January is a particularly rich month for folklore, as all manner of customs are required to ensure prosperity for the year ahead. Regular readers of the Administrator’s update will no doubt be aware that the Land of Blog remains an equally rich preserve of the traditions of yesteryear, and it will no surprise that we’ve been busy saying our ‘black rabbits’, burning hawthorn bushes, and dropping egg whites into water in order to guarantee you a healthy supply of articles in 2015.
Our favourite way of ringing in the New Year, however, is with the medieval custom of putting a flat cake on a cow’s horns before proceeding to sing and dance around the cow. You’ll be relieved to hear that the cake fell to the front of cow, auguring good luck and insightful environmental analysis for another twelve months. As important as these traditions are, if you’ve been properly attending to all of them, it may have left you little time to read last month’s batch of Isonomia articles. If that’s the case, what have you missed?
January’s prize heifer was jointly reared by Chloe Bines and Adam Baddeley, who brought to show a winning piece on the important role innovations in energy storage will have to play if the UK is to meet its renewable energy targets. Dealing with the interplay of technology, policy and investment, Chloe and Adam grabbed the technical issues by the horns in order to present a thorough and clear examination of the topic.
Despite being well milked for a number of years now, Peter Jones once again proved he’s far from ready to be put out to pasture, delivering as he did January’s second most popular piece. Peter has been tracing the Daily Mail’s antagonistic attitude towards recycling for some time now, and took the opportunity to respond to an article from James Delingpole seemingly setting out the tabloid’s line on waste management policy – a view perhaps not so well balanced as a flat cake on a horn.
We were also happy to welcome back another cow come home after many months grazing the green fields of the Land of Blog. Phillip Ward isn’t one to simply chew the cud, however, and provided an insightful article on how the financial pressures placed on local authorities are pushing them to consider ever more radical outsourcing solutions, waste services included.
As well as these happy returns, January proved a good month for new beginnings, with three articles coming from first time contributors. Wayne Lewis served up a beefy article on the opportunities for partnership working available to local authorities looking for efficiency savings in waste services, including the possibilities opened up by Teckal exemptions. Ian Doyle is a man who feels passionately about front line service delivery, and last month he told us why he thinks that the way street cleaning staff are treated is bull. Last to join the herd at the very end of the month was Hulda Espolin Norstein, who asked what difference a change in the UK’s relation with the EU might make to national environmental policy.
After such a great January it seems our observance of New Year’s traditions has paid off, but it’s not just our efforts which keep Isonomia prosperous. We’re grateful to all those who tweet about our articles, and for the fascinating comments we receive, both on the site and on LinkedIn. We try to provide an informed but accessible viewpoint on a wide range of environment issues. Offering a platform for a variety of opinions and generating debate is what we’re all about, so if you have a beef with anything you’ve read here or our articles struck you as either udderly inspired, please do tell us, whether by leaving a comment or with an article of your own.
Many of those who’ve written articles for the site started out just as visitors, and we’re always glad to hear from you if you want to pitch an idea. Whether you’re from Wellington or Dunnington, Arendel or Arundel, 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.
Now that we can feel confident about 2015, what might we have in store for February? We’ll continue to harness the plentiful and renewable blog source of energy articles, as Chloe Bines risks her eye sight by taking a look at solar power and Rob Reid returns to get us pumped up once again about heat pumps. No doubt there’ll be much more besides.
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.
Keep up the good work.
It would be “nice” to see a wider array of respondents to the articles in Isonomia than those I have seen over the past years.
Perhaps some people are more sheepish than others but no doubt after the middle of February those that had that opinion will remember that it is well worth expounding views that do not necessarily follow the traditional way of thinking.
Thanks for the encouragement, Peter – we’re very glad that you’re leading the way and sharing your thoughts in the comments section.