Corfu Blues and Global Views

Thursday, 23 August 2018

Dorset Waste Partnership: Plastic - Friend or Foe?

Plastic - Friend or foe? A message from from Dorset Waste Partnership:

"There's been a lot of coverage around plastics lately. Here are our top 3 facts about plastic recycling in Dorset... 1. Most of Dorset's plastic collected at the kerbside is recycled - around 66% annually. That which cannot be recycled is turned into fuel to generate electricity here in the UK. Our plastics are not stockpiled or sent to landfill.

2. It's good to recycle plastic, but it's best to not buy it in the first place. It's significantly cheaper to process recycling compared to black-bag rubbish - not to mention the benefits to the environment - but plastics don't generate any revenue for the council. The less waste we receive - recyclable or not - the better, so use reusable items whenever you can and avoid single-use and overly packaged items.

3. When produced and used responsibly, plastic is a cheap and versatile material that is easily recyclable. Problems arise when manufacturers use packaging that we can't recycle in Dorset (eg. plastic film or polystyrene) or items aren't placed in the right bin or, worse still, littered.

So please remember to keep putting your plastic tubs, trays, pots and bottles in your recycling bin".

Copyright © 2018 Dorset Waste Partnership, All rights reserved.

Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love; Overtourism; The Predatory Nature of Modern-Day Tourism

From Spiegel Online

Overtourism - a style of travel that is devouring all the beautiful places which drives it - the predatory nature of modern tourism - the infrastructure is no longer up to the task of handling the onslaught of travelers.

Reading Greece | An Englishwoman in Evia: Publisher Denise Harvey on her love for Greek literature and culture

From Greek News Agenda

A fascinating interview with publisher Denise Harvey

Excerpt:

"How did your interest in Modern Greek literature develop?"

My first two years in Greece I spent in Mani, then moved to Athens in 1969. The dictatorship notwithstanding, and in some ways because of it, it was a very exciting place to be. The cost of living was minimal and rents were cheap and enabled a bohemian way of life that was very attractive to aspiring poets, writers and young scholars, mainly non-Greek, most of whom, like me, had come to Greece before April 1967 when the colonels staged their coup. The Greek element of serious committed literary people was always present at our gatherings; many were the evenings when the tavern owner closed his shop down and left us at his tables with a good supply of wine and we talked through the night. Not a small number of our company were active in the resistance to the dictatorship, and not silent about it either. During those years, in addition to other jobs I worked as a ‘stringer’ and journalist -I remember one of the pieces I wrote was on Greece being a nation of poets with statistics on how many volumes of poetry were published each year, an unbelievable number- and I also produced books for the academic publisher Adolf Hakkert and an occasional volume for Oxford University Press. Those activities brought me in touch with a lot of people in the literary world in Greece".

"Do other foreign nationals share that interest? Have your publications managed to attract a viable readership?"

"I hope they do but fear that now a great many of them probably do not. Greece is no longer a haven for penniless foreign writers who are the most faithful supporters of small publishers like myself when it comes to buying books about the literature and culture of the country they are presently living in. One can no longer live in Greece on a shoestring. It would seem to me that foreign nationals with sufficient money to buy books are for the most part in the business world and on the whole they simply do not have the time to search out and read such books. Another factor is that, because of the economic crisis, the majority of bookshops still surviving in Greece are unable to stock books on their shelves as they used to in the past, and so they mostly upload titles with limited popularity on to their websites and only order them if they get an actual firm order for a particular title. That’s a very different way of finding a book which one maybe is attracted to read. Lost is the delight of discovering something which really interests one among a host of others on a shelf in a bookshop, and then flicking through it to get a taste of it; and not only that but having the opportunity to appreciate the quality (or not) of the publication, its design and general feeling. A book is a material thing and its content should participate in and contribute to its physical presentation, but that seems to happen less and less nowadays".

Books Published by Denise Harvey

Wednesday, 22 August 2018

Greece: Zagori Stone Bridges in Danger of Collapsing; Τα γεφύρια της Ηπείρου κινδυνεύουν με κατάρρευση

From Kathimerini

"Τα σημαντικότερα προβλήματα εντοπίζονται στο Ζαγόρι, στα γεφύρια Χάτσιου, Κοβάτσαινας, Πλακίδα, Καμπέρ Αγά, Αρκούδα, Μίσσιου, καθώς και στο γεφύρι Σκάλας Βραδέτου".