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The Electric Car Story We Should All Be Talking About

Electric cars are sold to us as the clean, ethical future: the simple solution to petrol, emissions, and climate collapse. No exhaust pipe. No fumes. No guilt. Drive electric and you’re doing your part.

But the longer I listen to the certainty around EVs — the smug finality, the “case closed” tone — the more I suspect we haven’t solved the problem at all. We’ve simply moved it.

Because “zero emissions” is only true in one narrow sense: electric cars don’t emit at the tailpipe. That matters for city air quality, and it’s not trivial. But climate impact isn’t just about what comes out of the back of the vehicle. It’s about the whole chain: extraction, manufacturing, electricity generation, and end-of-life disposal.

And yes: in many cases, electric cars really are better on the climate. A major life-cycle analysis has estimated that battery electric cars sold in Europe today can produce dramatically lower overall greenhouse-gas emissions than comparable petrol cars. That’s a real advantage, and it’s worth acknowledging.

But “better than petrol” doesn’t automatically mean “clean.” It doesn’t mean “ethical.” And it certainly doesn’t mean “no victims.”

The modern electric car runs on more than electricity. It runs on minerals — and minerals have to be ripped out of the earth. The new fuel of the “green future” isn’t oil alone: it’s lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and more. And the extraction doesn’t happen in glossy European showrooms. It happens in places where ecosystems are fragile, water is scarce, and the people who live nearby often have far less power to resist the pressure.

Chile is frequently held up as a symbol of this new reality. In the Atacama region, concerns have been raised for years about lithium extraction and water stress in an already arid landscape. And while “displacement” doesn’t always mean literal bulldozers and forced removals, communities can still be displaced in practice, when resources shrink, livelihoods collapse and the land becomes harder to inhabit. You don’t always need an eviction notice to be pushed off your own future.

Then comes the question nobody wants to picture too clearly: what happens when millions of EV batteries die?

Batteries degrade. Capacity drops. Replacement costs bite. Cars are written off. And suddenly we’re not looking at a futuristic revolution, we’re looking at a looming waste problem. We are manufacturing the next century’s landfill with a smile on our faces, because it feels cleaner today.

Yes, recycling exists. Yes, there are second-life uses for some batteries. Yes, policymakers talk about circular economies. But the scale is the issue. Recycling infrastructure doesn’t magically appear just because consumers feel virtuous. It requires systems, enforcement, investment, and time — and at the moment, the global EV rollout is moving faster than the uncomfortable questions that should be travelling alongside it.

So why does this side of the story still feel strangely muted?

Partly because it’s complex, and complex stories don’t trend. But partly because the car industry is not politically neutral. The automobile sector has been one of the most powerful lobbying forces shaping transport policy, regulation, and public messaging for decades. That doesn’t require a secret conspiracy. It only requires something much more ordinary — influence, money, access, timing, and the gentle steering of what gets taken seriously.

This is the deeper danger: the electric car has become a moral symbol. Question it and you’re treated as pro-oil. Doubt it and you’re dismissed as anti-progress. But this isn’t how ethical responsibility works. A solution isn’t automatically good because it comes wrapped in green language.

Electric cars may reduce emissions. But they don’t end extraction. They don’t end harm.

We’re not transitioning from dirty to clean. We’re transitioning from visible pollution to invisible supply chains, from smoke in our cities to disruption in deserts we’ll never visit.

So yes: electrification may be part of the future. But only if we stop treating it like a miracle and start treating it like what it really is: a trade-off. A compromise. A human project, built inside a world of scarcity, power and competing interests.

If we want an energy transition worthy of the name, we need more than new engines. We need transparency, better public transport, enforceable standards, serious recycling systems and the courage to count the human cost, not as an inconvenient footnote, but as part of the moral equation.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
— Aldo Leopold

Is It Time For A Peaceful Revolution?

The return of Donald Trump is not merely a political event. It is a moral diagnostic.

It tells us something deeply unsettling about the state of our world: that values, principles, and ethics have slipped from the centre of public life. They have been displaced largely by financial gain, grievance politics, racialised fear, and the steady erosion of democratic norms.

This is not an American problem alone. It is a global one.

Trump is not the cause of this collapse; he is its most conspicuous symptom, like a mirror held up to societies that have quietly traded moral seriousness for spectacle, responsibility for outrage and truth for tribal loyalty.

The Disappearance of Principle

Where are the people of principle?

Where are the politicians who speak honestly about limits, responsibility, and restraint, rather than promising everything while meaning nothing? Where are the leaders willing to say “this is wrong” even when doing so costs them popularity, office, or power?

And where, more troubling still, are the faith communities — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, secular humanist — when democracy is undermined and human dignity reduced to a slogan?

Too often, there is silence.
Or worse: rationalisation.

Ethics in a ‘Post-God’ World

We increasingly describe ourselves as living in a “post-God” world. Whatever one’s beliefs, this framing carries an uncomfortable implication.

If there is no higher authority to appeal to, no divine judgement, no metaphysical reckoning, then responsibility does not disappear. It intensifies.

In such a world, ethics cannot be outsourced to tradition, scripture or institutions. They must be embodied in individuals.

We are fully and finally accountable for what we tolerate, excuse, and normalise.

The collapse of shared ethical frameworks does not free us. It leaves us more exposed.

When Systems Fail

When political systems fail, when institutions rot from within, when law bends to power and truth bends to profit, waiting politely is no longer a virtue.

Peaceful resistance is not extremism.
Civic courage is not disorder.
Refusing to normalise injustice is not naïveté.

History does not judge societies kindly for their patience in the face of moral collapse.

The GDR: Proof That Change Is Possible

I live in the former German Democratic Republic.

Within my own lifetime, I have seen proof that enormous social change is not only possible, but inevitable, when large numbers of ordinary people rise up peacefully and say: Enough.

No tanks.
No violence.
Just people.

The fall of the GDR was not engineered by heroes or generals. It was brought about by teachers, factory workers, church groups, writers, engineers: people who withdrew their consent from a system that no longer deserved it.

That lesson should haunt us and teach us.

Have We Gone Mad?

As a warning light on the dashboard of history, young Germans are once again being asked whether they are prepared to fight for their country.

After everything Europe has lived through: after the ruins, the camps, the mass graves, the promises of Nie wieder — have we learned nothing?

The question should not be how to prepare the next generation for war, but how we allowed ourselves to drift back towards the conditions that make war imaginable again.

Democracy Belongs to the Ordinary

Democracy does not belong to elites.
It does not belong to parties, platforms, or billionaires.

It belongs to writers.
Teachers.
Lawyers.
Nurses and doctors.
Construction workers.
Refuse collectors.

It belongs to all of us.

When democratic systems disintegrate, it is not because “the people” failed. It is because too many people were persuaded that their voice no longer mattered.

Silence Is Not Neutral

Some of us are old enough to know where silence, blame-shifting, and passivity lead.

Writing from exile as Europe collapsed around him, Stefan Zweig issued a warning that has lost none of its force:

“The greatest danger threatening humanity today is not fanaticism itself, but the silent toleration of fanaticism.”

Zweig understood that history is not undone by villains alone, but by the quiet compliance of the reasonable.

So Where Is the Line?

If Zweig was right, then the question is no longer whether we see what is happening.

The question is this:

Where do you draw the line?
What responsibility do professionals, educators, faith communities, and citizens have when institutions fail?
What does peaceful resistance look like now?

Enough silence.
Enough normalisation.
Enough waiting.

History does not move only through great men. It moves when ordinary people decide that they will no longer cooperate with the unacceptable.

The moment is not coming.

It is already here.

“Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.”

—Stefan Zweig

Meaning Before Language

At the start of the New Year, I began growing mung bean sprouts on the kitchen counter. Nothing ambitious: a glass jar, a handful of dry beans, water, patience. It was partly practical — a small attempt to eat better — and partly seasonal, a gesture of beginning again.

But as so often happens, attention did the rest.

Each morning and evening I rinsed the beans, drained the water, and tilted the jar back into place. Within a day, change began. Roots appeared. Pale shoots followed. By the third day, the jar was quietly alive with direction and momentum. Nothing dramatic. Nothing expressive. Just steady response.

Watching this simple process unfold gave rise to a set of thoughts that have stayed with me.

There is something quietly reassuring in discovering that:

- order doesn’t require intention
- meaning can emerge from conditions
- responsiveness is not the same as consciousness

A seed doesn’t care —
but it is exquisitely attuned.

That distinction matters far beyond botany.

A mung bean has no brain, no awareness, no sense of purpose. It does not want to grow. It does not know that it is growing. And yet, when the conditions are right — moisture, warmth, oxygen — it responds. Enzymes activate, stored energy is released, cells divide, and a process begins that looks uncannily like purpose.

But it isn’t.

What the seed demonstrates is something both humbling and quietly radical: meaning can arise from structure rather than intention. Order can appear without a planner. Direction can emerge without desire. Life can move forward without knowing why.

“Life is not obliged to make sense to us.”
— Richard Dawkins

We tend to assume the opposite about ourselves.

Much of modern human anxiety is rooted in the belief that meaning must be consciously created: unless we are constantly choosing, narrating, justifying, our lives risk becoming meaningless. We speak as if significance must always be meant by someone, preferably articulated, preferably defensible.

And yet, much of what shapes us most deeply happens long before we have words for it.

Which brings us to language.

There is a quiet assumption, widely shared and rarely examined, that meaning only exists where language exists. I certainly absorbed this idea early on: that without words, symbols, and narratives there could be no meaning, only blind mechanism. Animals, plants, seeds may be somehow alive, but they are not conscious of their existence because they do not have language. But is this assumption true under closer attention? Language does not so much create meaning as name it. Long before we describe a situation as safe or threatening, nourishing or hostile, our bodies are already responding. Long before a child can articulate belonging or neglect, those conditions are shaping who they become. Meaning, in this sense, precedes language. Language arrives later, not as the origin of significance, but as its echo.

Taken seriously, this idea does not just reshape education or psychology; it also presses uncomfortably on our concepts of religion.

If meaning precedes language, then religion becomes structurally vulnerable in a way it rarely acknowledges. Religious systems depend on language to define, order, and sanctify a reality that was already unfolding long before it was named. Just as the seed germinates without reference to our metaphors, doctrines, or reverence, the world generates complexity, order, and awe without requiring theological narration. Religion, in this light, does not create meaning but gathers around it — stabilising, preserving, and sometimes claiming ownership of what would otherwise continue unbothered. The danger is not that religion is false, but that it mistakes itself for the source rather than the afterimage of meaning: a linguistic architecture built around processes that do not need to be spoken in order to be real.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Seen this way, the seed is not a lower form of life waiting for consciousness to redeem it. It is a reminder that attunement comes before articulation.

This has implications for how we think about human agency. To say that meaning can emerge from conditions is not to deny responsibility or choice. It is to relocate them. Agency is not constant control; it is responsiveness within constraints. The skill is not to will meaning into existence, but to recognise what kinds of environments allow growth — in ourselves and in others.

And this is where education enters the picture.

Much of contemporary schooling still reflects a modernist inheritance: knowledge divided into discrete subjects, timetabled and assessed in isolation. Biology here. Chemistry there. Physics somewhere else. Meaning nowhere in particular.

We teach biology largely as a catalogue of facts — cell structures, taxonomies, cycles, pathways — accurate, necessary, and often lifeless. Rarely do we teach it as the study of responsive systems. We talk about genes, but not environments. About mechanisms, but not emergence. Students learn that a seed needs water, warmth, and oxygen, yet miss the astonishing implication: life does not need a mind in order to organise itself.

By separating biology from physics and chemistry, we also reinforce a subtle illusion — that life is something apart from the rest of reality, rather than a continuation of it. As if metabolism were not chemistry in motion. As if growth were not physics slowed down and shaped by constraint. As if living systems did not obey the same laws as rivers and stars, only at a different scale.

A more truthful curriculum would dissolve these boundaries.

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
— Werner Heisenberg

Imagine teaching “life” as a conversation between disciplines:
chemistry becoming organised,
physics learning to linger,
energy flowing through matter long enough to notice itself.

In such a curriculum, a sprouting seed would not be a marginal example but a foundational one. Students would be invited to ask not only what happens, but what it reveals: that responsiveness predates consciousness, that attunement is older than intention, that meaning does not need to be imposed in order to arise.

The ethical consequences would follow naturally. Instead of moralising failure, students might ask better questions: What conditions were missing? What environments are we creating? What do we reward, nourish, neglect?

Education, at its best, does not manufacture outcomes.
It creates conditions.

A seed doesn’t care.
But it responds.

So do children.
So do communities.
And, more often than we like to admit, so do we.

Perhaps part of the task of education — and of adult life — is to relearn this modest, hopeful truth: that meaning does not always need to be pursued or declared. Sometimes it only needs the right conditions in which to emerge.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
— Albert Einstein

Dialogue or Destruction: Why Peace Has Only One Road Left

A Century That Should Have Known Better

Some days it feels as if the twenty-first century has learned nothing from the horrors that preceded it. We live in an age where the map of human suffering is once again studded with names we should never have to say in the same sentence: Gaza and southern Israel, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, Ethiopia – and now even Thailand and Vietnam finding themselves drawn back, in different ways, into cycles of unrest they thought they had escaped.

The tragedies differ in their causes, but they share one characteristic: they are morally unacceptable in a world that has the knowledge, the wealth, and the historical memory to do better.
War may once have been considered an inevitability of human conflict. But wars of aggression – and the atrocities committed in their shadows – cannot be squared with a species that claims to be moral, rational, or enlightened.

The sorrow is not only in the scale of destruction, but in its banality. Innocent men, women and children, whose only mistake was being born in the wrong place, are suffering because powerful individuals with guns, money, or ideology choose violence over the one thing that has ever worked: talking.

The Human Duality: Building Mars Rockets While Bombing Cities

It is one of the oldest and saddest paradoxes of the human condition:
We are capable of extraordinary intelligence and astonishing stupidity at the very same time.

In the same decade that we are preparing missions to Mars, mapping the human genome, and coordinating global relief efforts after earthquakes and floods, we are also manufacturing weapons so sophisticated and so profitable that entire economies depend on them.

Take the UK: a country with billions for advanced weapons systems but somehow “no money” for freezing pensioners, collapsing hospitals, or universal, high-quality education. This is not a mystery of economics; it is a reflection of politics, psychology, and a global weapons industry whose profits dwarf the budgets of most ministries of health. And while this grotesque misallocation of resources goes largely unexamined, public attention is successfully diverted towards the performative jingoism of Nigel Farage and his circle, obsessing over small boats as if they posed a greater threat than the industrial machinery of war.

Sociologically, all this reveals something darker:
that collective fear is more powerful than collective compassion,
and that democracies and dictatorships alike are willing to pour unimaginable sums into tools of destruction, even as their own citizens queue at food banks.

When you look at the sheer size of the arms economy – involving states, private firms, lobbyists, intelligence networks, and geopolitical strategists – it is no surprise that conspiracy theories flourish. One begins to wonder, not whether secret cabals exist, but whether the structural incentives of money, power, and fear create something that behaves exactly like a conspiracy: an unaccountable machine that profits from perpetual insecurity.

Yet even here, there is a deeper sadness:
This is all human-made. It could all be human-unmade.

The Only Road Left: Global Responsibility and Relentless Dialogue

Ending war and the suffering it unleashes is not a task for Washington or Moscow or Beijing alone. It is not a “European problem” or a “Middle Eastern problem” or an “African problem.”

It is a human problem.

And humans, whether in India, New Zealand, Switzerland, Brazil, Nigeria, or Japan, share equal responsibility for the world we are shaping.

The world is too interconnected – economically, technologically, environmentally – for the myth of “regional conflicts” to survive. A war in Ukraine destabilises global grain markets. A war in Gaza destabilises entire alliances. A war in the Sahel or Sudan creates refugee flows that reshape the politics of Europe within months.

And yet, our political rhetoric remains stuck in the nineteenth century: great powers posturing like drunken emperors, minor powers waiting for permission to act, populations encouraged to choose a side rather than choose a future.

Into this steps Donald Trump, who postures as a dealmaker but speaks as a man who has never studied history, diplomacy, or the complexity of human suffering. His racist, West-centric, emotionally stunted theatrics are not only unhelpful — they actively block the one thing that has ever stopped wars:

serious, sustained, structured dialogue.

China said this nearly two years ago, and they were right:
There is no military solution to these conflicts.
There is no future in “victory” defined as someone else’s obliteration.

If the stakes were framed differently —
If it were your grandmother being raped,
your daughter being shot,
your son sent to die in a trench,
would anyone still think that pride, posturing, or “teaching the enemy a lesson” was worth it?

Dialogue is not weakness.
Dialogue is not appeasement.
Dialogue is not naïve.

Dialogue is the only alternative to extinction-level stupidity.

What we need is a global determination — from governments, from civil society, from the international institutions we mock until we suddenly need them — to bring leaders and peoples into conversation with each other before the next atrocity, the next drone strike, the next unmarked grave.

We do not need more weapons.
We need more courage — the courage to talk to our enemies.

Because the only road that has ever led out of hell is the one people walked together, however awkwardly, toward a table, a room, a conversation.

Dialogue is not one option among many.
Dialogue is the only road left.

“If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” -Desmond Tutu

Cathedrals of Quiet Light: An Homage to Libraries

I did not expect a pilgrimage. All I wanted, on a cold Berlin morning, was a simple desk in my local library. A familiar refuge where I could coax myself into writing. Instead, I arrived to find the doors barred and the building shrouded in scaffolding. Closed for refurbishment. And yet even that felt oddly hopeful: a library being tended to, repaired, protected. A chrysalis in plywood. Still, it left me homeless for the day, so I pointed myself into the centre of Berlin and followed a vague instinct in search of a different reading room.

By early afternoon I was standing inside the Humboldt University Library, in the central Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum — a building completed in 2009 at a cost of roughly €150 million, a temple to light and linearity, a modern cathedral carved out of honey-coloured wood. I had never been inside before. I found my way up several flights of stairs, past quiet students and moving columns of books, until I arrived in the library’s great central atrium.

There are moments when atmosphere becomes an event, as if the air thickens with meaning, as though the space itself has a pulse. That is what happened. The first glance into the atrium felt like encountering a new idea before you have the words for it.

The room opened before me in tiers, receding downwards in vast wooden frames, each level lined with narrow study desks illuminated by soft rectangular lamps. Above, the ceiling dissolved into a grid of skylights, a geometry of glass and daylight. Below, hundreds of young people bent over books and laptops, headphones cocooning them, highlighters poised like tiny torches hunting for truth in margins. It was an amphitheatre of thought, tier upon tier of silent striving, human concentration arranged like an inverted ziggurat.

The sight moved me more than I had anticipated. I had often studied in the ancient libraries of Oxford, with their stone floors worn by centuries of scholars and portraits of stern-faced alumni glaring down with a mixture of judgement and encouragement. But this — this modern Berlin chamber with its clean lines and its open light — held its own kind of splendour. If Oxford’s libraries feel like the weight of the past pressing lovingly upon you, the Grimm-Zentrum feels like the future stretching out somewhere beyond the roof.

And suddenly I felt small and young again, in the most wonderful way.

A Place Where the World Learns How to Think

What struck me first was the sound — or rather, the absence of it. The quiet in a library is not mere silence. It is a collective agreement, a social pact, a voluntary reverence. The students around me were not quiet because they were told to be. They were quiet because they were invested. Because something mattered.

Then came the smell — that unmistakable perfume of libraries everywhere:
waxed linoleum; varnished wood; warm dust that rises from the turning of pages; and above all that distinctive scent of old books, a mixture of paper, glue, ink, and time itself. It carries, always, a faint edge of mystery – a reminder that knowledge ages like a living thing.

As I sat down on the highest tier, overlooking this incredible geometry of minds at work, it occurred to me that libraries are among the few places left in modern life where human concentration is visible. We watch it manifest physically: in posture, in scribbles, in slow-page turns, in the absorbed stillness of someone who is trying to understand.

The atmosphere was electric but hushed, charged but respectful. There were students mapping out theses with coloured pens, others scrolling through academic articles, some chewing their pens absentmindedly while staring into middle distance — that universal gesture of a mind wrestling with a concept. There were those who looked exhausted but determined, and others who looked exhilarated by a sentence they had just discovered. Every face was a small story of effort.

This collective striving was profoundly moving. It made visible something we often forget: knowledge is crafted, not downloaded. Even with all the technology around them, these students were still doing the slow, patient work that makes civilisation possible. Research is not glamorous. It is hours of searching, scanning, discarding, re-reading. Yet they persisted.

Watching them, I felt privileged — almost intrusive — as though I were witnessing a kind of secular liturgy.

This Is Not an Anti-AI Eulogy. Quite the Opposite.

Let me say this clearly, and early, because sentiments like mine are often misinterpreted: this is not a rear-guard lament against AI.
No pious calls to return to pre-digital methods. No false nostalgia. No technophobia.

I embrace AI wholeheartedly. I use it every day, and I consider it one of the most extraordinary tools ever created. It accelerates learning, supports human creativity, and holds vast potential for everything from agriculture to medicine to interplanetary exploration. It will help build the colonies on Mars long before we finish debating whether rocket fuel is environmentally friendly.

So this reflection is not a plea for a world without technology. It is instead an attempt to articulate something different: that libraries and AI are not adversaries.
They are partners.
One is where the human mind trains its depth; the other is where it extends its reach.

Libraries teach us how to think.
AI helps us learn faster once we know how.

The library is the gymnasium of cognition.
AI is the exoskeleton.

We need both.

A Secular Temple — or Something More

As I sat in the top tier of that atrium, I realised that all my senses were activated at once: sight, sound, smell, touch, and the quiet murmur of pages turning like a heartbeat for the whole building. It was almost too much. It bordered on the religious.

If you believe in God, you could easily imagine gratitude rising like incense: look what humanity — the species fashioned out of dust and breath — has managed to build. Look how our curiosity has unfolded into architecture, scholarship, craft, and a hunger for understanding that seems inexhaustible.

If you do not believe in God, the miracle remains.
After all, what could be more astonishing than this? That the random electrical impulses arising from an indifferent universe have generated organisms who sit together in vast wooden halls reading about Mesopotamia, quantum mechanics, marine ecosystems, political philosophy, medieval manuscripts, and machine learning algorithms. That atoms born in supernovae now write essays on ethics and the shape of a meaningful life.

Even the most hardened atheist cannot deny the improbability, the majesty of that.

To sit in a library is to witness a miracle in motion — a civilisation rehearsing its own continuation.

The Invisible People Who Make It Possible

It is easy, in moments of beauty, to forget the infrastructure that supports them. But libraries are not spontaneous miracles. They are daily, deliberate acts of civic generosity.

Someone designed this building with its lightwells, its tiers, its acoustics, its quiet. Someone else built it, brick by brick, panel by panel. Others maintain it, polish the floors, fix the lamps, organise the recycling, restock the bathrooms, oil the doors so they close softly.

Then there are the librarians, the custodians of order in our age of chaos. The ones who curate, classify, preserve, and patiently help bewildered visitors locate that one book whose title they have partially forgotten. They are the guardians of continuity, the keepers of fragments, the quiet historians of our intellectual life.

Yesterday, I watched a librarian register new readers at the desk. One of them was me. The young man helping me was in his early twenties, wearing a university hoodie, and fascinated by my British passport. He asked why the text was printed both in English and French. He was curious about British attitudes to Europe, about why I had come to Berlin, about what I was planning to write.

There was no transactional coldness in him. Only a genuine hunger to learn, to connect, to understand. It was a small moment, and yet it added a human warmth to the architecture around us. It reminded me that libraries are not only spatial achievements; they are social ones. They bring together people who believe — perhaps stubbornly, courageously — that knowledge should remain accessible to all.

And yes, I felt grateful. Deeply grateful. In an age dominated by cynicism about governments, it is worth remembering that states still choose to spend millions on libraries, archaeology departments, social sciences faculties, digitisation projects, and the preservation of knowledge. This is not trivial. It is evidence of a civilisation still investing in its own mind.

A Place Where My Own Creativity Woke Up

I did not plan to begin outlining a new novel yesterday. But the effect of sitting in that atrium was galvanising. The sight of hundreds of young minds in motion, the geometry of the architecture, the warm glow of the wood, the filtered daylight, the portraitless vastness that made every student their own protagonist — it all stirred something in me.

Creativity, I am convinced, is contagious. We borrow the electricity of others. When you place yourself in an environment charged with intellectual purpose, something inside you aligns. Ideas begin to organise themselves. Sentences appear without being summoned. Pages begin to form.

That is exactly what happened.

Within an hour of sitting down, my mind was in overdrive, casting threads between ideas I had been carrying for months, imagining scenes, characters, dilemmas. The space did not merely host my creativity; it provoked it. I left with the outline of my next book beating quietly inside my bag.

Why This Matters for the World Our Children Inherit

As I gazed into the atrium, I kept thinking about the thousands of young people around the world who will never experience something like this — who study in overcrowded classrooms, or at kitchen tables, or not at all. And then I thought of the students who do have this privilege and perhaps take it for granted, because we all take blessings for granted when they become part of the wallpaper of our days.

A library like this is not a neutral space.
It is a statement.
A declaration of values.
A place where a society says to its young:

Take this. Explore. Learn. Write. Think. Question. Become. We believe you are worth the investment.

My hope is that such spaces will not become relics. That they will not be drowned by the easy seductions of instant information, nor by political short-sightedness, nor by economic austerity. May libraries continue to stand as cathedrals of collective education, where young people can enter free of charge and leave richer in spirit, sharper in thought, and braver in imagination.

A Final Word of Gratitude

So this is my homage — not to nostalgia, but to possibility. To the people who keep these spaces alive. To the students who fill them. To the architects who imagine them. To the librarians who protect them. And yes, to the governments and taxpayers whose resources make them real.

Most of all, it is an expression of gratitude for the simple miracle that humans still gather in large wooden rooms to read books, annotate pages, debate arguments, and shape knowledge. In a world that often feels fragmented, libraries remind us that our species is still capable of collective enlightenment.

As long as there are libraries, there is hope.
As long as there are young people hunched over books, there is a future worth fighting for.
And as long as we preserve places like this — vast, warm, light-filled, reverent — our civilisation will continue to write itself into being.

Yesterday I entered a library looking for a desk.
I left having recovered my faith in human curiosity.

And perhaps that is the true gift of a library:
it does not simply store knowledge —
it awakens the desire to create more of it.

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” – Hannah Arendt

If you love the world enough, go back to a library. Sit down. Read something difficult. Support these spaces. They are still where civilisation renews itself.

Unseen Innovation: Europe’s Arcadian Missions in Agriculture and Beyond

Innovation rarely arrives with fanfare. It doesn’t always make the headlines. Instead, it often unfolds silently in the fields, the orchards and the hinterlands — where precision matters, human know-how meets technology, and tomorrow’s systems are shaped today. One such endeavour is the AgRimate project: a multi-national European initiative that demonstrates how real-world research quietly drives systemic change.

A good example: AgRimate

Launched under the Horizon Europe programme (grant agreement 101182739), AgRimate brings together 11 partners from Spain, Finland, Italy, Greece, Germany and Ireland. Its target: to transform pruning practices in olive groves and vineyards through AI-driven decision support, augmented reality (AR) assistants and robotic systems. By 2030, the project aims for a technology-readiness level of 7 or more, to validate in real-world field trials across Spain and Greece.

Among its goals:

- Integrate sensor networks and drone data to feed AI models that learn from expert pruners — combining tradition and technology.
- Deploy AR-based training and guidance tools to enhance worker competence and safety.
- Design robotic platforms and exoskeletons to reduce physical strain and improve productivity in high-value cropping.
- Ensure human-centred design: evaluating how AI and robotics impact worker well-being, autonomy and skill development.

This is farming at the intersection of cognition, competence, machine intelligence and everyday labour: exactly where digital transformation meets human factors.

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.”
— Wendell Berry

Why such projects matter

While big science programmes grab attention, applied-field projects like AgRimate deliver the operational breakthroughs — the nuts-and-bolts tools that farmers will use. In the EU, research shows that every €1 invested in agricultural innovation can yield up to €10-11 in return over 25 years.

And financially: Horizon Europe carries a budget of about €93.5 billion (2021-2027). Within that, agriculture, bioeconomy and natural-resources projects account for roughly €9 billion of dedicated support. ([European Commission])

Such funding enables:

- innovation in digital farming, robotics and AR
- capacity-building and competence-development in rural areas
- sustainability, productivity and social inclusion
- spill-over benefits beyond Europe: from knowledge export to global partners

Beyond agriculture: the hidden ecosystem

Though agriculture provides a compelling lens, research-funding stretches across domains. For example:

- The Erasmus+ programme fosters mobility and competence across borders, equipping educators and learners for global challenges.
- Health-related initiatives like EU4Health support medical research and pandemic resilience.
- Digital-technology programmes (digital Europe) underpin innovation in every sector.

Together, they create a background mosaic of everyday research infrastructure — quiet, distributed, and deeply impactful.

Global value, local roots

Projects like AgRimate don’t just upgrade a Spanish olive grove. Their tools, methods and models travel. Exoskeletons, AR training tools, AI-driven decision-engines: all are transferable to Latin America, Africa or Asia where smallholder farmers face similar labour constraints, skill gaps and sustainability demands. Research-driven competence models and embedded human-tech interaction frameworks are the heart of global agricultural progress.

Why we should pay attention

Often, we know about the big telescopes, the megaprojects, the splashy tech launches. But real change also happens quietly — in pruning trellises, orchards, farm-hands learning AR interfaces, complex sensor systems taking field-data at dawn. These are the systems that translate innovation into impact.

For professionals, researchers and rural practitioners alike, the message is clear: technology alone isn’t enough. It’s human competence, interaction design, usability, learning architecture and worker autonomy that bring tech alive. Projects like AgRimate embody that blend.

And for you — or for any practitioner, researcher or farmer — this is the invitation: monitor the unseen, celebrate the unsung, and recognise the spider-web of research beneath your everyday tools. Because behind those quiet fields, Europe is building the futures we’ll harvest tomorrow.

“Europe will not be made all at once, nor according to a single plan, but through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”
— Robert Schuman, 1950

Spain takes more refugees than Britain. So why isn’t Madrid screaming about it?

There is a strange and revealing truth at the heart of Europe’s migration politics, and it is this:

Spain receives more irregular boat arrivals than the United Kingdom — yet it treats migrants with more dignity, less hysteria, and far greater political maturity.

In 2024, Spain registered around 61,000 irregular sea arrivals.
The UK recorded roughly 37,000.

And yet, if you walked into a British newsroom or scrolled through British political Twitter, you would think that civilisation was on the brink of collapse.

Why is that?

Why does a country with fewer arrivals behave as though it’s under siege, while a Mediterranean frontline state quietly manages the reality without setting its national hair on fire?

The answer tells us something uncomfortable — not about migration, but about the moral core of modern British politics.

Spain: A Social Democracy That Still Remembers Its Soul

Spain has no illusions about its geographic position. If you sit at the hinge between Africa and Europe, people will come. Some are fleeing violence. Some are escaping poverty. Some are simply seeking a future.

Spain’s response is almost boring in its sanity:

Rescues at sea are organised, not weaponised.
Asylum processes function without turning every application into a national morality play.
NGOs and municipalities handle frontline integration without being smeared as traitors or “pull factors”.
And critically, Spain offers a legal pathway — arraigo social — that allows migrants to be regularised after two years, recognising the simple fact that if people are already living in your society, the most rational thing you can do is integrate them.

This is not naïveté.
It is pragmatic humanism.

A country that is actually under pressure has learned that panic makes everything worse — and that moral clarity and administrative realism are, in the long run, the only sustainable approach.

Britain: A Superpower of Performative Fear

Then there is Britain — a country with fewer boat arrivals, fewer border pressures, and incomparably more political theatre.

The new Labour government, elected on a promise of competence, has appointed a Home Secretary — an Oxford-educated politician who should know better — who has plunged headlong into the same punitive reflex that defined her predecessors:

Proposing visa bans on entire nationalities.
Reducing asylum processing time limits to the point of absurdity.
Recycling the rhetoric of American culture wars and Trumpian nationalism.
Treating refugees as a statistical nuisance to be minimised rather than as human beings with stories, trauma, and dignity.

This is not the behaviour of a confident nation.

It is the behaviour of a country addicted to manufactured panic, because panic is the last remaining tool in its political toolkit.

Britain no longer has a coherent economic model.
It no longer has a unified social vision.
And its political class no longer has a narrative of who the country is, or what it stands for.

So it turns to the only story it has left: fear of the outsider.

The Moral Collapse of British Labour

The tragedy here is not simply that Labour has adopted conservative immigration framing.

The tragedy is that Labour has forgotten its own genealogy.

Social democracy — the European kind, the post-war kind, the moral kind — was built on a simple conviction:

The health of a society is measured by how it treats the stranger.

This was not an abstract ideal.
It was a lesson drawn from genocide, fascism, war, and displacement — a recognition that if Europe was to rebuild itself, it needed a political ethic grounded in solidarity, not exclusion.

Spain, with all its imperfections, still remembers this.

Britain does not.

The Labour Party of today triangulates itself into oblivion, chasing right-wing voters who will never love it, and sacrificing the values that once made it a moral force in world politics.

A Labour Party that governs by fear is not Labour.
It is simply a softer mask on the same punitive instincts that have now defined British immigration policy for twenty years.

Migration as a Mirror

Migration does not destabilise nations.
It exposes them.

Spain’s handling of higher arrival numbers reveals a society that, despite its flaws, still has a functioning moral compass and a political class capable of distinguishing reality from theatre.

Britain’s handling of fewer arrivals reveals something far more troubling:

A nation with no confidence in itself, no stable identity, and no political imagination.
A country performing toughness because it no longer knows how to perform leadership.
A Labour Party performing cruelty because it has forgotten how to perform justice.

A Simple Truth Worth Saying Out Loud

A country does not drown because desperate people cross its waters.
It drowns when it forgets who it is.

Spain, for all its pressures, has not forgotten.
Britain, tragically, has.

And until the Labour Party recovers its moral centre — the centre that once made Britain a pioneer of compassion, dignity, and internationalism — its immigration policy will remain nothing more than an anxious shadow of its own lost ideals.

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the twilight of life, and the shadows of life.”
— Hubert Humphrey

Why Populists Thrive in a Connected World

Why Has Globalisation Increased Division Instead of Unity?

Globalisation should have been our great humanising force. For the first time in history, large numbers of people can travel freely, study abroad, work internationally, and encounter cultures that would once have remained distant and unknown. We have access to films, music, literature, foods, and languages from every continent. On paper, this should have produced an age of empathy. A century in which the old barriers of race, nationality, and religion dissolved into shared humanity.

Yet the opposite has happened. As the world has opened up, political identity has hardened. Populist nationalism has surged: Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and similar strongman figures elsewhere. Racism, religious extremism, conspiracy thinking, and tribal rhetoric are resurgent. The more connected the world becomes, the more threatened people seem to feel.

This contradiction is not new. It is the old story of the Tower of Babel. Human beings build upward toward unity, creativity, and common purpose—yet something in us fractures, resists, and disperses. Even if we don’t read that story religiously, it is psychologically precise. The closer we come to real integration, the more fear arises: fear of loss of identity, loss of control, loss of status.

Globalisation has consistently been experienced not as shared enrichment but as competition. The immigrant is framed not as a neighbour, but as a rival. Cultural diversity is discussed not as dialogue, but as dilution. Political rhetoric encourages the idea that “our” way of life is being erased. The result is defensive nationalism and, increasingly, violence.

This is not inevitable. The problem is not globalisation itself, but the absence of global solidarity to accompany global interdependence. We have integrated our economies, but not our ethics. We have connected our markets, but not our imaginations.

So the question is: How do we reverse the tide? How do we turn globalisation into a force for peace, dignity, and cooperation rather than division and resentment?

Here are three foundations:

1. Global Education that Teaches Perspective, Not Propaganda
International exchange programs cannot simply be tourism or language practice; they must cultivate the ability to see oneself from the outside. To understand how one’s culture appears to others, how history shapes identity, and how dignity must be mutual. Education that only reinforces national narratives will always produce suspicion, not solidarity.

2. Freedom of the Press, Protected by Law, Not Politics
Real democracy depends on the ability to critique power. When the press becomes the instrument of governments, oligarchs, or corporations, societies fracture along invented fears. The crisis at the BBC this week is not a local scandal—it is a warning. If journalism cannot report freely, citizens cannot think freely. And if citizens cannot think freely, they cannot live together freely.

3. Cross-Border Economic Cooperation That Shares, Not Extracts
The problem is not diversity—it is inequality. When globalisation enriches a few and impoverishes many, resentment is inevitable. But when globalisation supports fair wages, sustainable industry, ecological responsibility, and shared growth, it strengthens stability rather than fear.

In short: global interconnectedness must be matched with global empathy.

We already live in one shared world. The question is whether we will learn to behave as if that is true.

Unity is not naïve. It is the only realistic future we have.

“We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.”

–Kofi Annan

The Blueberry Paradox: Why We Keep Destroying the Systems That Could Save Us

On my last day in Spain, I sat at a small café, watching three men take down decorations from the town’s recent festival. The bunting had hung across the square for days, colouring the white-washed walls with celebration. Now the tourists had gone home, and these men — quiet, anonymous, methodical — were returning the square to its ordinary face.

Their work is unremarkable. No one applauds. Yet without people like them, the whole “beautiful tourist city” collapses.
Without them, the photos don’t look charming.
Without them, the streets feel neglected.
Without them, the illusion breaks.

I found myself thinking about fishermen at dawn, hotel cleaners before breakfast, bin collectors at 4am. The quiet labour that keeps the world turning — labour that rarely receives dignity, respect, or fair pay.

Then I looked at my arm.
At the blueberries.

Yes — I have blueberries tattooed on my forearm. And no, it’s not whimsical. Or perhaps it is, but in the way truth sometimes hides inside whimsy.

The blueberries remind me that I cannot enjoy anything alone.
Not even my breakfast.

To eat a blueberry, I depend on soil, weather, farmers, packers, transport workers, supermarket staff, the climate not collapsing this particular year. My pleasure is communal, whether I acknowledge it or not.

Upside down, from a distance, the blueberries form a heart-shape. I didn’t plan that. But perhaps the body speaks before the mind is ready to believe.

The tattoo is a reminder:
You are held. Your life is made by many lives. You are not independent.

And so here’s the question that came to me in that Spanish square:

If we know we are interdependent, why do we build societies that pretend we aren’t?

Why do we reward the illusion of the “self-made individual” while the world is built by the unseen hands of others?

Why does the fisherman earn less than the financier?
The cleaner less than the consultant?
The bin collector less than the politician?

It is not rational.
It is not moral.
It is not even economically coherent.

It is, however, familiar.

And this — whether people like to admit it or not — is where Marx enters the conversation.

Marx’s Point Was Never “Everyone Should Be the Same”

Marx’s central claim was beautifully simple:
Human labour creates value.
So the people who create value should benefit from it.

That’s it.
That’s the hinge.

Marx wasn’t calling for laziness, or enforced sameness, or the death of creativity. He was pointing out that societies become obscene when those who create the conditions for life (food, sanitation, infrastructure, care) are treated as disposable.

He believed in dignity through shared labour.
In contribution as meaning.
In justice as the redistribution of the wealth that labour creates.

Which is why, though he rejected religion, Marx comes surprisingly close to Jesus.

Jesus also preached the reversal of hierarchy:

“The last shall be first, and the first last.”

Not metaphorically — economically, socially, relationally.

Both men looked at society and said:

This is upside down.
We can live differently.

Both pointed to community over competition, relationship over possession, need over greed, dignity over dominance.

And yet —
we have not built the world either of them imagined.

Not once.
Not anywhere.
Not for long.

So the question is no longer Was Marx right?
Or Was Jesus right?

The question is:

What stops us from building the just society both of them saw so clearly?

The Answer Is Not Economic. It’s Psychological.

We call it capitalism vs. communism
but the real struggle is fear vs. trust.

We hoard because we are afraid there won’t be enough.
We compete because we are afraid of being overlooked, replaced, forgotten.
We dominate because we are afraid of being powerless.
We cling to hierarchy because we are afraid of being ordinary.

Fear is the water we swim in.
Fear is the undecorated square after the festival is taken down.
Fear is the silence in the early morning before the day begins.

Marx underestimated fear.
Jesus named it, but was killed for it.

And every system we have built has collapsed for the same reason:

We would prefer to be safe than to be equal.

The Failure Was Never Marx’s. It Was Ours.

We say “communism failed” as if ideology collapsed of its own weight.
But ideas don’t fail.
Systems don’t fail.

People fail.

We fail because we want justice until justice requires something of us.
We want equality until equality asks for our privilege.
We want community until community interrupts our autonomy.

We want the kingdom of God
without the cross.

We want Marx’s dignity of labour
without surrendering status.

So we keep building worlds in which:

the blueberry appears magically on the table
the labourer remains invisible
and we pretend we did this alone.

The Blueberries Again

I look at my arm.
The tattoo.
The accidental heart.

A reminder that interdependence isn’t an ideal —
it’s already true.

We just live as if it isn’t.

The question is not whether a just society is possible.
We already rely on one.
Every day.
Every meal.
Every building.
Every service.
Every breath of shared infrastructure.

The question is simply:

When will we live as though we know it?

And perhaps the first step toward a better society
is simply learning to say:

Thank you.
To the fisherman.
To the street worker.
To the invisible hands.
To the ones who keep the world turning
so that the rest of us can pretend we did it ourselves.

The Scapegoat and the Crown: Why Britain Needs to Abolish the Monarchy

Part One – The Scapegoat and the System

Prince Andrew has become a convenient scapegoat. The public outrage directed at him—his titles, his wealth, his disgrace—has become a form of moral theatre, allowing Britain to avoid a far more uncomfortable truth:
the monarchy itself is the problem.

It is an institution built on inherited privilege, not merit; on spectacle, not service. It sanctifies class division and performs humility from behind palace gates. The British people are told to revere the family as living symbols of unity, while they in fact embody the very inequality that fractures society.

The monarchy’s defenders call it “tradition.” But much of its wealth came from colonial exploitation, violence, and theft. To much of the world, Britain’s clinging to this institution looks less like pride and more like denial.

Part Two – Hypocrisy and Selective Outrage

The moral outrage directed at Prince Andrew contrasts sharply with the silence surrounding others in power. King Charles publicly humiliated Diana, maintained a mistress while married, and ultimately inherited the throne without a whisper of accountability.

Andrew’s association with Epstein is rightly revolting—but when was he tried and convicted by a court of law? In this story, trial by media has replaced due process.

This is not to excuse Andrew, but to question the hierarchy of outrage. Why is one man publicly destroyed while others—perhaps more powerful, perhaps equally flawed—are quietly sanctified by ceremony? Is moral judgment now a function of public relations?

Part Three – The Mirror of Hypocrisy

The British press has always loved a fall from grace. But who are the journalists behind the condemnations? Who among us is not conflicted, hypocritical, double-hearted?

Behind every polished column or camera-ready smile lies a private world of temptation, jealousy, and moral struggle. To deny this is to deny our shared humanity.

What Britain needs is not another scapegoat, but a mirror.
A nation obsessed with punishment cannot heal.
A monarchy built on myth cannot lead.
And a press addicted to scandal cannot claim virtue.

Let’s be honest: the time for the British monarchy has passed.
Its gilded walls and archaic rituals no longer represent democracy, merit, or truth.
If we want a mature, honest society, we must dismantle the systems—royal, media, political—that reward hypocrisy and spectacle over accountability and grace.

“Titles of nobility are like the decorations of savages—ornaments for ignorance.”
— Voltaire