personal political

survival

Walking through a puddle in a nicely wet park this morning, Olle said, "I do think we should get a rainwater tank" (a subject we'd been discussing earlier).

"I'd like to get one, but they cost a lot of money", I said.

"I'll put in all my money", he said. "I want to survive".

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Brian at LP has a post usefully summarising the debate about targets for cuts in emissions.
TipThePlanet is a wiki with lifestyle tips on reducing carbon footprints.

draw breath

Come and Draw Breath

Conversation Room - Drawing Breath Museum of Contemporary Art, Level 3

FRIDAY 27 APRIL, 2.00PM - 4.30PM

The air you just exhaled has already spread far and wide. The CO2 from a breath last week may now be feeding a plant on a distant continent, or plankton in a frozen sea. In a matter of months all of the CO2 you just exhaled will have dispersed around the planet.Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers

america consumed

These artworks by Chris Jordan about the volume of stuff consumed in the US are quite astonishing. It's mainly (not solely) by virtue of our much smaller population that Australians can afford to feel even slightly superior, statistically speaking. Thinking about all those plastic bags, etcetera, is mind boggling and profoundly dispiriting.

carbon offsets

Tony Blair made waves in Britain this week [can we imagine John Howard having anything of any interest to say on this subject? No] by defending his own air travel and his government's policy of buying carbon offsets to neutralise the global warming effects of flights.

Dominic Murphy in the Guardian looks into the carbon offsets business and has strong doubts about it. We might not be able to salve our consciences that easily - we might in the end be forced to make big lifestyle changes.

oil independence

Shamefully, I'd not until yesterday heard of the Swedish Commission on Oil Independence. Surely every country in the world - certainly Australia - should be making similar investigations and plans.

recycling

I recently saw a public cork recycling bin for the first time. Unfortunately it wasn't anywhere near where I live. But now I've discovered this recycling website and found out that there is a cork recycling drop-pff point quite close to home. I'm impressed!Time to start doing something with all those old batteries, the old computers in the attic and the mobile phone that's been languishing in a drawer as I couldn't bear to just throw it out.

consumerism

Six months ago we switched our electricity supplier to "green" renewables. Actually, it's not guaranteed that the electricity we use is from renewable sources, but the amount of electricity we use from non-green sources will be duplicated from a renewable source, if you get me.

I'd been planning to make that switch for some time but inertia reigned, as usual - until the night a green energy salesman, a very nice young Sri Lankan student, came to our door. He could make the switch for me on the spot. I seized the opportunity. As a reward for switching, he offered me a free 12 month magazine subscription. All of the magazines on offer were available to me at work except for one - a children's magazine (that's all it said - "children's magazine"). I chose that one, thinking it would be good for Olle to start receiving his own reading material in the post.

The magazine turned out to be K-Zone and he loves it, truly loves it. He spends hours pouring over the ads for computer games and competitions. Now I have to participate in conversations like this one, had at 7.30am today:

O, after perusing magazine in silence for five minutes: "You know how Jay (boy at school) gets Happy Meals all the time?"

Me: "Yes." (Jay is the archetypal fat frequent McDs eater.)

O: "Well, he could be getting these with his Happy Meals" - turns magazine to display page showing brightly coloured objects that resemble mobile phones.

Me: "What are those? (Not waiting for answer...) Well, he'd only be getting a chance to win one of those. Say 500 kids enter the competition and there's one winner, how many kids enter and don't win anything?"

O: "499".

Me: "That's right, so 499 kids buy more Happy Meals and McDs makes more money - they're getting you to spend money just on the chance you'll win something".

This might make me sound the dour spoilsport, but I can assure you this conversation was conducted in cheerful tones. And last night while we were watching tv, he suddennly looked up from the mag and said [I'm paraphrasing, as I don't take in the exact details], "If I go to http://..., I could get an xbox for only $x". We reiterated the disappointing news that he won't be getting an xbox, a nintendo or a gamecube any time soon. (We're aiming to delay getting one until high school. I'm not hopeful of sticking to that resolution.)

But I can't blame his heightened ad-awareness all on K-Zone, as yesterday we spent a long time in the post office shop (with emphasis on the word "shop") and as soon as we came out, Olle had this to say:

"Mum, for only $32, you could get a picnic set with speakers".

"What would we do with a picnic set with speakers?"

"It would be great - we could take it to the beach with us for music and dancing".

It makes me realise anew how bombarded we all are with inducements to consume. I go through life with my adult scepticism turned on, screening the ads out to a very large extent. Olle has only opened up to all this since he was seven and a half and his naivete and optimism is remarkably resilient despite having such a lefty cynic as a mother. He reads the ads in every magazine and newspaper with intense interest. One day recently, with Urban Animal in front of him, he informed me with the air of someone imparting important information that if we bought X packets of X brand of cat food, we'd get a free scratch pole. I took a close look at the ad. It was for a pet shop in Roselands. I explained that Roselands is quite a long way from our home so that by the time we paid to travel there, we would have spent more than we'd save by getting a free scratch pole. Besides which, we (or our cats) don't need a scratch pole.

That's the main point, of course. We don't need this stuff. We're inundated with stuff and inundated with inducements to get more stuff, all of which is hyped to improve our lives but most of which quickly turns into junk and clutter.

The irony is that switching to green energy brought this extra vehicle for consumerism into our lives. I should have had the sense not to succumb to the "free offer" in the first place.

the worms

It's a bit pathetic to say I can't think of anything to post about (as I did in my last entry). "Worm farm smell" is one of the search terms which regularly brings readers to my blog. So in the interests of pushing my Google stats higher (kidding), I'll tell you about the worm farm workshop I attended on the weekend.

Attended because my worm farm has continued to smell. And continued to bulge at the seams. A few weeks ago I rang a worm farm expert from the city council. He was thrilled to hear that I'd had a worm farm for 10 years. He's doing a research project on what keeps people going with their worm farms and what makes them give up. I got the impression that most give up. I think what makes them give up is the smell and the maggots/flies. A friend of mine who is a much better gardener than I am has given up for those reasons. Of course you are not meant to have either a smell or maggots in a properly managed worm farm.

Determined not to give up, I decided to attend a workshop to figure out what I was doing wrong. There were about 15 attendees, 95 percent female and about 75 percent over 40. I was the only one who'd ever had a worm farm. I tried not to dwell on the negatives, though one woman did ask me what I meant when I said worm farms required quite a bit of work.

In the middle of the room was a model worm farm - you wouldn't have known it had anything at all inside, so clean and odourless was it. But inside there were about 7000 worms and a lot of celery (from a juice bar down the road.)

My basic mistakes, I learnt, are:

• we need at least two worm farms to cater to a three-person, very vegetarian household which eats nearly all meals at home.
• the farm needs to be under cover when it rains (it hardly ever rains, but when it does, the farm gets wet which contributes to the stinkiness)
• instead of shoving food scraps into every tray, I need to build up a layer of castings (which looks like soil) in the middle tray and put scraps only in the top tray. That way the worms can retreat into the castings when it's hot or wet. I should be removing the castings once a month or so.
• no orange or pineapple peel or dairy or bread (I wasn't putting much dairy in but quite a lot of the others).

I bought a new farm and a new lot of worms (1000 or so). I've emptied out most of the old farm, put the new worms into the new middle tray with their bedding and put the old top tray (which got wet and smelly in the weekend rain) on top of them - that way I figure the old worms can go down and hang out with the new worms and the new ones can go up and eat some of the old food.

I'm determined to sort this out because I cannot bear putting organic waste into a plastic bag to be taken away to be put into a landfill.

nuclear

Greenpeace Australia commissioned an international panel of experts to answer a series of questions about the possibility of a nuclear industry in Australia, as a riposte to Howard's so-called "inquiry" into nuclear power. It's worth bookmarking or downloading the pdf for future reference.

warm up christmas

The people who organised the recent Walk Against Warming are organising an event at 11am on Sunday December 10th outside the prime ministerial residence of Kirribilli House (how come he still lives there when his kids have long left home?) Deliver your climate wish to John Howard.