in transforming our buildings, energy system and transport.
The decades-long debate over climate change has had a particularly unfair impact on the world’s younger generation. Not only are they inheriting the massive and unprecedented problem of climate change, but most are not getting the right level of education to know what to do with this unfortunate inheritance.
Actor Joaquin Phoenix said in his Oscar acceptance speech that “When we use love and compassion as our guiding principles we can develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings, and to the environment.”
About the same time this speech was given, in early 2020, the Systems Change Alliance (SCA) was formed by a small group of people from different countries. Like Phoenix, we also believe that implementing change with love and compassion is the best way to save both people and planet.