Is the fish on your plate older than your grandmother?

The Conversation: The real cost of taking fish out of the water. This excellent piece gives a good snapshot of overfishing (the carbon footprint of fishing was something I didn't realise until reading this). It also suggests one of the ways we can be part of the solution: by eating less fish, and eating smarter, which means either checking sites like Good Fish Bad Fish (an Australian version; UK readers can use the Good Fish Guide) or asking questions of potential fish meals such as: "Are they older than your grandmother? Did catching them kill tonnes of other innocent species? How much carbon was used to get it onto your plate?"

Al Jazeera: Overpopulation is not to blame for famine. The causes are famine in the Horn of Africa are complex. Simplistic analyses that blame a single factor do not help.

Guardian: Salty rice is not so nice - rising seas, rising salt in the Mekong. Concerns about sea level rise are not limited to infrastructure damage or coastal erosion; salination is the big issue in many places and especially for the densely-populated Mekong delta.

Grist: The great oyster crash. This is where ocean acidification is starting to bite.

CP: S&P Downgrades Planet Earth and Humanity. This will only make sense if you have been following recent US economic news.

Larry Elliott: The global economy is not in good shape. The crisis from 2008 has not gone away; it has simply shifted form.

Mongabay: Conflict correlates with warm weather, at least in the tropics. This isn't good news in a warming world.

Guardian: One billion cars. "Between 2000 and 2010, the number of cars and motorcycles in China increased twentyfold. In the next 20 years it is forecast to more than double again, which means there will be more cars in China in 2030 than there were in the entire world in 2000."

The triple crunch

Larry Elliot, economics editor at the Guardian, point out some key problems in economy, energy and ecology: three systems upon which human well-being and social stability depend. None are in particularly good shape at the moment, with potentially far worse on the horizon. Perhaps for the sake of space, he doesn't spend much time on the third one, and only mentions climate change, which is but one facet of our ecological woes. His four possible responses are schematic, and obviously, could incorporate a lot of variation within them. I think he is too pessimistic about the possibility of changing the wind on how we think about growth and things better than growth.

Is the economy too important to be left to the economists?

"The questions that the book leaves us with are, I think, primarily these: What kind of culture have we allowed to develop? Not only the subculture of financial institutions and money makers, but the culture in which that happens, the whole culture of our society. What are the sorts of behaviour we reward?

"What are the kinds of human beings we want to see around, that we've encouraged to be around? And that's certainly one of the issues that's come up very sharply in these conversations. Have we not begun to create a kind of human being, whose default setting is really profoundly selfish, profoundly introverted? And how on earth do we build a society on that kind of basis?

"So the questions about culture run very deep. They are questions about what we think is worthwhile in human behaviour. And unless we really tackle that kind of question, really revive our imagination about what human beings might be and should be, then the whole of our economic structure will not really change.

"Culture change begins, as one contributor to the book says, with behavioural change. And behavioural change begins with a change of vision, a change of horizon. So that the subsidiary question is, not only what have we taught people to value and reward, but what have we taught people to aim at? Have we shrunk their possibilities? Have we drawn in their horizon in a trivial way, a way that does less than justice to what human beings are really capable of?

"The authors of this book ask that question, fully conscious of the way in which the level of reward in the financial sector in recent years has been so enormous as to obscure ethical considerations quite a lot. But it's proved not to be an endless pot of resource, it's proved to be a path of self-contradictory and essentially destructive behaviour in practice.

"We need to recovery integrity, we need to recover a sense of the connection between economics and other things; and that's perhaps the other big question that comes up here. Is economics too important to be left to economists? And finance too important to be left to financiers? Don't economic questions always bring with them questions of value in something more than financial terms? How are we to get that back on the agenda?"

- Rowan Williams, "Crisis and recovery: the cultural roots of the financial collapse".

The panel discussion I mentioned yesterday was very interesting and worth spending 90 minutes on. A video will soon be available here.

Archbishop Williams was his usual complex and lovable self, even managing a reference to Sergei Bulgakov and this excellent essay. The Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott had many interesting things to say, but it was Tory MP and former ecological journalist, Zac Goldsmith who really connected some important dots. It is good to know that there are some politicians at least who seem to "get" some of the issues and are willing to speak publicly about them. He joked that his political career was likely to be short. If I was in his electorate, I would vote for him.