With Cornwall Council having declared a Climate Emergency in January 2019, and an Ecological Emergency after COP26, you might assume councillors would be falling over themselves to get educated on the subject. Unfortunately you'd be wrong. Cornwall Councillors were offered free online Climate Literacy Training as part of their induction training after the May elections. Having heard that uptake on the training was on the low side, even after six months, I asked the council how many councillors had actually completed the training. Out of 87 councillors, just 5 have actually finished the package! According to Councillor Alvey, Cabinet Member for Environment and Climate Change, there are other means for councillors to get educated on climate change, such as induction sessions in the Council's carbon neutral programme, and all-member briefings. Around 30 members have participated in either of those avenues, though it's unclear how much climate change and ecological informatio...
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole over the past few days and ended up reading about The Public Universal Friend. What first grabbed me is that this was an actual name, and what made it more remarkable was that this person lived in America in the seventeenth century, when the idea of changing your birth name was presumably more unusual than it is today. As I began to dig a little more, I realised there was a whole lot more that made this person unusual for their time, not least that they also became genderless. When you think about how hard certain parts of today's society are pushing back on the transgender community in supposedly more enlightened times, it's all the more remarkable that someone was able to do this publicly almost 350 years ago. The Friend was born in Rhode Island in November 1752 as Jemima Wilkinson. One of twelve siblings, they were raised a Quaker, and learned long passages of the Bible and Quaker texts by heart. In the mid-1770s, the Friend began attend...