Photo: zappers

Plastic’s been getting a pretty bad press for quite a while now. Bloggers like my erstwhile colleague Matt over at The Coffee House (‘The Dead Zone – plastic fcuktastic‘) have been covering the problem comprehensively, and quite right too. There can’t be too many people left who aren’t at least aware that plastic bags are a Very Bad Thing. How many of them take the issue seriously enough to actually do something about it is another matter.

Claire Morsman felt strongly enough about the media coverage of the thousands of marine creatures killed by ingested plastic each year, to make her own reusable cloth shopping bag, the Morsbag. This single individual act inspired a worldwide movement of over 200 ‘pods’ (groups of Morsbags creators), in the UK, America, New Zealand, Spain, Japan, Morocco, France. Since the ‘sociable guerilla bagging’ campaign began, the tally of Morsbags has reached 17,869, potentially saving 8,934,500 plastic bags. Says Claire Morsman:

“I’ve learned there are a lot of people out there who want to do something about environmental issues but don’t necessarily know how to start. There’s so much energy and emotion and intelligence ready to be unleashed. I’ve always thought there are many more good people than bad in the world, but now I’ve learned how brilliant people are! They’re joining in and not giving in to desperation.

“Everyone inspires each other. It’s a win-win situation. Anyone can do it, it’s completely universal, and you’re making a bag. How fabulous is that?”

For more information about Morsbags and instructions on how to make your own, go to www.morsbags.com

This is the first of an occasional series in which Change Alley looks at the state of environmental debate at the grassroots. No deep analysis here, local opinion will be allowed to speak for itself for the most part, although it may prove hard to resist the odd comment or two in passing.

The Western Daily Press is a Bristol-based regional newspaper covering Avon, Wiltshire, Devon, Dorset and parts of Gloucestershire and South Wales. The Press celebrates its 150th anniversary in June, but has kept firmly up to date with a successful online edition that provides a number of interactive features to allow readers to ‘have their say’. Here is a recent thread from their Forum pages, contributors’ details have been omitted to avert embarrassment, but you can read the whole thing here.

Manmade or natural?

• There is a threat to some wetlands and their inhabitants due to dry winters. Do you believe that climate change is manmade or is it a natural cycle of the earth?
• History tells us that climate change has always taken place. The Romans grew vines in the Severn Valley. The climate change con has been put about by governments in order to (a) A good excuse to tax us more and (b) to try to get us to save oil and gas which are of course finite resources. If you look at the scientists who have supported the theory they have all been paid by government grants to say whay the government wants to hear. Independent scientists have very grave doubts about lots of the so called facts that have been produced.
• To believe we can destroy what has taken all of eternity to create, just by what is essentially ‘keeping warm’, is fanciful I think. . That doesn’t mean I don’t believe we should be protecting, conserving and always trying to find ways to improve our environment. . We certainly should; and increasingly so. . But in any case, in the overall scheme of things the Earth is pretty insignificant. . . . Mind you I do know someone who believes that if you haven’t got a PASSPORT and don’t fly, you should get petrol FREE OF TAX; and if you haven’t got a car either you should get FREE BEER! . . AND HAVE TO SAY I AGREE WITH HIM!
• I find some of the comments made by so called experts quite annoying.These people travel round the globe warning us of climate change and how do they travel,by plane.When they get to their destination how do they get to the venue,by car.So to me it’s just a load of eco freaks on the take.They get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for speaking out of their backsides.We’ve been down this road millions of years ago.What about the ice age,i suppose that was the dinosaurs fault for letting off too much methane
• The indignity of ‘The Speaker’ of the House of Commons personifies the corrupt thinking of all these people. . . The jailed Conservative politician Jonathon Aitken, was jailed for lying under oath about hotel expenses for his daughter I believe. . . They are all disgusting hypocrites. . . And WE are paying their wages. . . Is it surprising we try and avoid paying Income Tax.

And there we have it. Five degrees of separation to take us from drying wetlands to political corruption and tax avoidance. A valuable insight into the thought processes of the Man On The Yeovil Omnibus. It makes one so proud that the British public can penetrate the blanket of lies and propaganda on climate change and see it for what it really is.

It’s funny how words’ meanings can change over time. I was browsing idly through our bookshelves the other day, when I came across an interesting little volume called ‘The Survivalists’. Nothing to do with Jerry Ahern‘s interminable macho saga, Patrick Rivers’ 1975 book is a serious review of the ‘alternative’ environmental movement in the mid 1970s. From the blurb on the back cover:

“It has become fashionable to write and talk about the environment crisis: about the Earth’s fast dwindling resources of food, raw materials and energy; about Doomsday. But it is all talk: life goes on as before.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

“Beneath the veneer of the Establishment there exists an Alternative of people ‘living the revolution now’…. Some are escaping to rural self-sufficiency, others to communes; some join non-violent revolutionary groups; the technically-minded begin experimenting in alternative technologies; some set off to fight world poverty; others do all this and more”

The people Rivers describes would nowadays be called ‘greens’ or ‘environmentalists’. Today, ‘survivalist’ conjures up a particular set of images: rugged individualists, preparing for TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) by stockpiling supplies and weapons in a remote hideout, sometimes with some form of extreme political agenda. For an amusing glance at the survivalist ‘sub-culture’, watch Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekend episode ‘Head For The Hills‘. But there’s a wide spectrum of preparedness, and a whole range of survival scenarios to prepare for, from Hurricane Katrina to getting stranded in the snow on the way home from work. There is a growing awareness that disasters don’t just happen to other people, and a realisation that our ‘civilisation’ is much more fragile and precarious than we used to think.

“A dedicated ‘conserver’ does not generate much garbage in the modern sense. Consider the following ultra-frugal conserver practices:
Kitchen scraps: Use every available scrap for animal feed or for compost.
Paper and cardboard: saved for re-use as stationary or for fire kindling, insulation.
Bottles, jars, plastic jugs, and plastic bags: washed and saved for re-use.
Candle stubs and soap scraps: save to periodically combine and re-use.
Steel and aluminum cans should all be carefully washed and sorted, for re-use as containers or raw material for various metal projects.
After being boiled for soup, most bones can be ground to make bone meal, or burned to make lime.
Scrap metal of all descriptions should be sorted and stored.
Wood ashes and fat scraps should be saved for soap making.
Twine, string and thread of all kinds can be saved for re-use.
Clothes worn beyond the point of usefulness should be saved for bandage material, quilts, rags, and insulation.
Electronics beyond economical repair should be cannibalized for their metal hardware and individual components.”

An excerpt from the manifesto of some low-impact hippy permaculture commune in West Wales? It ticks all the ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ boxes. It’s actually a recent piece of advice on post-collapse garbage disposal at Survivalblog.com, a preparedness web site that claims over 55,000 visits a week worldwide. If you can see past the ‘gun nut’ discussions, this is an wonderful resource for anyone thinking about ‘off-grid’ living, growing their own food, or just planning for a winter power-cut.

A common factor in survivalist philosophy is that our present-day consumerist lifestyle is unsustainable. Where Rivers’ survivalists and today’s greens seek to modify our behaviour so as to avert, or at least moderate, catastrophe, the typical Survivalblog subscriber is planning to maintain as much of his lifestyle as possible WTSHTF. The conclusion to the above advice reads like this:

Of course, most of these extreme measures should be reserved for post-TEOTWAWKI. The value of your time must be considered! Taking these measures now would probably alienate your spouse. Your family and neighbors would also soon notice your growing heap of stored “recyclables” which they would surely label garbage. It might not be to long until the fire marshal was called to condemn your stockpile as a fire hazard. Unless, of course you could convince them that all you were doing was “reducing your carbon footprint”.

Business as usual.

Tonight, The History Channel broadcasts a two-hour documentary special ‘Life After People’. The program speculates:

“What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive?”

A mix of science fiction and science fact, using expert testimony from a range of disciplines, we are shown how the world as we have made it would change if the human race were no longer there to ‘maintain’ it. Judging by the accompanying History Channel web site, the program follows quite closely the general thread of a 1996 New Scientist article, ‘Return to Paradise‘, which traces the changes in a deserted London over 5, 10, 50 and 500 years.

The thing about ‘What if?’ scenarios is that they often raise more questions than they answer. In this case, one has to ask how the human race disappeared, because the manner of our departure could have a strong influence over how, or if, the planet and its remaining occupants survive us. The web site describes a number of possible causes: pandemic, nuclear winter, asteroid impact. Several of these would be relatively quick, but indiscriminate, possibly leaving a totally dead planet. The premise of the show seems to be an instantaneous vanishing, leaving all physical traces of our civilisation intact. This kind of begs the question, who turns the lights off? Who makes the nukes safe, and closes down industrial processes? What about the mess?

I suppose this is outside the scope of the program. As another New Scientist article ‘Imagine Earth Without People’ put it in 2006:

“Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses).”

Cheery stuff. Inevitably, ‘Life After People’ concentrates on the decay and collapse of our built environment, because it makes more dramatic visuals than watching grass grow, which I imagine would be a major activity if this were to happen for real. It should be remembered that there’s very little of the planet’s surface left that doesn’t bear the mark of human activity, and very few ecosystems that wouldn’t change once we went.

Channel 4′s food season ‘Big Food Fight’ is about to start its second week. I’ve deliberately avoided most of the programs so far, because I know a lot of this stuff already and frankly I just get upset by yet more gory details about factory farming. Great bloke though Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall seems to be, I don’t need to sit through his faithful reconstruction of an intensive chicken farm. Although anyone who has cooked and eaten both roadkill and human placenta paté deserves our respect.

Be that as it may, last Thursday I found myself watching ‘The Truth About Your Food’, a Dispatches documentary about the £5 billion UK market in premium foods and ready meals that claim to be healthy and nutritious. Three families were given different collections of ‘foods’ from which to assemble their regular diet: premium ‘healthy’ products, e.g. Sainsbury’s ‘Be Good To Yourself’ range; bargain basement equivalents; and I can’t honestly remember what the third, quite health-conscious, family had, it may have been business as usual. That must have made them the ‘control’, although that would imply a level of scientific rigour for the program that it didn’t really deserve.

Between domestic reaction shots (“Mmmm, this is…. quite nice”) and nutritionist talking heads, we learnt a few things.

• Foods that claim to be good for you very often aren’t.
• Premium-price healthy products are often no better for you than their cheaper cousins, and sometimes worse.
• The various competing food labelling schemes are confusing and pretty much useless, since people who don’t have time to cook their own food tend not to have hours to spare to decypher the figures on the packet.
• Breakfast cereals are full of salt and sugar.
• Concentrated fruit juices are full of citric acid which is as bad for your teeth as fizzy drinks.

And so on. I know that by the end I was past caring what the ‘results’ of the ‘experiment’ were. Each family was shown piles of salt, sugar and fat equivalent to what they’d consumed while on their ‘diet’. The relative sizes don’t matter, they were all scarily large. The one thing I took away from the program was recurring nausea at the thought of yet another Tesco chicken tikka massala or Waitrose chicken filo parcel. Chicken seemed to crop up quite often as an ingredient. I wonder where it comes from. My mate Hugh could probably tell you.

A feeling gradually emerged from all this that what these people were being fed wasn’t really food at all, but what Michael Pollan would call “foodlike substances”. In his book ‘In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating’, he describes how our eating habits have been formed, manipulated and controlled by a “nutritional industrial complex”. We have moved away from traditional food cultures where what we eat and how we eat it was determined by family influence and local ingredients, to a complacent acceptance of interference in our diet by scientists, marketing and governments. While nutritional recommendations change regularly, the end result is still that “much of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the past fifty years has made us less healthy and much fatter”.

So, what to do? Pollan’s core message is that we should return to eating “real food”, and offers some recommendations on how to find it and get the most out of it. It’s a long list, here’s a few to give you a flavour:

• Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. Going back several generations enables us to avoid the confusion of lengthy ingredient lists, most of which have dubious nutritional value and are included more for the food industry’s benefit than for ours.
• Avoid food products that make health claims on the package. Anything with a package is more likely to be a processed than a whole food. And the whole issue of packaging and its environmental impact is another kettle of worms altogether.
• Cook – and, if you can, plant a garden. Creating your own food chain, “from fork to fork” as Monty Don used to say, enables us to reclaim control from industry and science.

Pollan goes so far as to say that “cooking from scratch and growing our own food qualify as subversive acts”. This puts him firmly in the same camp as relocalisation groups such as Path To Freedom. It doesn’t matter how much or how little food you can grow yourself. If you can just grow some salad on a window-sill, that’s one less nitrogen-filled plastic bag of imported salad bought. After all, as Lao-Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Extracts from Michael Pollan’s book ‘In Defence of Food’, including his full set of rules-of-thumb, are published on the Guardian’s web site.

‘Consuming passion’

‘How to get back to real food’

If you’re one of those people who’s prone to lightbulb moments, when a bright idea pops into your head when you least expect it, your time has come. NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, has launched the Big Green Challenge, a nationwide competition to come up with innovative ways of reducing CO₂ emissions in the community by 60%.

The £1 million prize fund is designed to encourage and reward people working together to develop new approaches to saving energy. So, the competition is only open to organisations or groups of people. These will need to be formally constituted as ‘not-for-profit‘, although newly formed groups can apply for this status later.

Ten finalists will have a year to turn their ideas into action. The winner will be announced in late 2009. The first stage of applications closes at the end of February, so get together and get those thinking caps on.

Individuals can’t enter, so if anyone wants a partner for this challenge please let me know. I give great brainstorm, and I’m so easy to work with

A flyer in my weekend paper announces that Londoners are to be offered the chance to exchange two traditional light bulbs for two free energy efficient bulbs. From 11th-13th January, take your nasty old incandescent bulb along to any branch of B&Q and trade it in for a lovely new long-lasting, energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL). While stocks last. This is a joint project between B&Q, British Gas and the Mayor of London. According to the Mayor’s web site, the initiative is a “stunt-led PR activity across the city, [involving] above the line marketing, promotional activity, point of sale information packs”. Its purpose is to “help raise awareness of the importance of using energy efficient lightbulbs”.

http://www.london.gov.uk/sponsorship/opportunities/environment.jsp

There are so many issues and unanswered questions raised by this it’s difficult to know where to start.

• Presumably it’s OK to swap a dead bulb, we’re not told. But who keeps dead bulbs lying around just in case of a trade-in opportunity? It’s highly likely that the majority of people participating in this exercise will be presenting perfectly viable bulbs for exchange.
• I never shop at B&Q. My nearest store is about 5 miles away, in an area I never go to. Taking part in the amnesty will require a round-trip of 10 miles.

All of which devalues the ‘freeness’ of the new bulbs. As for the whole idea of phasing out old bulbs, which underlies this initiative, don’t get me started. Oh, I have.

• CFLs are not 100% satisfactory alternatives for incandescent bulbs. They’re subjectively dimmer and the light has a different quality, an effect that becomes more noticeable amongst older people as their eyesight deteriorates. CFLs are not suitable for activities such as reading, sewing or electronics. A 11 watt CFL is not equivalent to a 60 watt incandescent, despite what it says on the box. In practice, users will end up switching to 20 watt bulbs and even installing additional lights to compensate.
• CFLs tend to be longer and heavier than old-style bulbs, so they often don’t fit existing light fittings. Ceiling roses may need to be ‘beefed up’, small lampshades may have to be replaced with larger ones.
• As has been publicised recently, information on disposal is vague, inconsistent and unavailable. While the current health scare about the mercury content has been over-played, people still need to know that CFLs are different and need to be handled accordingly.

Don’t get me wrong, I support the use of CFLs where appropriate. I even have several installed in my house. I do not approve of the current blanket policy of phasing out and banning. I am planning to stockpile incandescent bulbs so that I can continue to find my way round the house in my old age.

Oh yes. Ken, that link on the flyer still doesn’t work, get it fixed.

8th January Update: At last Ken’s found someone to fix that link at www.london.gov.uk/lightbulbs/
There are some interesting snippets of information in there. Good to see that someone agrees with me that CFLs are different.

For technical reasons, the glass used to house energy saving light bulbs has to be opaque – not totally transparent, so shouldn’t be directly compared to clear traditional bulbs.

Wherever you look, you’ll read something about “How To Have A Greener Christmas”. Helpful suggestions such as reducing packaging, buying locally and using low energy tree lights are really just the usual anti-climate change propaganda dressed up with a sprig of holly and some tinsel. Valid though these seasonal hints and tips may be, they’re missing the point. Christmas is the traditional big feast in the middle of winter to cheer us up when everyone’s at their lowest ebb. To brighten our darkness, Christmas must provide a contrast with ‘normal’ life. It’s true that modern Christmas has become an orgy of consumerism, cheap tat and mounting desperation, but we only have ourselves to blame.

I grew up in the 50s, with food rationing fresh in people’s minds and the economy still trying to kickstart itself. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t well-off either. Little ‘extras’ had to be worked and saved for, and were valued all the more for that. We had a rule: no presents except for birthdays, Christmas and perhaps an egg at Easter. Consequently, the contrast between the seasonal festivities and our everyday existence was intoxicating. The anticipation, the rituals, a few decorations and some rich food was enough to convince everyone they’d had a great time without spending a fortune. The tinsel and the wrapping paper were carefully stored away for next year.

Compare that with today’s Yuletide experience. We consume all year, buying ourselves and each other all kinds of nick-nacks and geejaws designed to fall apart or go out of fashion long before the Christmas shopping season starts in October. We’re sated by retail therapy, bored by novelty. What do you give someone who buys themselves whatever they want whenever they want it? As far as I can tell, you throw money at the problem in a vain attempt to make Christmas ‘special’, or at least distinguishable from August Bank Holiday or the third Tuesday in February. Over-consumption at Christmas can’t be separated from the much wider problem of universal over-consumption all year round.

The environmental propaganda machine continues to rumble forward on ‘The Archers’, BBC Radio 4′s venerable soap opera and green information channel. Tuesday’s episode featured an earnest discussion of anaerobic digesters on farms, turning animal muck into methane and generating electricity for sale back to the grid. According to jet-setting career agriculturist Debbie Aldridge, calling home from Eastern Europe where she runs her father’s offshore organic farming operation apparently single-handedly, the Germans are streets ahead of the UK with this technology. She wants a piece of the action at Home Farm.

It’s taken a while for art to imitate life. Last year the BBC reported how an agricultural college was using methane from the muck produced by its dairy herd to power its working farm all year round (‘College harnesses cow pat power‘ ), saying “the technology is used at more than 1,000 farms in Germany but only at a handful in the UK”.

Why are we so far behind here? The natural conservatism (small ‘c’) of UK farmers? Problems financing the project? General uncertainties in the farming industry? The idea seems to tick all the right boxes: cheap electricity, lower emissions, reduced water pollution. For me, the only fly in the ointment is the need for artifical fertilisers to replace the muck that used to be spread on the fields.

The reason they’re ahead in Germany is, you guessed it, money. In 2004, Renewable Energy World reported:

In Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the incentive system for anaerobic digestion consists of both a subsidy for the green electricity generated, and of either investment subsidies or fiscal incentives. Of all the countries reviewed, Germany has the best investment climate for anaerobic digestion at this level, the main reason being its high feed-in tariff for the electricity generated – 10.1 Eurocents/kWh. Moreover, this rate is guaranteed for a period of 20 years.

Sounds tempting. I bet Brian Aldridge would jump at that deal, if it were available in the UK.

Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum…

Photo: ‘Kivalina Sunrise’ by Vision Aerie

An island in a moonlit sea. A thin sliver of sand 6 miles long, under pressure from rising seas and erosion. A place with no future, named in an IPCC report as an example of the costs of relocating coastal communities. An indigenous community of 400 who desperately want to leave but who can’t afford to even if they had somewhere to go. Where is this? Somewhere in the Pacific? The Carterets, perhaps, or Tuvalu.

Wrong. This is America. Kivalina Island, Alaska, 85 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is disappearing and has perhaps 15 years left to live. One option is a stronger sea wall, made of rock rather than sandbags. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates it would cost $33 million to protect the southern tip of the island. At the other end of the scale, relocating to a new purpose-built settlement on higher ground inland would cost at least $155 million, or about $387,000 a person. Some have suggested just giving the inhabitants the money and letting them loose, but this idea hasn’t generated much enthusiasm.

No-one seems to be prepared to take responsibility. The locals see a big storm as their only salvation. “If Kivalina floods or something really bad happens, then they’ll move us,” says the pastor. “That’s the only time we’ll get money.”

Welcome to the United States.

Los Angeles Times