Resolutions January 1, 2010

I thought I’d share a couple of my resolutions, one to encourage others to join me and the other because I know some of you have been waiting for it.

First – I’ve signed up the the 10:10 campaign. I don’t think there is anything actually happening with this in NZ – it’s a UK programme. But you can still sign up to the 10:10 Global campaign, and do it.

10:10 is a committment to cut 10% of your carbon emissions in 10:10. Human-induced climate change won’t be stopped by individuals voluntarily cutting emissions, but it will send a signal to governments that we are acting and expect them to do the same. It will also get people used to doing what may well become compulsary or economic necessity later, and maybe we’ll find some of those things aren’t so bad.

Exactly where I’ll find 10% to cut is a tricky question. My insanely long showers are the obvious place to start.

My other resolution is that I’m going to start putting my Antarctica pictures up on this blog, along with the text from my emails and bits from my diary. It’s taken me far too long to sort them out. Here’s a preview…

Gaining and losing November 10, 2009

It’s freezing and damp and I haven’t been gardening – this is more random environmental thoughts.

I’ve always been interested in environmental issues and have tried to do the “right thing”, whatever that is, but I can’t honestly say I did very well. Progress was slow, although I had been improving a bit over the last couple of years. In general though, I was rather depressed by the scale and diversity of the problems, disillusioned about the direction things were going and confused about the solutions.

Feeling that there was little I could do to solve the world’s problems, I set out to change the only thing that I had any realistic chance of changing – myself. Somehow, the circumstances all seemed to work together, and I have achieved far more than I expected.

Losing: one of my serious commitments for this year was to make less rubbish. There are so many things wrong with our disposable “use once and bury in landfill” mentality, and the “use once and put it in a recycling bin” is frankly not much better. The making, transporting and disposing of all that waste uses a lot of fossil fuel and contributes to carbon emissions, locks up what would otherwise be nice land in stinking landfulls, puts toxic chemicals into the environment and spreads persistent, damaging rubbish into some of the most pristine areas of the world. Reducing waste is a good for the environment in so many different ways.

Losing: the only thing reducing waste is bad for, as far as I can tell, is the economy. Waste, and the wasteful society we live in, generates a lot of economic activity, and the way our society measures wealth says that all that wasting is good. So I’m bad for New Zealand’s GDP, and I’m proud of it.

Gaining: other people’s rubbish. I’ve decided to try the approach of “offsetting” for the waste I do create – it’s hard to avoid buying some things in non-reusable, non-recyclable plastic. So I also stop other people sending stuff to landfill or recycling by using their rubbish, for example taking their old cardboard boxes, newspapers and coffee grounds and using them in my garden. Over the last few months I’ve taken several hundred litres of coffee grounds that would have otherwise been landfilled. This is much more rubbish than I think I’ve actually created over that same period!

Gaining: tastebuds. Reducing waste had meant avoiding most processed food, except as a rare treat. I’m making a lot of the food I eat from scratch (soup, stock, biscuits, breakfast cereal), and now I’m eating less salt, sugar and fat, I seem to be enjoying food more.

Losing: some things were hard to give up – like takeaway coffee. 10 years ago it was a rare treat, but I got sucked into the whole Wellington culture and soon came to depend on it.

Gaining: organisational skills. Taking my own shopping bags everywhere (not just a couple of supermarket bags, but all the small bags for fruit and vegetables etc) took some effort. Also, shopping only rarely at the supermarket means I have to think more about what I need and plan a whole lot better. I’m not the most organised person (understatement), but with practice I now manage. I’m both more organised and less stressed.

Gaining: muscles. I’ve done some hard gardening this year, and I’ve also given up using the lift at work. I mostly did it because I wanted to get fitter, but I’m saving a tiny bit of electricity too. I work on the 12th floor of an office building, so it’s no light sacrifice.

Losing: more than 15 kilos. It turned out that less waste = less waist. Who knew?

 

 

 

What’s wrong with spring? October 17, 2009

Freezing southerly again. Apart from trying to support some of my battered seedlings, I couldn’t be bothered doing anything much in the wet (4cm since yesterday evening) and cold. I did uncover a few plants that the blackbirds had buried, but that’s it.

Instead of writing about what I didn’t do in my garden, I though that I would do a bit of an audit on some of the good and bad things I’m doing for, or to, the environment. I’ve been trying quite hard for the last year or so, so it is useful for me to document some of the things I have done, and also document that things that I’m doing worst at, in the hope that it motivates my to do better.

Good – I take the bus to work, and don’t live too far away (10-15 minutes if traffic isn’t heavy).

Bad - I still drive everywhere in the weekend and in the evening. Given the quality of the after hours and weekend bus service where I live, I don’t feel like I have much option. My car is probably about average for fuel efficiency, but it could be better.

Good – my diet is probably a lot lower impact than most. I don’t eat too much in the way of processed food, grow lots of my own vegetables and my most frequent shopping trip is to a farmer’s market (bad – it’s 15 km away). I go to a supermarket about once a month to buy things like toilet paper, cat food, flour, butter and cleaning products.

Good – I use a lot of low toxicity cleaning products like baking soda.

Bad – I love my dishwasher. I’m sure that the detergent I use is horribly toxic and that it uses more energy than washing dishes by hand.

Good – my garden is currently providing well over half of my vegetable needs, and that is a lot because I really do eat 5+ a day. It is largely organic and provides habitat for lots of insects including the native praying mantis, bumble bees, various wasp and fly species, and stick insects, which are very cute but do tend to eat my raspberries. The garden also provides some fruit for me and next autumn should provide a reasonably proportion of my carbohydrates (it won’t be anywhere near 50% though). It provides almost none of my protein and, because it is a very small garden, it never will unless I start eating snails.

Bad – I eat meat and/ or dairy products most days. These are far more resource intensive than vegetables. But…

Good – the actual volume of meat and dairy products I consume is probably only 20% of what it was a year ago. Also, I used to waste a lot of milk, because the supermarkets stopped selling the type I wanted to buy in volumes less than a litre. Not any more, since I buy powdered milk, making up only what I need.

Good – I create very little landfill and recycling rubbish. Mostly I achieve this by not buying stuff with excess packaging, even if it is recyclable (recycling is a poor substitute for not creating the rubbish in the first place). I’ve had the same supermarket bag as a bin liner in the bin in my kitchen for about a month. I wash and reuse many of the plastic bags that I can’t seem to avoid. I think I think I’ve got my food waste volume below 10% (it has been shamefully bad in the past) and all except meat waste is taken care of by composting and worms. I think that I put out a council rubbish bag and my recycling bin some time in the last couple of months, but I don’t remember when. I won’t be putting them out again any time soon.

Even better – I take some rubbish that other people would send to the landfill or recycling and give it another life: I take 15-20 litres a week of coffee grounds from a cafe in town and use it in the garden and the compost bin; I scrounge cardboard and old newspaper from work and other random places to use in the garden; if I need plastic supermarket bags to use as bin liners etc, I scrounge them off anyone who has excess; I use old plastic milk bottles from work to make up powdered milk.

Note quite so good – I hoard, including some stuff that I really should throw away. If I’m not sure what to do with it, I just leave it lying around until I get thoroughly sick of it, when it becomes quite likely that I will toss it in a landfill in frustration.

Really so bad that it’s embarrasing – did I mention that most of my good work as outlined above is cancelled out by daily 20 minute showers? At Scott Base, I managed to have my showers under the requisite 3 minutes, so I know it can be done. I’m steeling myself to add “showers under 10 minutes” to the New Years resolution list. Even that seems daunting though.

This is only a partial list, there are plenty of other good, and bad, things that I’m doing. I’ll do another list sometime, if I get around to it…