On 12 June this year (2024), I fell off my bicycle. This essay is about why I fell off and what I should have done to avoid long-term serious injury. Understanding those questions is going to require that we sift…
How to talk about Nepāl bhāṣā
There is at present, again, a debate around the correct terms with which to refer to the language spoken by the original inhabitants of Nepāl Maṇḍala. With the UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages well underway, this seems to be a…
Grant for training autistic cyclists
Grant awarded for training Situgyan Consulting has been awarded a small grant from Cycling UK (Scotland) under the Shift programme. With this money, we will offer a series of workshops in February and March 2022. This is a pilot, and…
Ethnic nationalism and extinction
Ethnic nationalism leads to extinctions. This is a specific example of the destructive interactions between different processes within the ecological, economic and political crisis, and it is important because it shows that there can be unexpected causal links going from…
Nine headed birds
There are some places you visit and remember, and there are other places that you get tangled up with. Wuhan is such a place for me. In 2015, I accepted the post of director of the Confucius Institute of the…
For a future university
The ratcheting stresses of economic injustice and a tangibly deteriorating global environment are fuelling populism, fascism, and fundamentalism across the planet. I believe that we are on the cusp of a serious struggle to define and defend the values and…
The coronavirus is the climate emergency is air pollution is…
Labels like “global overheating” or “the climate crisis” are imprecise and divert our attention from the scale, complexity, and speed of the ecological/economic/political crisis. There are at least four broad kinds of destruction, all wreaked by humans, that have created…
Opportunities to learn from Covid-19
We can learn a great deal about how to respond to the climate emergency from looking at how organisations, governments and individuals are reacting to the novel coronavirus. Here are six points to start with. 1. It is possible to…