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 Spent good part of last night driving my entirely electric (not hybrid) G-Wiz across London to be serviced in Southall.
This journey is always exciting because I usually set out uncertain whether I'd be able to make it home again on a single charge, in the event that I can't get into the G-Wiz service depot.
Three years ago I made this film about a journey I planned to make with the extraordinarily talented graphic designer Gary Cook, driving the G-Wiz from John O'Groats to Lands End with regular - too, too regular - stops to recharge at strangers' houses but only if they consented to change the electrcitiy supply to a "green" tariff.
For reasons too tedious to go into, having to do with the needs and wishes of TV executives, the trip never happened. I'm planning to do it next year, though, and write a book or at least an article about what happens. Would be glad to know what you think, before I undertake such a mission.
 Not long after a British judge ruled that environmental concerns are broadly equivalent to religious belief, I came across this interesting story in The Ecologist suggesting that conventional religions represent the best hope of meaningful action.
The story appeared before a conference organised by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, described by the UN as "the biggest civil society movement on climate change in history". Faith communities own between 7per cent and 8 per cent
of the habitable land surface of the planet, run (or are involved in)
half the world's schools and control more than 7 per cent of
international financial investments.
Speaking at Lambeth Palace before the ARC conference at Windsor, the
Archbishop of Canterbury said religions held the 'moral vision' and that ultimately
their impact would have 'deeper roots' than anything achievable at the
Copenhagen summit. UN Assistant
Secretary-General Ola Kjorven said with more than 85 per cent of the
world's population adhering to a religion the commitments made at the
Windsor summit had the potential to be, 'the biggest mobilisation of
people and communities that we have ever seen on this issue.'
 I'm not the head of Greenpeace, and I don't run a big science programme, but I have a hunch that if we could improve poor soils that are gradually turning into desert there would be a) a lot more food b) less fighting over "good" land and c) less cause to chop down healthy rainforests.
This wonderful film describes what happened when a group of permaculture practitioners took over 10 acres of desert land in Jordan. Please watch it.
 Ed Mayo, formerly of the New Economics Foundation, recently became secretary-general of Co-OperativesUK, which supports the development of sustainable, co-operative, mutual and social enterprises.
With the Conservatives and Labour both announcing plans to repackage unwieldy state operations into locally owned enterprises of just that sort, there could hardly be a more exciting time for him. In his opening address, Mayo looked back over the last decades in which we've been told to let markets rip and set ourselves against each other. "As Lily Tomlin once said, 'the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.' Extending the animal metaphor, Woody Allen once decried the culture of relentless competition as not just 'dog eat dog' but worse too - 'dog doesn't return dog's answerphone message'." Which is all good fun, but I'm not sure that anybody reading this is going to be persuaded, as I am, that cooperative businesses tend to have a more benign ecological impact than most other kinds of business. In The New Economics: A Bigger Picture, a challenging but generally upbeat new book by Mayo's former NEF colleagues David Boyle and Andrew Simms - hailed by such champions of the planet as Caroline Lucas MEP, Professor Herman Daly and Safia Minney MBE - cooperatives are referenced only three time in the index. Perhaps they're not so important after all? I'd be delighted to hear from Mayo and indeed any others how (if at all) co-ops can be considered green...
 For some months now I've been hatching a plan with the peace activist Vijay Mehta to supply crochet hooks to disaffected, troublesome youths so that they can learn to make something with their hands.
I've joked that we must stop them carrying knives and get them to carry crochet hooks instead.
I'm so grateful to Vijay for taking this joke seriously, and for supplying hundreds of hooks, which Camila Batmanghelidjh has promised to let us distribute among children at her charity, Kids Company. At the same time, we're going to teach the children to crochet, and to make yarn out of old plastic carrier bags - turning something reviled (but cheap and readily available) into something potentially quite beautiful, with (we believe) a positive impact on the children.  Naturally, there's no reason why this project should be restricted to crochet, plastic bags, or Kids Company.
My in-laws happen to live quite near Montacute House, the National Trust place in Somerset, where there are some fantastically beautiful specimens of very old embroidery. Much of that embroidery can be seen in an exquisite book, The Goodhart Samplers, one of whose editors, Jacqueline Holdsworth, told me she'd recently spent a weekend at a Costumes and Textiles Fair working with children and teaching them cross-stitch (to make this sound more exciting than they might otherwise think, she called it X-Factor Stitching). "It was astonishing," Holdsworth says,
"how even learning to thread a needle, which they had never done before,
gave them a feeling of achievement." Holdsworth, I was delighted to discover, is a fan of Kids Company, and offered to help out with stitching lessons. If all this sounds a bit twee, bear in mind that children in the UK are taught very little in the way of practical skills though major industries depend on them - as made clear in this story, about a global fashion brand being sued for breach of copyright by a woman who set up a knitting enterprise to give work to refugees. Incidentally, Holdsworth has recently been coordinating a global Stitch Along of another sampler that was published without license, leaving no funds to pay for its conservation. Hundreds of people around the world have stitched, she says, "at the top of the Jungfrau, at the Paris Opera, in Japanese Reviews, in Lithuanian woodlands and Idaho cornfields", raising more than £3,000. To join in, see her site Needleprint.
  News from the inspiring people who came up with the million-downloaded Repair Manifesto - a crucial component of sustainability, rarely taken as seriously as recycling.
On their site they have posted these amazing pictures by the American artist Nina Katchadourian of her efforts to repair spiders webs using red yarn, scissors, tweezers and glue.  Each morning after doing a repair, she found her threads on the floor where the houseproud spiders had dumped them after rebuilding their webs correctly. If only we all took such care!
 Instead of working, as I should - with several deadlines getting closer - I've been unable to put down an absolutely brilliant comic novel and wanted to spread the word about it.
 Mrs Normal Saves The World, by Sheila Hayman, is sparklingly satirical about well-meaning greens, but also about people in the mainstream who don't give a toss about the planet. Whichever camp you fall into, the book will make you laugh aloud again and again - as it did me.
Better still is that Hayman's satire - about a wife and mother-of-two who suddenly decides to "save the world" - somehow manages also to make you care very much about the family at the centre, when all goes wrong, and finally to leave even a cynic feeling inspired to "do something". I'm not in the business of recommending things to buy people for Christmas, but happy to make an exception in this case. Not least because Hayman is giving all proceeds from the book to two great causes: Tree Aid and Practical Action. PS. If you don't want to buy it, why not do the really green thing and order it from your library?
 Winter on its way at last, been thinking about how to keep energy use to a minimum.
One idea arises from my recent visit to the Orkneys, and specifically my tour of the home and workshop of the inventor John Vincent; who struck me as being like Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (among other projects, he is indeed building a car almost from scratch, though I don't believe he intends it to fly). He said he was more like Stig Of The Dump, the caveman in another children's book who hoarded everything he could find.  If and when global catastrophe kicks in, we will all want to have a John Vincent on our side: he seems undaunted by virtually any practical task, having worked as a car mechanic, fisherman, farmer, builder, plumber, butcher, and in youth development work with troubled children. Oh, and mending clocks.
But I digress. The thing that really struck me was that Vincent has built a cosy cottage for practically no money at all, using a dilapidated stone outhouse and odd bits of material gathered from skips and elsewhere. This included a vast amount of insulating board, in a variety of sizes, which he puzzled together and joined with expanding foam to create an incredibly cosy home, which he likens to a thermos flask. The heating - up there beyond the northern tip of the Scottish mainland - consists entirely of one electric towel rail element, which heats water running in pipes under the flagstone floor. To remove condensation there's a single-room heat recovery unit (pictured) that he got here. And, er, that's it.  From the outside, the cottage - in traditional stone - looks just like any other. His daughter and her partner and young child have been living there, but now that they're moving out he's looking to do holiday lets.
Vincent tells me he has not yet built himself any photovoltaic panels, to create electricity using sunshine, but if anybody can do it, he can. I lately came across this site which sells instruction in how to make low-budget PV, but since contacting the owner of the site I have had no reply, so don't feel confident about sending off for a kit. I've since found this how-to on the wonderful website Instructables, but it makes the whole thing sound dreadfully hard work.
Does anybody else have any experience with this kind of thing? Are the sites selling instructions as good as they promise? Have you actually built a solar panel - and, if so, does it work?
 A judge has found that green beliefs are equivalent to religious beliefs, under the Religion and Beliefs Regulations 2003.
So, what next? Well, I've just finished researching a story about families trying desperately hard to lead greener lives, and more than one family was let down by all the flights the parents took for work. If those individuals believe, as they say the do, that reducing emissions is imperative, this judgement allows them to turn round to their employer and say they'd prefer to do long-distance meetings by Skype from now on. Any employer who refuses permission for such a step would potentially be discriminating against them because of their beliefs. How about you - does the judgement give you any ideas?
  Actually, there's nothing threatening cyclamens, to the best of my knowledge.
I drew this cyclamen this morning, at the kitchen table, on brown wrapping paper that comes with my vegetable box, reflecting while I did it that there's nothing like drawing what you can see before you to make you feel really alive, and absorbed in the present. In doing so, I hoped to exorcise the uncomfortable feelings engendered by my interview with the failed suicide and population-control exponent Dr William Stanton (see previous post). But didn't, quite.
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