Eco Worrier - Times Online - WBLG

Swaps, shops and, erm, snot

Wrapped up in bed with a cold, listening to the rain giving the broad beans and lettuce seedlings a bashing, it all feels a bit grim. Can it really be June on Friday? (And is anyone else having problems getting their salad greens to grow big and strong? Mine are stuck at dwarf proportions). Surely we’re supposed to be drinking Pimms in the sun and browning ourselves in our lunch hour, not festering in bed with a Lemsip.
The only thing that makes me feel marginally better is that my favourite approach to fashion is all over the place (I say ‘my’ approach, but obviously I know that scores of you out there have been doing something similar to the Wardrobe Challenge for longer than I have. And may I take this opportunity to thank you for all your emails and comments about how you resist fast fashion and take up creative alternatives. I enjoy reading them all and have swiped up some astonishingly good tips). It was also a pleasure to read in The Guardian’s about the rise of clothes swapping; having received several emails about the clothes swapping events mentioned at Futerra and Hybird but not been able to make them. I also recently learnt about the first ever Pop-Up Swap Boutique that is being set up in central London (5-7 Brompton Road to be precise).
The game is this: you take along unwanted stuff and you are issued with a Visa Swap card charged with points that reflect what you have donated. On 15th/16th/17th June, you go back to cash in your points by buying new items. Find more about it here. One thing I know for sure, and that’s if the world’s leading payment brand, Visa, is onto this, the consumer climate must be changing. And there must be money in it to tempt such a dough-driven sponsor. Swap shops are here to stay.

Something bright and light...

On a more frivolous note (than my previous post, anyway), am I the last to hear about Made, an accessories brand that has a concession in London and Dublin’s flagship Topshop stores?
It makes hair clips, earrings and jewellery out of discarded flip-flops collected during clean-ups of the East African coast.
It reminds me of a company that I heard about recently that will make shoes from your old jeans.
I hate to get all product-y on this blog, but I love all this consumer resourcefulness. It reminds me of the time I tried to make a handbag out of my most beloved pair of trousers. Suffice to say, it ended up being used as a moisture mat for the wormery.

What do you make of nuclear power, eco-worriers?

Work has begun on several new nuclear power stations, revealed The Times this morning. So, how are we feeling about this, eco-worriers? Tell me what you think. Sceptical? Quietly confidant? Horrified? I must say, I swing between all three. Most of the time, I feel rather like a cornered rabbit being forced to admit that hanging out with Mr Fox isn’t necessarily such a bad idea. Nuclear power offends my green sensibilities, but, right now, it seems like the only option that will tackle climate change. Fast. Albeit in a horribly toxic manner.
Not that I really believe that this is the Government's priority. The Blair/Brown duo is motivated most of all by how to maintain “a stable and affordable energy supply” and “end the reliance on the whims of foreign governments” (in the words of Alastair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary), and who can blame them? But my concern is that renewable energy developments will never make headway unless we start putting money behind them, rather than pouring it into new nuclear power plants.
And I haven’t heard the bigwigs talk anything like enough about energy-efficiency. If they’re so worried about dodgy energy supplies in the future, they should encourage us all to value resources and use less of them.
I’m not saying that a few more energy saving light bulbs will save the day, but it should be part of any plan for the future. We need financial incentives for energy-saving products; more money ploughed into renewable energy options, and, most of all, we need to keep a close eye on industry and its energy-gobbling habits.

Offsetting for the unfaithful

For some light relief on this sunny Tuesday morning, I heartily recommend this new take on going carbon neutral. It’s called Cheat Neutral and it’s not strictly about the environment; it’s actually about your love life, but it made me smile all the same. After all, why not extend the concept of carbon neutralising to other areas? What I love is that there is actually a Paypal link in case anyone takes it seriously enough to decide to line the pockets of the monogamous to cancel out their wicked, cheating ways. The video is also hilarious (click here to find it). The point of the spoof? Ultimately, it’s a dig at the concept behind offsetting, reminding us that to do a bad thing and then try and make it better by doing something good in a completely different arena, is never going to work. As the founders of Cheat Neutral say at the end of the video: "We need to start cherishing our planet, not cheating on it.”

In light of global warming, should Formula One drivers retrain as bus and train drivers?

Fellow Times Online blogger Ed Gorman looks at this on his latest post that includes passionate emails from planet-bashing racing aficionados. From blaming the “the big yellow thing in the sky” to pleading that the sport must not “let the eco killjoys dictate what we should do for our leisure and entertainment” the responses suggest that the question hasn't been taken in the light-hearted spirit that it was probably asked. Come on, even us eco-worriers have a better sense of humour.

Fellow Times Online blogger Ed Gorman looks at this on his latest post that includes passionate emails from planet-bashing racing aficionados. From blaming the “the big yellow thing in the sky” to pleading that the sport must not “let the eco killjoys dictate what we should do for our leisure and entertainment” the responses suggest that the question hasn't been taken in the light-hearted spirit that it was probably asked. Come on, even us eco-worriers have a better sense of humour.

Slug-slaying, not for sensitive souls

I’m under attack. First, it was aphids. Little critters sucking the life out of my tomato plants. Then the rain saw them off. But with this week’s drenching came the gardener’s greatest wet weather foe. Slugs and snails. And I’m sure if I looked hard enough at the remnants of my beloved courgette plants, I’d probably find puppy dog tails too. The sort of slugs I'm dealing with would think nothing of munching through man’s best friend. I went away for a day and a night last weekend, leaving my two handsomest courgette plants alone and unprotected. On my return, barely a stalk remained. They had been zapped. Gone. Gobbled. Fodder for my garden’s rising slug and snail population. My French beans, dwarf beans and marigolds have suffered attack too and risk similar fate every night. So what to do? It is a question that has been asked by gardeners for centuries. How to save your tender seedlings and young veg plants from slugs? (click below for more)

Fancy a carbon neutral cookie?

Thank you Marilyn and the Gridskipper blog for pointing out this green bakery in New York’s East Village (with a really irritating flashy website but don’t let that put you off). Anyone who manages to combine chocolate cookies with environmental benefits deserves high praise. Better still, cyclists get a 50 per cent discount, which is surely going to prompt all sorts of people to start propping a bike helmet under their arm. It opened last year, but it is still working on the perfect organic biscuit. Meanwhile, it gains greenie points for the materials used in its construction (see pic left). The floor is cork; the walls are daubed in milk paints, made of 99 per cent food ingredients, and the work surfaces are made from bamboo.
Sadly I can’t tell you what the baked goods taste like. Not until a branch is opened over here, that is.

Would you drive a G-Wiz?

Fresh debate about the G-Wiz electric car has kicked off. Last time I wrote about it on this blog, a fierce row ensued about its environmental benefits, which you can find here.  This time it’s not the green implications of nipping around in this small, low emission vehicle that are at stake but its safety. It has failed a Department for Transport crash test. For main story, see here. In its defence, GoinGreen, the company that imports and sells the cars, has said that there have been no reported deaths or serious injuries associated with the 2,000 vehicles on the roads in the UK and India.
Which seems a little odd, since the Government is making us feel as though anyone driving one might as well be going the wrong way around the M25. But the fact is these cars are designed to be driven slowly, in built-up areas. They only ever reach 45 mph, for goodness sake. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be aware that they are considerably less safe than, say, the latest range of BMW SUVs, but I know what I’d rather drive. As it happens, I wobble around town on two wheels, courtesy of a trusty mountain bike bought second hand in 1991. Along with all the motorbike and moped riders, I must be more far more at risk than G-Wiz drivers. Would you prefer to cocoon yourself in metal in a polluting vehicle that promises to protect you or sacrifice a degree of safety for a lighter environmental footprint?

Click here for Times Online's top ten other environmentally-friendly cars.

Carnival of the Green # 76

My time has come at last to host the legendary Carnival of Green - which if you don’t already know is a rolling feast that gives different green blogs an opportunity to flag up the week’s best posts. To learn more about it, click here. Last week it was hosted by Enviropundit. Next week it trundles off to Natural Collection. Now, let’s see if I can’t tickle your fancy with some of the following subjects.

Bums and tums….get fitter while cooling the planet

With all this talk about slimming your carbon footprint (if you missed it, I'm talking about a new book that shows you how to cut your carbon calories) let’s not forget how the eco-friendly lifestyle helps you achieve a svelte figure. I’ve been counting the ways:

* First, the obvious: cycling or walking to work or legging it to catch the bus. Immediate fitness.
* There’s also energy-saving measures like turning down the thermostat. Your body has to work harder to keep warm in a cooler house, burning more calories.
* Then there’s extra trips to flick off stand-by buttons and fill the kettle every time you finish the meagre amount of water you allowed yourself to boil.
* When it comes to cleaning, it’s lemon juice and vinegar all the way for greenies. And while I wouldn’t want to diminish their powers, there’s no doubt that you have to put some elbow grease into it to get your bathtub sparkling. (On this one, I’d go further and suggest that we can probably chart our national disposition for bingo wings, those unwelcome fleshy extensions to our upper arms, to a growing dependence on super strength ‘spray and wipe’ cleaning products that shift grime so effortlessly that you might as well be wiping with your little toe.)
* And have we factored the weight of all those organic, mud-caked root vegetables lugged back from the farmers market every weekend?
* A couple of hours in the garden is also virtually the same as a gym work out, except with floral, less sweaty, aromas. For city dwellers deprived of their own patch of Eden, there’s the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers, currently recruiting those willing to spend a few hours a week trimming hedges and planting bluebells.

Earthships, the mother of all eco-homes

Don’t you just love ‘em. Pioneered in the 1990s by Mike Reynolds, an architect, in the barren deserts of New Mexico, they’re straight out of an eco-conscious Doctor Who. Reynolds first described them as "independent vessels to sail across the seas of tomorrow".  Now they are cropping up all over the place. Developers at Brighton Marina are expecting the go-ahead any day for a development of 16 earthships, the first of its kind in Europe.
Across the channel, an experienced Earthship crew, led by Jonah, who emailed me to let me know (thanks Jonah), will be starting construction of another cluster, in Normandy.
I wish Jonah would pop along to my backyard and start digging.
Oh, and most of excitingly, if you happen to be in New Mexico, you can rent Earthships, from $170.

(Click below to find out how an earthship works)