Enjoying the Christmas season with friends, we spent some time visiting our local historic city of Bath and were impressed to discover an amazing exhibition of photographs around the city centre and in particular at Bath Abbey.
These fabulous photographs are by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and mostly taken from the air by helicopter. See the links for the brochure of the exhibition in Bath and more information about the Earth from the Air project including pics of some of the photos. The exhbition is in Bath until the end of January – go see it!
The exhibition encourages sutainable development, and the first few lines of accompanying text are arresting. “Since 1950, economic growth has been considerable, and world production of goods and services has multiplied by a factor of 7. During the same period, while the world's population has only doubled, the volume of fish caught and meat produced has multiplied by 5. So has the energy demand. Oil consumption has multiplied by 7 and carbon dioxide emissions… by 4. Since 1900 fresh water consumption has multiplied by 6, chiefly to provide for agriculture.” Most of this increasing consumption is by the fifth of the world's population who live in industrialised countries.
I wonder about some of the data and conclusions to do with climate change, and consider whether by talking about climate change we risk missing key points by inappropriately conflating partially related issues. However this kind of information leads me to think that whatever else is going on our consumption is out of control, which points to an underlying cause of greed.
The Dawn Treader - Richard's Cabin 