Ken Whitehead
Ken Whitehead is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary, where he specialises in using unmanned aerial vehicles for a variety of environmental monitoring applications. For his PhD he developed methods for measuring glacial flow rates and ice loss in the Canadian Arctic. In the past he has been a remote sensing instructor, and has worked as a remote sensing / geomatics specialist in the UK, South Africa, and Canada. Ken is originally from Scotland, but currently lives in interior British Columbia, where he enjoys life in the great Canadian outdoors.
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Time for a New Politics of Sustainability
The major defining feature of politics in our current day and age is the division between the political left and right, with the political spectrum popularly being perceived as a progression from communism on the extreme left, through socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, to fascism on the extreme right. The terms left and right are believed […] More
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The Power to Change the Economy from Within
When we look at how our market economy affects the environment, it appears that all common sense goes out the window. According to the prevailing economic wisdom, it makes perfect sense for us to clear vast swathes of tropical rainforest to make way for oil palm plantations and soya beans, to pursue the last few […] More
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The Power of Business as Usual
The inability of our society to take serious action on problems such as climate change is extremely frustrating to many people. After all we know what it is we have to do; why don’t we just get on and do it? It seems simple, but there are many obstacles to change. Most of these are […] More
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Nationalism and the Global Consensus
Like most people I am proud of my culture. I was born in Scotland and spent the first 25 years of my life there. Although I now live happily in Canada, in many ways I still think of Scotland as being home. It is the landscape which shaped my perceptions of nature and beauty, the […] More
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Demographic Transitions in the 21st Century
One of the critical challenges for the next century is the need to stabilise, and ultimately to reduce the number of human beings on this planet. We are already by far the most abundant large animal on Earth, and our sheer numbers, combined with our extremely wasteful use of resources, is putting increasing strain on […] More
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Short Termism and the Human Brain: How We Tune Out the Long-Term Consequences of Our Actions
Sometime between fifty and one hundred thousand years ago, the ancestors of modern-day homo sapiens are believed to have left their African homeland and begun their relentless expansion across the world. Within a comparatively short time period, early humans had extended their influence to every continent. Life is believed to have existed on this planet […] More