Fairtrade history in the Netherlands

Yesterday I visited a little piece of Fairtrade history: while visiting my parents in Leiden, we visited the Wereld Winkel, literally "world shop". Wereld Winkel was the world's first ever Fairtrade shop, founded in the Netherlands in 1969 and now has 250 branches across the country. The focus was upon fairly traded handicrafts that give people the chance to use traditional skills to create products for the Western market. However, this was relatively limited in its impact at first, since a lot of learning was required on both sides to predict what people wanted to buy (with variable strands in fashion) and to achieve the quality that consumers desired in return for the slightly higher price. 

Max Havelaar, the first Fairtrade mark

York is home to a groundbreaking Fairtrade shop too: Shared Earth was founded in York as one of the first UK retailers to follow in the footsteps of Wereld Winkel in 1986, with a similar range of wares: predominantly craft items and clothing.

One major change in buying habits over the last 45 years was the move towards Fairtrade food as well as crafts: firstly long-life products like tea, coffee and chocolate and then more recently perishable items like bananas. Initially, fairly traded tea and coffee were only available in ethical shops like the Wereld Winkel or via stalls like the one I set up at my church aged 17, because there was otherwise no way for consumers to tell whether food sold in supermarkets or elsewhere was fairly traded. 

What is Infrastructure For? Social and Economic Sustainability Goals

Principle 2: Social and economic development

‘If you’re asking me to choose between conservation and development, I’m going to choose development every time.' Community worker in Democratic Republic of Congo

This is part of a series inspired by the book Sustainable Infrastructure. What is infrastructure for? And do we really have to make a choice between meeting people's needs and protecting the environment, as the quote above suggests? 

The purpose of most infrastructure is to improve social or economic outcomes (and let's face it, when one third of the world's people have no access to sanitation, there's no shortage of need) and that's why economic issues have traditionally been the biggest influence over project scoping and delivery.

For example, many projects are justified on the basis of a cost-benefit ratio, which may consider only benefits within the organisation (eg reduced maintenance and operation costs for a railway) or may additional calculate the wider economic benefits to users (eg the business case for HS2).

Getting Transport Policy Right: The Harrogate Line Blues

Since August, my new job in Harrogate has meant a daily commute on the York – Harrogate – Leeds line, a secondary route in need of some TLC. But before I explain the problems, here are four things I love about my daily train journey:

1. The fantastic view over Knaresborough and the Nidd gorge from the Nidd Viaduct.
2. Mist rising gently over the flat fields of the Vale of York between York and Knaresborough (ie before it gets into the hills).

Advent Reflections 3: A Song of Mary

This post is the third in a series of weekly posts during Advent inspired by "Holy Boy", a Christmas oratorio which we're performing in Acomb on 21st December.

Having spent a few weeks considering the promise of Emmanuel, the story now moves to a teenage girl in an unknown small town, who has just been told that her life will be turned upside down by being unexpectedly pregnant with the Son of God (and not even married yet! What will the village gossips say, let alone her fiance?)

A Fossil-Free Nativity

This year I'm singing in two very different productions of the Christmas story. I've written previously about Holy Boy, a choral nativity we're perfoming in York on 21st December. Yesterday I took part in a fossil-free nativity play outside Methodist Central Hall, next to Westminster Abbey, calling for the Methodist and Anglican churches in the UK to follow the lead of the World Council of Churches and divest from fossil fuels. 

Blog Action Day 2014: Fuel Poverty Costs Lives and the Planet

Today I am joining thousands of bloggers across the world in Blog Action Day by blogging on a single subject: inequality.

This is an issue which affects all of us, with well-publicised research by the University of York’s Kate Pickett demonstrating that people living more unequal societies are less healthy, more anxious and more likely to be affected by crime, right across the income scale.

Research published in the Guardian showed that around 80% of Britons now think the income gap is too large, and the message has been taken up by world leaders. According to Barack Obama, income inequality is the "defining challenge of our times", while Pope Francis states that "inequality is the roots of social ills".

A new economics?

This week I bought an excellent book by economist Ha-Joon Chang  called "Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and The Threat to the Developing World". I'm looking forward to reading it, as his other book "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" is one of my favourites. On the other hand, I'm feeling somewhat jaded by the effusive comments on the back cover about these new and compelling ideas. I don't want to knock the ideas themselves, but I would contest the concept that they are new.
In fact, for the past 15 years I have campaigned about global injustice based on the evidence through which Christian Aid, WDM and many others have prominently and repeatedly demonstrated that the free market policies and privatisation forced onto poor countries by richer ones damage the countries forced to adopt them.

Towards a Sustainable Railway – Part 1

My first stage in working out where I can usefully contribute to making the railways more sustainable is to consider where our environmental impacts are coming from. Today I'll consider the impacts from normal operation of the railway, for example powering trains, buildings and encouraging passengers and freight to use more sustainable forms of transport.

Storms, Floods and Landslides - An Engineer's Tale

At this point in my blog, I could try to explain to you the science behind climate change, and the ever-growing body of evidence demonstrating that the atmosphere is getting warmer and that this is almost certainly the result of human activity releasing astonishingly huge quantities of greenhouse gases. I could show you the 5^th report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published this year demonstrating yet again the consensus from scientists across the world about this problem.
But I won't, because you learned the basics of the greenhouse effect at school and people have an uncanny tendency to switch off as soon as anything is mentioned that relies upon them understanding any details about the workings of the troposphere. I am not a climate scientist, I'm a civil engineer. So instead, I will tell my own story of how the change in our climate is already affecting us in the UK and my daily work through storms, floods and landslides.