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 I'm often struck thatpeople who leave angry comments on this blog seem to regard anything green as a terrible intrusion by the state, and an invasion of their privacy.
I'm baffled because I'm not one for big government either, and think that many of the best "green" solutions to blah-blah-blah are actually small-scale individual actions that you can either do or not - you decide - but which, if many of us do them, have significant effect. (Having said that, I agree that many other people would like to impose solutions from on high, and that tax rises are often part of that, as well as assorted erosions of our capacity for self-determination, like the threat - which I mentioned yesterday - of imprisonment if you dare to feed food scraps to pigs, even after boiling them (the scraps, not the pigs) for an hour.) All this preamble about the right to self-determination and privacy comes as I discover that, after several years of owning a mobile phone, I'm about to be called out of the blue by any number of people trying to sell me assorted tut. The directory of mobile phone numbers goes live next week. All numbers, including those belonging to children, could be open to cold calls and general abuse, though of course we're promised that this isn't so. If you want to go ex-directory, click here, and follow the instructions.
 Fascinated to read in new book, Waste, by Tristram Stuart, that the biblical injunction forbidding Jews to eat pork may have nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with ecology.
 It seems that biblical scholars are in widespread agreement that the eating of pigs became taboo in the Middle East because pigs were eating foods that could otherwise have provided nourishment to people, while ruminants such as sheep, cows and pigs were turning grass (inedible to humans) into meat (edible) so were considered a Jolly Good Thing.
It seems that a number of environmentalists have created their own kosher rules by refusing to eat pork while still eating other meat - for the simple reason that, since the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, it has been illegal to feed food waste to pigs, and they must be fed instead on high-quality grain - if not actually pearl barley, as I my headline has it, then certainly grain that has been grown, as often as not, on land cleared from previously virgin rainforest. The outbreak of foot and mouth was indeed traced to a farm where the pig-keeper was failing to cook the swill he fed to pigs. This was against all the advice - it was against the law - but the government that had hitherto encouraged farmers to feed animal meal to herbivores overreacted by forbidding farmers to feed even vegetable scraps to omnivores. (If you buy a bag of apples in the supermarket, you are allowed to feed them to your children but not to your pigs, lest they've been contaminated.) Pigs have lived with human beings for thousands of years and are a fantastic way of turning waste into food. They eat absolutely anything. As Stuart argues with incredible force, we could feed an incredible number of pigs on the 30 per cent of food that is thrown away in this country. Let's bring back swill! Overturn this crazy law!
 Well, perhaps not everywhere. But at the Co-operative group, single-use carrier bags have been replaced by almost half the customers using bags for life.
The partnership between the Co-op and Supreme Creations, which supplies its reusable, Fairtrade cotton bags, is to be recognised this afternoon when Prince Charles hands out a gong on behalf of Business In The Community. In South India Supreme Creations employs over 2,000 workers, earning 33% more than the average. Additionally, through the sale of the Fairtrade bags just over
£75,000 has
been donated to the Wings of Hope Children’s Charity - enough to build a new school in India. And that can't be bad - in fact, it's fantastic.
There's only one problem: what will those workers make when, eventually, everybody in the UK has already got a Bag For Life? Me, I've already got several...
These Londoners carried water African-style from the River Thames to Downing Street today where they delivered 80,000 letters to Gordon Brown. The letters from the British public demand that world leaders at the G8 next week address the lack of clean water and sanitation which billions of people suffer worldwide everyday. Women in developing countries spend hours each day walking and queuing to collect water for their families. Often it is dirty, polluted and unsafe to drink. Today's walk to highlight the issue was backed by the charities WaterAid, Tearfund and Unicef. Steve Cockburn, from End Water Poverty International, said. "If London ran out of water on a day like today there would be outrage. We want Gordon Brown to be just as outraged that 4,000 children are dying every day in the poorest parts the world because they lack clean water and safe sanitation.
“The G8 summit next week provides a perfect opportunity for the Prime Minister to stand up for the world’s poor and ensures their rights to the most basic elements of life - taps and toilets - are realised in full. Only by doing this can their promises to fight poverty be kept."
 Believe it or not, I don't like writing scare stories, such as my recent post on peak oil, which won a flurry of passionate comments, and nor do I enjoy
reading other people's. This is not because I don't believe they're factually
correct, but because I don't think that spreading despair is a valuable approach.
The
trouble is that when I write upbeat posts about how to
enjoy low-carbon life I get little response - and when I do get a response people (perhaps rightly) take exception. They think it's too mild, too
domestic, to be worth publishing on the Times website. Too silly, perhaps. So you may not care to know that I went out last night and gathered from a rather neglected mahonia bush on public land behind my house a vast bowlful of berries, also known as oregon grapes, and with assistance from my five-year-old daughter made juice. To this we added - wait for it - the juice of a couple of beetroots. The sharpness of the mahonia went well with the earthy sweetness of the beetroot, but we still weren't satisfied. After cooking up this mixed juice with sugar and pectin, to make jam, we flung a handful of home-grown jasmine flowers into the jar. This morning we enjoyed on our toast a jam that was not just locally sourced but also, we believe, the most aromatic and implausible jam eaten anywhere in the world. If this stuff about jam is not for you, let me respond here to a comment on my last post about how higher oil prices will facilitate the extraction and refining of untold quantities of oil remaining in hard-to-reach spots - and that, in a nutshell, we can stop worrying. Alas, oil is not like other commodities. At some point, it will take more
than a barrel of oil in energy to extract a barrel of hard-to-reach
oil, and when that happens it doesn't matter what price you pay - it
still won't be worth it. As those graphs I posted yesterday show, the energy
return on energy invested has been dropping dramatically in recent
years. There's very poor return on tar sands, and biofuels in many
cases use more energy to produce than they yield.
It's been said that climate change is about what comes out of your
exhaust, and that nobody really profoundly cares about that, while peak
oil is about what goes into your tank, and people care a great
deal about that. Me, I care even more about what goes into my tummy, such as this delicious jam. I hope that this post, combining the scary stuff with the cheerful, finds you well.
 Well, I'm not going to do this often, but somebody who regularly posts informed comments, Dr Clifford Wirth, has written about peak oil on my last post - which was about something else altogether - so he must be rather exercised by it.
The graphs he alludes to are represented below. The first shows a slow decline in global crude oil production currently and then accelerating after December 2010 (click on it to see full size).  The second shows net oil production - because a significant amount of oil is used to extract and refine and deliver oil - a proportion that increases all the time, hence the rapid decline in net production (below). 
Wirth points out that declining energy return on energy invested - in other words, the increasing amounts of energy "wasted" in the production of energy - mean that we have much less than "half" of the world's oil deposits left. I know it's hopelessly optimistic, but a part of me does still think that we may possibly be saved from the worst of climate change by the impending energy shortage (though that of course will put an end to most of us). Any thoughts, anybody? POSTSCRIPT (July 8): Thanks for your comments, but please keep them polite, or they will probably be deleted.
 Well, that's what I'm hoping, anyway. (The man in question is me.) I've bought a few yards of fabric and a couple of very long batons, and some cheap hooks that screw into the wall, and I'm planning to assemble the lot into some kind of blinds arrangement for the conservatory, which captures so much heat, on a day like today, you could roast an entire hog. The idea behind this is to create something useful in very little time, and which will cost so little that if my wife takes against it when she comes home, there's be little waste (obviously, I can use all the bits again). Meanwhile, on the subject of hogs - but no, that can wait till another post tomorrow.
 You don't need to be a hydrologist to predict that as more and more earth is concreted over, so we will see more and more flooding.
Nor do you need to be an estate agent to understand that, while one person in a street paving over a front garden to create a parking space will see their property value rise, if everybody does it then whole street ceases to be charming and the prices all fall. (In fact, this happens even when only a large proportion of households do this.) So it gives me some pleasure to announce that, far from paving over my front garden (don't have one), I have today finished un-paving my back garden. It's only a small space, but the tonnage of concrete we had to dig up was astounding. Much of it will be put to use as "urbanite" - a substitute for rocks, with which to build up, eg, raised beds. The rest, alas, has to go to landfill, but of course I'm delighted to have paid a vast fortune to the chap with a skip, who presumably pays a vast fortune in landfill tax. Which I daresay the government spends very wisely indeed on subsidies for solar panels. (That's a joke, by the way.) Am now mulling whether to buy in loads of topsoil (from somebody's about-to-be paved front garden, presumably) or just to build up the fertility by scattering clover and alfalfa and suchlike, along with bucketloads of crumbly brown goo, from our wormery.
 Recently donated my treadle-powered sewing machine to local community arts and crafts event.
 This picture shows me trying to pass on the ancient skill of treadle-powered sewing to a fast learner, eight-year-old Lucien Dunne.
Not all the boys - yes, several boys - were so patient. One, when I was trying to rethread the needle, felt impelled by mysterious forces to keep going on the treadle, with nearly fatal results - well, causing me to prick my finger. Have you taught anybody sewing recently? Isn't it about time?
 If you watch River Cottage, you'll have seen that many thousands of people have signed up to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Landshare scheme - in which people with land are put together with people who have none, but wish to grow food.
Hugh on Landshare from River Cottage on Vimeo.
Having recently talked to a chap who uses his entire allotment to grow potatoes - and can't possibly use them all himself - I thought I would find out whether anybody is also organising crop sharing on the internet. I've found this, called Cropswappers. If you know of any other schemes, do post a comment...
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