In Tudor times, the end of the harvest and beginning of autumn was marked by the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, celebrated on 29th September. One Michaelmas Day tradition was the cooking and eating of geese, which were resplendently fat at this time of time year. Eating a goose was though to bring luck and financial security for the coming year, as in the rhyme: ‘He who eats goose on Michaelmas day, shan’t money lack or debts pay’.
Obviously we can’t condone the carbon-emissions associated with a goose-rich diet, and neither are we ones to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Our Michaelmas meal has been therefore crafted from the finest blog curd, coagulated from a rich harvest of September articles and designed to cater for a wide variety of tastes. However, in case you’ve been too busy down at the Goose Fair to have a gander at Isonomia, feast your eyes on our monthly look back at what you might have missed.
The topic of reusable nappies is always apt to bring the Isonomia readership out in goose bumps of excitement, and last month was no exception. Hilary Vick’s piece on the lessons learned from London’s use of incentives schemes to boost reusable nappy use proved to be the plumpest blog brought to September’s table. It’s a notable achievement for a new contributor to be the month’s most read author, so well done to Hilary!
As an innovative thinker, Ad Lansink is a man who would have few qualms about saying boo to a goose. His fourth Isonomia article to date took second place in the readership race last month. For those who don’t know, Ad is the man responsible for inventing the waste hierarchy. His most recent article concerned the notions of reuse, recovery, and recycling and argued that recycling would better be thought of as “material reuse” than as a form of “recovery”.
It seems that the waste industry is still in a flap about TEEP, and September saw readers once again flock to Peter Jones’s August article on the pitfalls faced by local authorities in conducting and procuring TEEP reviews. They propelled it into third place for the month, but carried Peter above Chris Sherrington to become our all time most read author. Further congratulations are in order for Amir Dakkak, whose piece on Egypt’s water crisis left Thomas Vergunst’s call to arms on reusable nappies floundering in its wake as it became our most read article ever.
The wind beneath our wings in September was new author Chloe Bines, who took a look at the summer’s energy generation statistics and mused on the current role of wind power in UK energy policy. And the gas in our oven was supplied by Chris Eden – also a new author – who filled us in on the landfill gas market in Spain: once subsidised as a source of renewable energy, landfill has capture is now threatened by lax enforcement and new taxes.
It was a good month for Isonomia as a whole: we set a new record for page views per publication, and our growing community of readers produced more comments on articles than ever before. We really appreciate all the comments we receive, so thanks to all those who commented. Offering a platform for a variety of opinions and generating debate is what we’re all about, so if anything you’ve read here has plumped your plumage or ruffled your feathers, please do tell us, whether by leaving a comment or with an article of your own. We try to provide an informed but accessible viewpoint on a wide range of environment issues, so whether you want to talk turbines or labour over landfill, please do get in touch.
It’s easy to shift from visitor to commentator to author, and we’re always glad to hear from you. Whether you’re from Goose Creek or Sugar Creek, Nottingham UK or Nottingham PA, with your help we will create a space where thoughts on topics from across the environment sector can be expressed and explored, enabling communication and cross fertilisation of ideas.
What’s set to hatch this October? Without wishing to count our goslings too soon, we expect to bring you ideas on how to reduce the amount of waste lost to accidental or deliberate fires from new author Roy Hunt, and there’ll be more from Peter Jones on TEEP. If you’re lucky, we might also be able to continue our migratory flight around the world with new pieces on waste management in New Zealand and Poland.
Isonomia is more than just a blog these days – we’re hooked up to all sorts of other outlets. You can now follow us by subscribing to our Paper.Li site, where you can see Isonomia’s articles, and other interesting material, gathered together in a newspaper format. We also post our articles via our Facebook page, and tweet about each new piece. Of course at the top right of each page you can still subscribe to have each article e-mailed to you. It couldn’t be easier to follow all we have to offer.
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