conservation

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June 2, 2010

Baby steps to greenthink — walking and Wombles

Posted by efreak under behaviour, Britain, conservation, environment, green, hiking, recycling, society | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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When I was a teenager, I had two back-up conversation plans: football and Neighbours. I did not really do very well at small talk, a slight barrier when trying to meet girls. So I knew that if I rambled on about the vegetarian fusspot Harold Bishop, star of the suburban, Australian soap, most people would know what I was talking about. It was a patch of common ground from where we would begin scaling conversational mountains (like Home & Away)…

Wind farm devastates Wimbledon landscape

When you are trying to nudge friends towards engaging with environmental problems, you need to find something, anything that can start moving them away from the energy-hungry, how-can-I-do-anything-about-climate-change attitude. It is obviously not an easy journey, and they won’t be volunteering to scale coal-fired power stations for Greenpeace the next weekend. First you need a little thing, an ‘in’, that shows them that the idea of a greenish life is not very far from where they are.

For efreak’s mother-in-law it is recycling, an obsession. Another popular way, as I wrote previously, is by growing stuff. Some people just like the feeling of being smug. For me, it is walking. In Hong Kong, where I used to live, I could not think of a better way of (more…)

 

May 25, 2010

Free compost, dead worms and other garden disasters

Posted by efreak under agriculture, conservation, environment, farming, food, green, recycling, waste | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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“I am having a bit of trouble with my wormery. Any advice?” I sheepishly asked a woman setting out a row of giveaway seeds and leaflets in Finsbury Park. A more accurate question would have been: “All the worms in my wormery have died. Do I need some more worms, or can I just turn it into a compost pot?” But I stuck with the first, I-do-not-want-to-appear-completely-useless question.

Worms not included... anymore.

“Yes,” she replied, not pausing from her aggressive leaflet arrangement. “Release all your worms into the soil and start a compost instead.” I got the impression she strongly disapproved of wormeries. “But I live in a flat,” I mumbled, “And the wormery is the only place where I can get rid of my food waste.”

“Well, they probably got too cold during the winter. You have to treat them like any other pet,” she said, still giving the impression she could not believe that any right-thinking person one would keep anything as cruel as a worm zoo. [in my defence, I did worry about my worms and brought the wormery inside during the cold snap. The worms repaid my kindness by escaping all over the carpet.] Afraid of another worm-based dressing down, I decided that perhaps I was not going to get the answers I craved and retired quietly, but slightly bruised, to the queue for the free compost.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how I now spend my weekends, queueing up for free compost in Finsbury Park. It is a rather brilliant scheme. Haringey Council collect all the food and garden (more…)

 

May 11, 2010

Advertising climate change

Posted by efreak under advertising, behaviour, climate, conservation, economics, efficiency, energy, environment, transport | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Here’s an idea. If you want to convince people of the seriousness of major environmental problems, like climate change, why don’t you just give a top advertising agency an enormous wad of cash and let them wangle their wand in the dark arts? You give the ads blanket coverage and, hey presto, even your Daily Express-reading uncle is convinced of the threats to Amazonian biodiversity. You can finally get on with the job of banning air travel and making socks and sandals a compulsory combination…

Mike Hulme, a professor at the University of East Anglia and the founder of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has written a brilliant book on why it is not quite as simple as that. The argument of ‘Why We Disagree About Climate Change‘ is that everyone comes at the problem from a different point of view. They are either desperate for a return to a Garden of Eden idyll, terrified of the apocalyptic collapse of humanity, confident we can create technical solutions, or hopeful that we can rebuild a better society. If you want to convince people of the importance of the issue, you have to understand what is important to them (money, social justice, global security). Some people go all gooey-eyed when they see polar bears falling off melting glaciers. I think it is funny…

So which tribe should advertising target and what message should it give for the greatest impact? Here are a couple of examples:

First up is your typical Greenpeace ad. A Clockwork Orange-esque bombardement of apocalyptic imagery — icebergs, dead fish, whales, deforestation. This ad is aimed at shocking you into the kind of direct action that has made the organisation famous…

The second is part of the UK government’s Act on CO2 campaign. It hired director Shane Meadows, (more…)

 

May 10, 2010

Eating dirt — looking after our soil

Posted by efreak under agriculture, conservation, environment, farming, food, green, society | Tags: , , , , , |
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I raised the vessel to my nose and inhaled the aroma. My senses were hit with a woody, yet fresh flavour. The texture looked sandy, with a slight oily residue. It looked delicious and rich. But then, the moment of truth — the taste. I paused to savour the moment, looked around the bar where dozens of people were doing the same, grabbed a handful and licked my finger. The taste? Well, it tasted like dirt. The soil sample from the gardens of Alexandra Palace tasted as it ought to — like it should be on the ground, feeding plants, not in my mouth, staining teeth. I did that tight-lipped spitting thing, and sipped away the residue with my cider…

Would you like any ketchup with that?

This soil-tasting event — apart from a wonderful chance to treat Mrs efreak to a special night out — was aimed at highlighting the importance of dirt to our lives. The Green on the Screen event (a monthly, North London screening of environmentally-themed films) showed the documentary Dirt!. The film was a romp through all things dirt and dung — micro-organisms in soil, growing your greens, insulating your house with mud, suicide among farmers in India, how you could get electricity from mud, the risks of degrading top soil by intensive agriculture etc… In some parts it was rather breathless, and the combination of cartoon characters representing soil and the prerequisite, gravitas-laden commentary from famous actor (in this case, the curious speller Jaime Lee Curtis) was a little, er, muddy.

But the film picked up when it started looking at individual US projects. The first was Tree People, a project run by top (more…)

 

November 8, 2009

Could community-think help create a green design for life?

Posted by efreak under Britain, conservation, economics, environment, Politics, society | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
[2] Comments 

“Libraries gave us power”. So sang the post-Richey Manic Street Preachers on “A Design for Life“, a celebration of the local lending facility among other things. Libraries are a brilliant idea. Based mostly on trust, they give free access to a huge range of books, slightly out-of-date CDs and free Internet access. I got my taste for their bookish delights when I borrowed Glenn Hoddle’s first two — count ‘em — autoboigraphies when I was a young efreak (he apparently had enough material for two even before he decided that disabled people had it coming).

ostrom_hand_photo

Hands up if you have a Nobel...

The genius of libraries drifted into my head during recent lectures on my LEnTIL (Leaders of Environmental Treehugging in London) course about how you harness the strength of community in tackling environmental problems (see previous blog). Such an approach, made famous by the recent Nobel Prize winner and professional old woman Elinor Ostrom, looks beyond the normal reliance on laws (stop polluting or we will chop your hands off) and markets (bankers making pots of money while helping clean up). Ostrum’s approach is for communities to make their own rules to tackle a particular problem, especially those of common ownership.

Ostrum said a few factors were crucial in ensuring such community-centred systems work: 1. You need a stable community which has a shared long-term vision for what you can achieve (on a wider scale this has implications for immigration, see Martin Wolf’s article this week in the FT) 2. System has to be cheap for users and those running it. (more…)

 

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