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The world is on fire but don't worry I'm not going to give you bad news week after week. Despite the shitstorm we're experiencing, some good things keep happening as well. This week, researchers from The Nature Conservancy released their research on Hawai'i's coral reefs and good news: the coral reefs that experienced a massive bleaching in 2014 and 2015 are now healing! They found that the corals that were healing the quicker were the ones with limited exposure to humans, shocking right. Read more about these wonders of nature.

Ever wonder how meat became such a staple in our lives and diets? Turns out Victorians are all to blame. The global mass-meat industry as we know it today took its first steps in Britain. It revolutionized the British diet and how the rest of the world consumed meat. Read about the fascinating story of how 'big meat' came to be.

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All aboard the sleeper - The unexpected renaissance of European night trains

Solutions

Written by
Davide Banis

on
11 November 2019

In his 2017 book Night Trains, British writer Andrew Martin nostalgically celebrates the bygone era of sleeper trains and overnight rail travels. Attempting to recreate the journeys immortalized by novels like Murder on the Orient Express, Martin embarks on a series of nocturnal train adventures across Europe, just to realize that today’s sleeping carriages are nothing but a pale shadow of the opulent “hotels on wheels” that whisked wealthy passengers from Paris to Istanbul in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In 1934, when Agatha Christie published Murder on the Orient Express, the eponymous train was the pinnacle of luxury travel. In the dining car, waiters wearing immaculate white jackets laid nine-course spreads on starched linen while the interiors were a triumph of art deco glamour. Even in economy class, the steel ladders of the berths, introduced in the late 30s, had carpeted rungs.

In comparison, the rolling stock of today’s night trains leaves Andrew Martin unimpressed, to say the least. His couchette on an Intercités de Nuit, an overnight service run by France’s national railway company, is “a pretty good simulacrum of a prison cell.” As for refreshments served on board, the average breakfast consists of "a plastic cup of instant coffee and a jam-filled croissant in a sealed wrapper uninspiringly labelled ‘7 Days’."

Despite the spartan hospitality, night trains aren't particularly profitable either. "They do not make money," wrote Martin, "so their future looks uncertain in Western Europe."

In 2017, when Martin published his eulogy, overnight rail routes were being axed across Europe and sleeping carriages seemed ready to be parked at the transport museum, killed by budget airlines and high-speed trains. However, just a couple of years later, night trains may be about to undergo an unexpected renaissance.

In October, the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB)—one of the very few European rail operators that never gave up on overnight routes—announced plans to introduce a new Vienna-Brussels Nightjet service from January 2020.

A connection between Amsterdam and Vienna might follow in 2021. It would be the first international night train running in the Netherlands since December 2016.

A recent study by the Institute of Mobility Policy, part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, concluded that there’s good potential for sleeper trains from Amsterdam to several European destinations, including Vienna, Zurich and Milan.

Support for night trains is gaining momentum in Switzerland, too. The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is discussing the reintroduction of wagon-lits, withdrawn from Swiss rails in 2009 (current overnight services from Zurich are operated by ÖBB).

A survey commissioned by the Swiss Association for Transport and Environment found that the majority of polled Swiss are in favor of trans-European night trains. “We see the demand and are therefore looking into whether we can rebuild the night-train network. We’re now examining the routes and connections,” Armin Weber, SBB’s head of international passenger transport, told Swiss public television SRF.

The Swedish government is also interested in exploring the possibility of revamping its nighttime rail offer, as part of the country's ambitious plans to be carbon neutral by 2045.

The relatively low environmental impact of rail travel is one of the main reasons driving the comeback of romantic sleepers and couchettes. Night trains were killed by faster and cheaper airplanes but now they’re taking their revenge.

A report published in October by the UK Committee on Climate Change stated that “flying is the quickest and cheapest way for a consumer to increase their carbon footprint.” (Overnight) rail travel, which is virtually always less carbon-intensive than aviation, might then become the go-to choice for eco-minded travellers. Moreover, passengers save up an expensive hotel night and wake up well-rested right in the city centre, ready for their visit or meetings.

So, are night trains the silver bullet for climate-conscious, efficient and even glamorous travels? No, or at least not yet. Hefty track access fees, infrastructure capacity constraints and high maintenance costs put the brakes on railway companies' investments in their overnight services.

And even when they do invest, things don't always turn out as hoped.

The case of the new Caledonian Sleeper is exemplary in this regard. Connecting London to Scotland, the Caledonian Sleeper is one of the two remaining overnight routes in the United Kingdom (the other, the Night Riviera, connects London to West Cornwall).

The Scottish government and Serco, the company which operates the train on behalf of Transport Scotland, spent £150 million ($193 million) to renovate the rolling stock and the overall experience.

Harking back to the golden age of wagon-lits, the refitted Caledonian Sleeper was vaunted as a "luxury hotel on wheels," equipped with en-suite double rooms and a new technology to help ensure travellers sleep undisturbed during the journey. The restaurant car was freshened up too and Highland classics like smoked venison, haggis and a wide range of whiskies were added to the menu.

Unfortunately, since their introduction in April 2019, the new fleet of trains has been plagued by a variety of glitches and faults, from severe delays to water problems. The Office of Rail and Road (ORR), the U.K.'s railways regulator, reported that, between April and June, the Caledonian Sleeper has attracted the highest complaint rate of any train operator in the country.

Part of the charm of wagon-lits is that moving them across countries amounts to an epic operation. It requires solid infrastructure, a faultless rolling stock, specialized personnel able to maintain hotel standards in difficult conditions and (often) international cooperation. It may sound utopian but, in Europe, night trains can also be vessels of continental integration, cutting across national borders like a knife through butter (however, EU rules have paradoxically stymied overnight rail services in the past).

The challenge now is to make this romantic and climate-friendly travel option more economically viable, both for operators and passengers. And to ensure it remains a reasonably pleasant experience.

It’s an uphill struggle and there’s a lot of work to do but this also means that for night trains the end of the line is still far, far away.

Header image: SBB Intercity train
Credit: Pixabay

This story features:

Sustainable travel / Night trains

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California is living America’s dystopian future

Obstacles

Written by
The Conversation

on
5 November 2019

Credit header image: Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture

The Golden State is on fire, which means that an idea of American utopia is on fire, too.

Utopias are the good places of our imagination, while dystopias are the places where everything goes terribly wrong, where evil triumphs and nature destroys her own. Frequently utopias and dystopias are the same place, because perfection may not be possible without someone suffering.

Ursula LeGuin writes about this paradox in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story about the moral dilemma of living in a city called Omelas whose prosperity is made possible by one child’s pain. As the story’s title makes clear, most people don’t walk away from the beautiful place, even when its secret is known.

California often finds itself the Omelas of the American imagination. For some, it’s the beautiful place where having it all means shafting someone else, as in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” about Los Angeles’ theft of water from the Owens Valley. Or as in the magical theme park, Disneyland, which substantially underpays some of its workers.

The novelists Octavia Butler, Edan Lepucki, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Paolo Bacigalupi and Claire Vaye Watkins are among the many who have imagined the Golden State as a dystopian novel. In their novels, California is either on fire, in extreme drought or both. They all picture California’s descent as a combination of climate crisis and social unrest.

For these authors, climate change hints at the dark secret of the perfect place, of bad decisions that all America shares. Their novels suggest that if California looks like a dystopia before other American places, that’s because it’s often in the lead.

“California is America fast-forward,” sociologist Manuel Pastor says.

‘Ecology of fear’

The wildfires that ravage California light up America’s screens with terror. Suburban homes are stripped to their foundations; Samaritans lead horses from burning barns.

The historian Mike Davis reminds us that California has long seemed an “ecology of fear” for Euro-Americans. Settlers from Northern Europe and the East Coast did not understand Southern California’s climate, which is prone to unpredictability and drought.

“It is Walden Pond on LSD,” Davis writes, meaning that it is a psychedelic version of American nature spots like Walden Pond, in New England.

The unfamiliarity of California’s climate led to poor decisions about where to build from the start. Now Californians, like most western Americans, live too close to their wildlands, which are drying into tinderboxes.

“In the United States, there are now more than 46 million single family homes, several hundred thousand businesses, and 120 million people living and working in and around the country’s forests,” writes the journalist Edward Struzik, in “Firestorm,” his book about “how wildfire will shape our future.”

America has created the combustible environment called intermix, where residential and commercial uses spill into wildlands. America craves inexpensive electricity, too, which means that overhead power lines run through forests and chaparral.

Overhead lines have sparked some of the worst recent fires in California and other American places like New Mexico and Tennessee.

California utility company PG&E estimates the cost for converting overhead to underground lines at US$3 million per mile. While cost estimates vary, such a project surely will be expensive and might take a century to complete.

Overhead infrastructure wasn’t made for extreme weather, like the estimated 80 mph winds that inspired a rare “extreme red flag” warning in Southern California.

Pleasure in the state’s demise

On fire, California is a dystopian novel that the rest of America reads avidly, and at times with schadenfreude, that feeling of joy that a person may take in another’s suffering.

California ranks as one of the happiest states in the U.S., at number 13. But California came in last in a 2012 poll on which states Americans like.

Maybe it’s the happiness that annoys others, which some perceive as phony (“tofu,” “silicone” and “dyed hair,” said Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, about what is wrong with California).

When California was on fire in 2018, with thousands missing and dozens dead, President Donald Trump tweeted that the state mismanaged its forests. He tweeted the same thing during the recent fires, with more force. Schadenfreude? Arguably, the nation is struggling to address the fire challenges of the intermix, and California is ahead of the rest.

California supposedly is most hated by conservatives. But it nurtured the careers of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, plus a pair of conservative ballot measures, Prop 13 and Prop 187, that cut taxes as well as services to immigrants.

It is also the birthplace of modern progressive movements, from the United Farm Workers to environmentalism. California has been a seedbed of American political passions, to the Right and Left. Perhaps that’s why it arouses passion – and envy.

Confronting the secret

Dystopian thought criticizes what it loves in an attempt to make it better.

If California is living a dystopian novel, it is also a first responder to the fires of a changing planet.

Some of the state’s utility companies are getting smarter about infrastructure fixes. Evacuations are going better in the places where evacuations happened before. Californians voted in a landmark cap-and-trade bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and now they are trying to improve on it.

The state’s climate policy and renewed support for investment in public education signal that it is getting past the nation’s racial generation gap, where older white voters don’t see themselves in a demographically browner youth and resist funding them.

Living in Omelas means either compromising with injustice or learning how to make the world better before others even know that it’s broken.

Stay tuned.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. It's written by Stephanie LeMenager. You can read the original article here.

This story features:

climate change / California Wildfires

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With this advent calendar, you can donate to a different charity every day

Solutions

Written by
Davide Banis

on
4 November 2019

Advent calendars, once an uncomplicated matter of cardboard and cheap chocolate, can be extremely elaborate and eccentric nowadays.

From mini-bottles of gin to beauty products, wedges of cheese to radio-controlled helicopters, you can find literally anything behind the tiny numbered doors. Even donations to charities.

The latter is the idea at the basis of Advent of Change, a quirky philanthropic advent calendar which lets you donate to 24 different nonprofits. Every day of the Advent season, you can open a new box and see to which organization you made a 50p ($ 0.65) donation and how you can expect it to be used.

Advent of Change was set up in 2018 by Kristina Salceanu, a social entrepreneur based in the U.K. The first edition of the calendar raised £100,000 ($ 130,000) for organizations like The Hunger Project, a nonprofit committed to end world hunger, Crisis, the U.K.’s national charity for homeless people, and the Willow Foundation, an organization that provides emotional and psychological support for seriously ill 15-to-40-year-olds.

For this year’s edition, the team at Advent of Change ramped up their efforts producing not just one but four different versions of the calendar, including one specifically for children and one in braille.

Now, the calendars support a total of 72 charities working in fields as different as animal welfare, mental health and international aid. All organizations appear to be officially registered as charities in the U.K. even though there is no mention of particular criteria (like effectiveness, transparency or accountability) adopted to select them.

Advent of Change itself is a non-profit organization claiming to give over 70% of any product's sale price directly to charity.

As cheesy as it may sound, it might be that, when it comes to advent calendars, the “real treat” is donating something every day rather than receiving it. I also have no doubts that you will feel better after 24 donations to charity than after 24 mini-bottles of gin.

This story features:

philanthropy / christmas

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More Stories

All aboard the sleeper - The unexpected renaissance of European night trains

California is living America’s dystopian future

‘Ecology of fear’

Pleasure in the state’s demise

Confronting the secret

With this advent calendar, you can donate to a different charity every day