Eco Worrier - Times Online - WBLG

Me and my worms...

Just what you wanted, I'm sure, a picture of me and my wormery. Not that you can actually see the wrigglies. For that honour you'll have to click below on 'continue reading this post'. This picture does show how small and urban garden friendly a worm bin is. I know I'm always banging on about this but honestly, get one. Worms are unlikely life enhancers.                                                                   

Mmmm, yum

Because it's Friday and because it's cold and because Easter is coming, I thought we all deserved a visual treat. Here is Divine's Easter offering. Get it at Waitrose, Morrison's, Oxfam and other independent shops for £4.99. Recently, The Body Shop, which had invested in Divine Chocolate Ltd that makes this egg, handed its shares over to the producers for free at the Kuapa Kokoo farmers' cooperative in Ghana, which was a jolly decent thing to do. This makes it my favourite dark stuff of the moment. That said, my friend Nicole, who is always at the height of cocoa fashion, brought round a bar of Blake's organic chocolate with chopped almonds the other day, and that was quite something. Turns out it's an Irish company, read all about it here. 

For more eggselent Easter choices (sorry) try Montezuma, a company selling handmade and deeply ethical chocolate. I particularly like the Emperor Egg Box: unusual geranium and chilli flavoured chocolates that come in a real egg box that you can recycle or even compost afterwards. When I was young, we used to make chocolate eggs by pouring melted chocolate into plastic moulds. That appeals to me this year, as I get increasingly obsessed with a DIY approach to life, so let me know if you spot any such equipment. We have long since lost the moulds and reverted to buying overpackaged, oversugared high street varieties.

Worldmapper and my thwarted Easter eco-trip

Here is a map representing the world not according to landmass but according to the proportion of flights taken by each country. A number of these modified maps came out of a collaboration between Sheffield University and the University of Michegan (thanks to Treehugger for prompting the link). You can also look at the world according to its military spending, car use or military deaths since 2000. This one shows it according to CO2 emissions. Click here for further fascinating interpretations of our planet.

Meanwhile, here’s a dilemma to make all you terrible lot who pick holes in my attempts to be green (you know who you are) rub your hands together with glee. My friend and I want to go to York over the Easter weekend. Neither of us have a car. I like to use public transport wherever possible because it’s greener and also because I find it relaxing nestling into a train seat with a stash of papers and a Fairtrade cappuccino.  But the cheapest deal we can get – and, yes, I know we should have booked earlier – is £170 for two return tickets. Ouch. For a two hour train journey to York, it’s an awful lot. So, take a coach, you're probably thinking, if you’re so committed to public transport. Well, yes, but it’ll take between five to six hours on a National Express coach, and I don’t think I’m prepared to spend that much of my weekend rumbling (slowly) down a motorway. As a last resort, we’re flirting with hiring a car. Any alternatives would be gratefully appreciated. I’m tired of answering your eco-dilemmas. I want some help with mine.

Please don’t chuck the sofa

Sorry to bang on about the house move, but there’s so much eco-worrying that happens in the fraught time between uprooting yourself from one place and settling down in the next, I just can’t stop…
Here is a sorry tale of some furniture from our old rented place. Specifically, a huge and blissfully comfortable Habitat sofa; a kitchen table, and a giant shiny fridge. All of which I was sorry to leave behind, since we don't have this stuff for our new place.
The new tenants, however, were unimpressed. They told the letting agent they didn’t like this stuff. It is old, they said, and past its best, and they had their own superdooper shiny new versions. So, they took the whole lot to the dump.
This hurts. It’s not just me that would have gladly taken this stuff. When you see how quickly things are snapped up on Freecycle and Gumtree, you realize one man’s trash is indeed another man’s treasure. 

Worm update

What joy to plunder the first tray of compost from the wormery. Dark, rich soil, shining like melted chocolate, and still dotted with egg shell and the odd bit of avocado skin. Plenty of worms down there too, although they're supposed to be heading up to the top layer where I put fresh scraps. I try not to rip into them, poor little wrigglers, as I give it all a good turning over with a spoon (I know, I know, my choice of tools tells you far too much about my ranking as a gardener).

Next I mix it with some normal garden soil in a bucket. Using this, I plant out some herbs that have been growing in containers. I wedge them in with my new concoction and they look fairly happy about it. I tell you this not because it's necessarily the right thing to do with home-made compost. I've no idea. I combined the two soils only because the worm compost looked a bit wet and rich to be used by itself. Rather, I'm challenging anyone to tell me that I should be doing anything different with it. To be honest, I've no idea. Lately I've adopted a cavalier sort of attitude to growing things. Whoever said you need to be well-versed in Alan Titchmarsh and the peculiar terms that green fingered folk toss into conversation to grow a few lettuce leaves. More to the point, whoever said not knowing how to do something should put you off trying.

VIDEO: Al Gore in London

(Google Video not working? Click here to watch the Gore interview)

So, as the government released the Climate Change Bill, Al Gore arrived in Britain in a blizzard of buzzwords. He was here to promote his new channel Current TV, which is a bit like YouTube with more impressive-sounding phrases, but fewer clips of students lipsynching to the Pokemon theme tune.

Hannah Betts met him for the interview above, and discovered that he's running a three day training program, teaching 1,000 people to present his 'slideshow about global warming'. Cate Blanchett and Cameron Diaz have already been trained. The News Blog has more.

Should the mood take you, please feel free to vent your own feelings on him here. An alarmist? A hero to the green cause? A monotone bore, more likely to send you to sleep than get you turning down the central heating? Here is a man who rouses fury and devotion in equal measures.

As he strides purposefully around town - one imagines leaving a trail of eco-converted in his wake - tell us what you think? Should we all rise for Saint Al Gore the Green?

UPDATE: Also on Times Online today: Listen to A date with the planet - a podcast recording of a debate at London's Cadogan Hall with Adair Turner and Marks and Spencer's CEO, Stuart Rose.

Eco-Worrier’s Wardrobe Challenge

Inspired by a wardrobe pledge on this blog that encourages people to abstain from buying new clothes and to refashion, renovate and recycle old items, I have decided to launch my own version.
Please welcome, Eco-Worrier’s Wardrobe Challenge.
For one year, I am not going to buy any new clothes. This sounds more extreme than it is. Let me explain. Taking part in this does not prevent you from buying second hand clothes from charity shops, vintage shops and Ebay. Just nothing new. Why? No, not some kind of miserably puritanical hair-shirt instinct latent in all green-minded people. I would simple like to show some resistance to consumerism.

(Click below for why I'm taking the challenge; my worries, and how to join me)

Brutal rejection from Freecycle

I’m feeling sorry for myself. Tempted as I am to head out into the garden and eat worms (a turn of phrase that takes on a whole new meaning when you have a wormery) I have decided that writing about it might be more soothing. After years of praising the Freecycle movement for its pioneering eco spirit - in this blog and in my print column - I have been denied membership to its growing ranks. Hackney Freecylers don’t want me. That’s the long and short of it. My community has rejected me. Only a few days living in the lovely London Borough of Hackney and I’ve been cast out.

Click below to see the polite but curt email that was sent to me.

Help! Has anyone had any joy with eco-friendly paints?

If you read one of my previous posts, you’ll know what’s coming next. Painting. What else is there to occupy you once you are installed in a new place? Especially when confronted with purple walls in the bedroom and carrot orange in the study. No offence to the previous owner but things have got to change. Having browsed the wide range of green paint companies – Earthborn, Rendona, Ecos Organic Paints – I’ve discovered that they are all considerably more expensive than your bog standard Dulex. And I can’t help wondering if they work as well. Will the walls need redoing in a year’s time to prevent an orange/purple glow appearing? Comments on websites by people who have tried them hardly inspire confidence. Even one of The Guardian’s committed green columnists, who is making the tarting up a railway carriage the subject of her column, The Green House, gave up on finding a decent green paint.  Quite frankly, if a Guardian greenie can’t manage it, what hope do I have?