Not saving the world, saving myself

The problem with the phrase “save the world” is that it highlights the chasm between individual actions and the magnitude of problems facing the country. It’s easier to bury your head in the sand than “save the planet”. It’s easy to consign your empty beer bottle to disappear among the countless tonnes already dumped in landfill and instead of taking it home to recycle. Mentally conjuring up the display of night lights across the country it might seem pointless paying an extra ten pounds on your electricity bill a month for renewable energy. And why shouldn’t you join the thousands of commuting workers in their cars?

The same goes for language like “it’s not easy been green”. It’s all about depriving yourself, going back to rationing, struggle that kind of thing. It just doesn't sound as fun or interesting as a carbon-heavy business-as-usual lifestyle. If envinronmentalists truly want to promote change, rather than isolating themselves in ecofriendly bubbles and bemoaning the selfishness of the vast majority of humanity, they need the language that makes an environmental way of life seem attractive.

For individuals, living ethically may be all about taking personal responsibility. But its difficult to see it working on a larger scale. However, it's very convenient for governments to place the emphasis on personal responsibility, rather than action across society, because it allows them to talk green without having to take any steps towards real change. It allows them to place a premium on domestic recycling, while businesses are free to send masses of material to landfill.

It allows Brown to fiddle around with the idea of banning supermarkets from handing out plastic bags, despite the very small impact this would have on the UK's carbon footprint. (Although it would be a powerful symbolic signal.) The Environment Agency last year asked a panel of experts to give the top 50 things that would make most difference to the environment - not using plastic bags didn't figure at all.

George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network says the contribution of plastic bags to climate change is “vanishingly small”. This puts into perspective VW’s arresting dancing plastic-bags advert which says driving its car could reduce your carbon footprint the equal of recycling 25,000 plastic bags.

Marshall is great on the language of climate change - a powerful psychological deterrent to action: One psychological response to climate change is to find language and images that create distance– to suggest that it will affect someone else in the future. So the talk and images are of ‘climate’ not ‘weather’, polar bears not hedgehogs, African children not our own.

See his take on the phrase Save the Planet here.

Patio heaters no more at B and Q

Hearing that B&Q has pledged to end sales of patio heaters pleases me on two accounts.

Firstly, great news that it will be more difficult for people to buy a product that is so patently wasteful of energy. (Although the problem with this point of view is all about civil liberty, the unattractiveness of banning eco-friendly choices and smug eco-martyrs.)

Secondly, it could discourage my neighbours from their patio heater-fuelled parties of talking loudly in posh voices and playing Red Hot Chilli Peppers till dawn.

Boo to Ken

We need more cycle racks, not more councils impounding our lovely bicycles.

See London clamps down on cyclists - Ken Livingstone has fought for low emissions in the capital, so why are the authorities now targeting bicycles? (Guardian unlimited.)

London: greyness and light

Sometimes I get a bit fed up with the greyness of London, the rude, unfriendly people, the horrible traffic and the rain. (Especially in January.)

But some days it just seems brilliant.

Last night on the bus, London was divided. I couldn’t read my paper because a huge, slumbering guy behind me was blaring out R&B from his jacket pocket. There was nothing to see from the window but the concrete of Stockwell. It was an annoying Sunday night journey, slow and everyone on separate journeys.

Then a group of people on the back of the bus starting singing. It was a beautiful song in an African language. They were forgetting the words, and laughing through it. It was a beautiful lilting melody. The slumbering guy came to and turned off the music from his phone. They sang louder, and we all sat there listening.

Getting off the bus and walking over Waterloo bridge with the wind hitting the side of my face, the lights were lovely. Purples and peaches lit up the National Theatre. Lovely blue blobs adorning the Hungerford bridge. The yellow glow of parliament beyond that on the right, the blinking pyramid of Canary Wharf off in the distance to the left. The view was only marred by the London Eye, which was flashing psychedelically.

Heading towards London Bridge on the South Bank, the trees sparkled blue and white. Rather than being lit from above the benches along there have lighted underskirts. “Like wideboys’ cars,” said Tom. “Or pimp my bench.”

On the shore of the river, by Gabriel’s Wharf, a group of crusties were sitting around a fire on a sofa moulded from the sand. Further on was a sand “angel of the south” surrounded by flickering nightlights in reclaimed plastic bottles.

Along the way we had an impromptu tutorial on playing the berimbau (a musical bow) from a busker with dreads, who made a wonderful cacophony with the pitch-bent twanging of his bow which he accompanied by shaking a rattle and singing.

Coming back the same way we went past the mini beach party again and as Sunday faded towards its end we were in time to see the rising tide crumbling away a huge rounded skull. Thoughts of the impermanence of beauty, the power of nature and the inevitability of time were brought back to reality by a hippy emerging from weeing in the shadows.

Thrill seekers

This week a York academic Professor Trevor Sheldon likened staying in an NHS hospital to bungee jumping, because up to 10% of hospital stays resulted in some kind of mishap.

I wonder if this says more about how safe bungee jumping has become, or perhaps hints at a new thrill seeking pasttime for middle Englanders.

Now there’s no need to try an extreme sport like snowboarding, or throwing yourself out of a plane. Why not get yourself down to your local NHS hospital. Wonder where the MRSA is lurking? So do the staff. Their guess is as good as yours, and if its smeared around your bed waiting to infect your open wound, chances are the cleaners will miss it too.

Trouble with your kidneys? Try having one of them removed. Just hope it’s the right one.

Time to save the world again

The Environment Agency has asked an expert panel to list the top 50 things that will save the planet. I’m pleased to see that quite a few of the top priorities are actions that decision-markers need to take, rather than making us green people feel even more guilty. We need more government action on this! Also see Leo Hickman in the Guardian, who assesses whether they got their priorities right.

The top 20: What the panel prescribes
1 Dramatically improve the energy efficiency of electrical goods
2 Religious leaders to make the environment a priority for their followers
3 Encourage the widespread use of solar power throughout the world
4 Secure a meaningful post-Kyoto treaty on reducing the emissions that contribute to global warming
5 Encourage households to generate much more of their own power
6 Introduce tax incentives to "buy green"
7 Tackle the rapid growth in aviation emissions
8 Wean ourselves off dependency on petroleum
9 Encourage individuals to buy less non-essential "stuff "
10 Dramatically improve public transport
11 Aim for a "zero waste" culture
12 Install "smart energy" meters in all homes
13 Introduce a measure of economic success that includes the environment
14 Fully harness Britain's huge potential for generating renewable energy
15 Seek alternative, less damaging sources for biofuels
16 Bury carbon dioxide from power stations underground
17 Encourage hydrogen fuel cell technology in cars
18 Implement government policies to control global population growth
19 Reach international agreement on preserving rainforests
20 Create better incentives to improve energy efficiency in the home

I’m also getting worried about biofuels. The idea seems so nice. Petrol = bad, so let's turn plants into energy instead. But the benefits of biofuels may have been underestimated, and subsidies to produce biofuels is both creating an excess of bio-ethanol and skewing agriculture away from food production.

"The net greenhouse gas emissions of expensive European rapeseed oil-based diesel are a mere 13 per cent less than those of conventional diesel", says Martin Wolf in a thoughtful piece in the FT. I've also read in the Wall Street Journal that the biofuels gold rush is threatening the last bits of existing prairie-land in the US. Collecting bio-gas from landfills intuitively seems like a better idea, but don't know how this compares.

Chaos fans

Fantastic site by The Institute for Figuring - "an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts". Including fractal crochet!