Today I had to stand in for Nick Holmes, the CSD Team Leader, at a Tech Forum meeting. It was potentially quite scary, because these things are famously… scary.
I had to defend the Semantic Markup standard against a number of people who had problems with it. I argued the case, stood my ground, and the standard was voted - not unanimously, but on-the-record - through. It needs plenty of work and all that, but… tiny acorns.
I went to a lecture organised by The Darwin Initiative. It was all about “The Science of Sustainability and the Sustainability of Science”. Not just randomly, of course… I’m not quite that masochistic.
The main speaker was from India, and he talked confidently about how we can’t keep on with “Business As Usual” - which of course involves scary graphs with increasing temperatures, pollution and McDonald’s outlets - and how we should instead look to get involved in “Systemic Change”, which involves making biodiesel, buildings out of mud, and everybody very very happy.
At the end of it all, the UK’s Parliamentary Secretary for Biodiversity, Landscape and Rural Affairs called him a “genius”.
And I couldn’t help thinking that if someone else had stood up and been as intellectually dishonest as this Indian bloke about just about any other area of modern thinking, he’d have been called something close to the opposite of a genius.
Call me a cynic, go on.
