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Grist for the Mill - The Thinking Watermill Society
Grist for the Mill - The Thinking Watermill Society
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3 NOV 2026 · In a previous podcast, we spoke about bread and roses.
Bread, because everyone needs the means to live. Roses, because life should offer more than survival.
But perhaps roses have another story to tell.
In 1957, the French writer Maurice Druon published Tistou les pouces verts, the story of a little boy with an extraordinary gift.
Wherever Tistou placed his thumbs, flowers began to grow.
They bloomed in prisons, hospitals, and even in a factory producing weapons.
Tistou could not make suffering disappear. But he could bring beauty into places where it seemed to have been forgotten.
And sometimes, changing what people see can change what they believe is possible.
We often speak of the environment in terms of resources to preserve, risks to manage and damage to prevent.
All of this matters.
Yet nature offers something that escapes our calculations.
The quiet beauty of a flower beside a road. The shade of an old tree. The unexpected colours of a field in spring.
None of these needs to be owned to be enjoyed.
And beauty need not be the privilege of wealth. Sometimes it asks for little more than a patch of earth, a little care, and the freedom to grow.
In his song Le tasche piene di sassi, the Italian singer Jovanotti evokes flowers blooming and freely giving all they have.
They do not choose who may admire them.
They simply bloom.
Perhaps that is their most generous gift: they make the world more beautiful without asking anything in return.
And perhaps we have something to learn from them.
Caring for the environment is not only about protecting what exists. It is also about allowing life to flourish, sometimes in places where we least expect it.
We may not all have Tistou's green thumbs.
But we can all leave a little beauty behind us.
We once asked for bread and roses.
Perhaps it is now time to learn how to grow the roses.
And sometimes, simply to let them grow.
Not only for ourselves.
But for everyone.
The Thinking Watermill Society
27 OCT 2026 · We humans have become accustomed to measuring climate change in degrees, emissions, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events.
But perhaps we can now begin to measure it on maps.
The indicators are varied: diseases appearing in new regions, crops moving beyond their traditional areas, schools of fish migrating across the seas, changing tourist seasons, and territories becoming harder to inhabit.
Our analysis does not address the causes of climate change or the debate over its anthropogenic nature. It simply observes the effects and the way they are transforming the geography around us.
The Shifting Map, a new series from The Thinking Watermill Society, will track these shifts and explore their consequences.
Because climate change is not just making the world warmer.
It may also be shifting the world we thought we knew.
20 OCT 2026 · Cities are growing.
They are becoming denser, faster, more expensive, more efficient.
And, increasingly, they are becoming places where very different lives are compressed into the same narrow definition of what people need.
A roof.
Food.
Transport.
A job, if possible.
A minimum income.
These things matter. Of course they do.
But there is a danger in believing that, once basic needs are somehow met, the work of society is finished.
Because human beings do not live by survival alone.
More than a century ago, workers marching for better conditions found a remarkably simple way of saying this.
They asked for bread.
But they asked for roses, too.
Bread meant wages. Food. Security.
The roses meant something more difficult to measure.
Time.
Beauty.
Education.
A place to meet.
A tree outside the window.
A theatre one can afford.
A public square where one is not required to buy anything simply to remain there.
The possibility of living in a city without being reduced to a worker, a consumer, a commuter, or a statistical unit.
Today, urban transformation risks removing precisely these things.
Neighbourhoods become investments.
Public spaces become commercial spaces.
Housing becomes an asset before it is a home.
Distance pushes people farther from schools, culture, friendships and communities.
And those with fewer resources are not merely becoming poorer.
Their world is becoming narrower.
Politics often responds by asking whether people have enough to survive.
Do they have shelter?
Can they pay for food?
Can they reach work?
These are essential questions.
But they are not sufficient questions.
A society can provide bread and still produce lives without roses.
James Oppenheim wrote more than a century ago that “hearts starve as well as bodies.”
Perhaps that is something urban policy should remember.
The quality of a city cannot be measured only by how efficiently it accommodates human beings.
It must also be measured by how much room it leaves for them to be human.
Bread, yes.
But roses too.
8 SEP 2026
1 SEP 2026
22 APR 2024 · Hi everyone! I'm Lorenza, a master degree student, who would like to add more positive news on this very special day.Do you know that Norway is the first country in the world to ban deforestation? Norway gave $1 billion to Brazil to protect the Amazon back in 2008. This helped cut Amazon deforestation by 75% in 7 years.A few years later, in 2016, Norway became the first country in the world to ban deforestation. The Norwegian Parliament pledged that the government's public procurement policy will no longer use products linked to deforestation.The pledge was part of Norway's Action Plan on Nature Diversity, which also requested that the government's investments avoid harming biodiversity.Norway's action plan follows its partnerships with countries such as Brazil, Liberia and Guyana, providing billions in funding to help preserve their forests. The partnerships are part of a UN initiative to reduce emissions by avoiding deforestation.Norway is also working to restrict gas car sales by 2025. Gas cars face significant taxes, while EVs enjoy exemptions, making them more economically appealing.According to the Norwegian Automobile Federation's analysis, gas car sales have consistently and steeply declined, with less than 10% of new car sales being non-electrified.I hope you enjoyed this environmentally-friendly news. The best way to celebrate Earth Day? Show more care about our planet.Thank you
22 APR 2024 · Hello everyone, my name is Cecilia. Today the world is celebrating Earth Day, a 54-year annual event and the largest environmental movement on our planet.Before sharing some GOOD news in favour of our ecosystem, I must thank the Thinking Watermill Society for inviting the Parioli English School to the podcast.On a positive note, we are 2 students who deeply believe in this project and would like to raise awareness as well as spread the results of some amazing initiatives as follows.Do you know that The ocean cleanup is a non-profit organisation that develops technologies to clear the oceans from plastic pollution?This year’s goal is to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or GPGP) by optimising the System 03.The GPGP is the biggest accumulation of floating plastic on Earth (triple the area of France). It is located between Hawaii and California and it contains 100.000.000 kilograms of plastic. Cleaning such a vaste area requires ten cleanup systems.Therefore, in 2023, the association tripled the size of their system so as to achieve their goal.The system 03 is long 2.5 kilometres and it is able to clean an area of ocean equivalent to a football field in 5 seconds.Until today the ocean clean up has removed a total of 345,000 kilograms of plastic, which represents only a third of a percent of the mass of plastic in the GPGP. Even though it is not a huge percentage, these results demonstrate that this system is working.They aim for System 03 to achieve 100 kg/ hour of plastic extracted from the GPGP. For example, in 2023 this system reached a level of 75kg/hours of plastic removed, an all-time high for us in the GPGP.In order to improve the performance of cleanup systems they consider both the amount of plastic they extract in kilograms per hours and the uptime the system is actively cleaning (not including transit, extraction, etc.).In conclusion, they believe that in 2024, by increasing the uptime, capture efficiency and by improving the ability to target the high plastic density areas, they will achieve their goal and show the world that their solution for Great Pacific Garbage Patch is real and effective.
25 MAR 2024
23 JUN 2023 · In this episode, we get introduce the founders of The Thinking Watermill Society, the members of the network and its purpose.Listen to understand why the HER Media Network was created and its vision. This podcast is powered by The Thinking Watermill Society.
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