Opinion
Urban space and ecological footprints
As a counterpoint to the special report on sustainable cities that leads this issue, Irish science consultant Roy Johnston proposes an original style of town planning that would create fewer greenhouse gases.
A key feature is the positioning of living space in relation to work space and retail trade space. Currently in Ireland these three are increasingly widely separated, so that dependence on the car is total and ingrained. It seems to me that the key factor governing this positioning problem is the price of land, which is subject to local market forces, and is in effect monopolistic.
I am wondering whether anyone has studied what might be the effect of all ownership of land being vested in the State, with a leasing OPINION procedure for land use in specific locations, the price of the lease being related to the cost of necessary services, rather than (as now) what the (monopoly) market will bear?
If this were to be the case, might we have compact cities, with people living in walking distance of places of work and centres of retail trade, and relatively easy mobility of domicile location?
This is at the boundary of science, technology and economics, and I am wondering who might be fit to tackle it as a possible serious step in the process of carbon footprint reduction.
Safety education
Two British readers, Roger Fenwick of the European Association of Chemical and Molecular Sciences (EuCheMS) and Jeremy Wallace wrote to express their indignation at the June 2007 special edition on the seventh framework programme which opened with a photo of a researcher decanting a liquid from a test tube into a glass vessel. Even though the woman is holding her face very close as she does this, she is not wearing safety spectacles.
According to Mr Fenwick, as our magazine is also aimed at younger readers, “It is important to get across the message that a laboratory is an inherently dangerous place and that accidents, when they happen, can be very serious. The wearing of safety spectacles in laboratories is not an option but a necessity.”
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