Blogs from the Wilderness

I don’t usually use this blog to persuade people to do stuff, but I came across this by accident and am a little surprised it hasn’t had more publicity.

So vote earth, apparently it has a cool feature where you can see how many people in your country, city or postcode have voted as well. The tool has been adopted by the UN to demonstrate the depth & breadth of support for action.

The more people who vote for this, the more impressive it will be for world leaders and, hopefully, push them into more action.

This is also important for me as all the flying I have been doing in the last year has probably pushed my carbon footprint through the roof.

In my constant attempt to bring down my global footprint, I decided to give vegetarianism a chance. To be honest getting down my global footprint wasn’t my only motivation, I also wanted to improve my diet which according to the government should contain at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day and by my calculation contained almost two a day (during the week, none at weekends).

So I trialled vegetarianism for two weeks, I decided on 1 week originally, but after the first week I had been eating fish almost every day so I decided that for the second week I could only have fish on one day.

So I made salads, potato salad, tuna salad, feta cheese salad – I didn’t get as far as a nut roast and I never touched Linda McCartney’s, I even went to a barbecue with some salmon fishcakes. I’ve discovered vegetables I never thought of before; kale and swede readily spring to mind.

Did I miss my meat? not really, but then I knew I only had a short time before I could have some again, but the enjoyment I got from finding new vegetables to eat meant that I didn’t rush out a buy a steak afterwards. The hardest thing about being vegetarian was that the sandwiches in most supermarkets are usually packed with meat, the only vegetarian options being egg and cress or cheese ploughman’s, neither of which is very interesting. Come on folks where are the roasted vegetable or the olive and salad sandwiches they don’t have to be Cordon Bleu to be tasty.

As a result my diet has now changed to include more fruit and vegetables (I try to buy them in season and grown in the UK) and also nuts which help to replace the protein lost from eating less meat, but I could never give up meat completely.

The story of my Talisker trek

So one very dark Sunday morning, after having discovered that Kevin and I were booked onto completely different flights, I started my intrepid journey to the Isle of Sky (at the time of writing the home of the best whisky in the world). The first part of my journey was uneventful, I missed the bus so had to get a taxi to Liverpool St. and dozed all the way to the airport. Once at Glasgow I had a three hour wait before the last plane landed with Kevin on it and we could all get on the buses for the 6 hour drive to Skye.

On the way to Skye, we drove past Ben Nevis and, surprisingly, Jimmy Savile all kitted out in his shell suit and waving at the passing traffic from the back garden of his home in the highlands.

Upon arrival, we discovered that there were people who had had a much more exciting journey than we had. The celebrities had been on a plane whose engine had caught fire during the flight and they were forced to land at Glasgow instead of going to Inverness. The coach coming from Edinburgh had gone the wrong way for an hour and a half and was forced to turn around. Because of those problems, dinner was delayed and we spent the time getting to know our new team mates Sarah and Dave.

The next day started with training in map readying and orientation. The terrain was boggy and it was very windy but again the morning went without any major hiccups and to our delight, the wind kept the midges out of sight.

Then the competition began in earnest and we hit our first checkpoint about 45minutes after we started, this meant that we had our first task to do. Three of us were blindfolded and held a rope in three directions that had a flag in the middle of it and the fourth person directed us, by pulling on the rope we had to get the flag over different point in a circle. We successfully completed this with the only problem being Dave who was directing us forgetting Kevin’s name and calling him Derek.

Once the first task was done, it was onto our next checkpoint, here we were given three rugby balls and one person had to juggle two of them while the other three had to feed them to him, we lost points if one touched the ground.

The next thing to do was to get to the next checkpoint which was nearly two hours away. We set off across boggy marshy land and soon found ourselves picking our way across an enormous bog with loads of tufts of heather in it. In my infinite wisdom, I quickly became bored with the slow progress and decided that the best course of action was to sprint across. As you can imagine, I didn’t make it more than 50meters before one leg disappeared into the depths of the bog and I land face first onto a large lump of heather. At which point my heroic team mates made their way carefully to the edge of the bog leaving me stranded.

At the third checkpoint we had to overcome the famous river crossing test, we made it across once but failed to get back again. Having felt we had lost points at that checkpoint, we decided we needed to make up points on the next checkpoint.

We mostly ran to the next checkpoint, demonstrating how fit we all were (or how foolish). The fourth task was some kind of human pulley system, we had to keep buckets of water or materials off the ground as it travelled from one side to the other. We managed to do this faster than anyone else – which wasn’t bad.

Then it was off to the final checkpoint and we were given a written task that we could do back at the campsite. We got back at quarter to four and went for a drink while we wrote the answers.

In the end we finished 6^th overall, but we out drank any of the other teams. Team M rocks!

I am doing the world famous Talisker Trek from the 1st to 3rd June 2007 and am looking for sponsorship, but before you decide whether or not sponsor me let me give you a bit of background on what I am going to do (it isn’t all drinking whisky). The Talisker Trek is a 3 day trek around the rugged and remote Isle of Skye.

The trek is made up of teams of 4 people navigating across the terrain surrounding Skye’s Cuillin Hills. By the end of the trek we will have learnt how to navigate with nothing but our sense of direction a compass and map.

During the trek we will be set challenges such as tyre pulling and tossing the caber, things that I really excel at. You can read more about it at the talisker trek website.

A great advantage of doing the trek for me is that the procedes go to the Woodland Trust which is trying to plant a 1/4 of a million trees over the next couple of years to help combat climate change.

A lot of people claim that environmentalists want us to go back to the dark ages, back to living all our lives in one small village and not being able to travel more than 20 miles away from it and only by horse and cart. To live in a world where we each have to do back breaking work in garden, where our cities are demolished and the airports closed and where nobody is allowed to make any money.

These people paint a picture of environmentalists as a bunch of hippies who just want to live in communes wearing sandals and hair shirts, and having dodgy hygiene standards. And these people in their big gas guzzling 4x4s earning bug money in the city call the environmentalist’s luddites.

But, environmentalists aren’t luddites…

At the beginning of the 19th century the luddites (led by General Ned Ludd) destroyed factory machines because they were scared these new machines would meant that they would lose their jobs. The luddites ultimately lost because they wanted to keep the status quo (you can’t, after all, stop progress). So is it the environmentalists who want to stop progress?

I have a dream, a dream of a world where cars can run quietly on electricity, and don’t belch out polluting fumes that create smog in inner cities. One where people walk around with mp3 players & mobile phones that don’t need batteries because they can charge themselves from the movement of our bodies. A world where people can download any film/book/music they want wherever they are to read and watch even while they are on the move. A world where long distance travel is possible but the planes landing at Heathrow, or any other airport, do not keep people awake at night with the noise of takeoffs and landings. Where we don’t rely on other, often unstable, countries to supply our energy because we can produce enough ourselves through sustainable means. A world where teleconferencing is commonplace because the quality is almost as good as being there face to face.

These things are all possible, and a number of them happen now, for instance the best performing fund in the three years to the end of 2006 was the CIS Leaders trust a fund that buys shares only in ethical and green companies. These are the companies of the future not the oil and petrochemical companies who are fast becoming the dinosaurs of the modern age.

The new luddites are not the people we think, they are not the environmentalists who want to develop technology and provide innovation to make our lives better, they are the people who want to keep the reliance on oil despite the damage it does, the people who want to keep the status quo.

Just after I came back from my holiday and started hunting around for a way to make me feel better about all the flying and driving I had done, out came an avalanche of articles pointing out that carbon offsetting is completely useless.
One article pointed out that tree planting could actually increase global warming if they are planted in the wrong place. Another article claimed that a number of the companies selling carbon credits are ripping customers off, and then there are voluntary and certified carbon accreditation schemes… can you trust a voluntary scheme? is the certification worth the paper (recycled hopefully) it’s written on? And finally, as part of my research I discovered that different carbon calculators gave differing amounts of carbon dioxide released by the same flight, why is this?

In a nut-shell, carbon offsetting is a method of cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that you can’t influence by paying a company to do it for you. The companies that do this for you usually have several different methods or reducing carbon dioxide, and they range from planting trees to giving away energy saving lightbulbs to developing countries.

There are several points to consider when you are offsetting Carbon, the first is would the carbon have been saved if you didn’t pay money into the scheme? There is no point in paying someone to plant a tree that they were going to plant anyway. The second is the scheme viable? the company formally known as future forests reforsted several areas but because they weren’t managed the forests died again when they finished.

I have also read that the carbon trading scheme was so poorly organised that for the first two years they have allocated far too many carbon credits resulting in a crash in carbon trading market. I suppose this means that if you are spending your carbon offsetting money on carbon credits to ‘retire’ then you get more for your money, but in actual fact there were so many extra credits around that it made no difference to the cost of carbon credits and didn’t stop any pollution in industry.

Recently it seems that every supermarket is trumpeting their green credentials, telling us that they are aiming to carbon neutral, label food that has been flown, save energy and recycle more. These all seem to be very laudable goals but I just keep thinking that if the industry was serious about becoming greener and reducing carbon emmissions then they would work together and cut them across the board.

Supermarkets have generally been very reluctant to change their hugely profitable business models and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into line by government legislation or threats of legislation. Two examples I can think of at the moment are removing sweeets from checkouts and more recently salt labelling, which only happened when the government threatened to force a standard onto the supermarkets.

So my question is, are these giants of retail serious about becoming ‘Green’grocers or are they doing the minimun they think that they can get away with in order to stave off government legislation?

Have a look at Tesco’s environmental policy they trumpted Sainsburys this year but Marks and Spencer claim to be the greenest.

So there I was intending to lend my support to the Icount campaign, wandering down Malet St. and seeing all the people in costumers and waving banners and I thought, this looks good. There’s going to be quite a few people here, the beating drums whipping people into a frenzy and then they all just ran out… there were no more people left and I had barely walked half the length of Malet St. What kind of a protest is this? Well at least the Lib Dems were out in force.

So I sat on a wall for a few minutes waiting for the crowds of latecomers to arrive but when the march started off I decided that this was it, so I got off my perch and joined in at the back. I wouldn’t call myself a veteran of protest marches, but I’ve been on a couple of mayday riots, a make poverty history march and the anti-war march before we invaded Iraq. They were all much bigger than this one and I found it hard to believe that this was going to get anyone’s attention, and there was something else very strange, everywhere I turned there were people with Lib Dem placards, I searched vainly for even a green party one, but nothing, surely this wasn’t a demonstration organised by the Lib Dems? although it would explain the low turnout.

Halfway to Trafalgar Square someone offered me a placard, I took it because he was carrying two of them and had a look at the front to see what I would be hoisting up, relief, it was a RSPCB one. “At least it’s not a Lib Dem one” I said loudly, the deathly silence that followed told me volumns.

As you can see the march was pretty uneventful but worse still when we got to Trafalgar Square I realised that this was’t just a Lib Dem march it’s just that I was marching with God knows how many Lib Dem councillors and MPs, so we stood at the entrance, they decided to take a group photo and I was stuck almost at the front of them. So if you ever see a picture of a bunch of Lib Dems in the corner or Trafalgar Square at the end of a very short march about Climate Change and there is one twerp in the middle of the picture holding a RSPCB placard, that’s me.

I got away from them pretty quickly after that and went to listen to the pointless posturing of those on stage. 20,000 people were there apparently, personally I think that is a pathetic turnout for something that is being described as the worst crisis we have every had to face. Just as I thought there was hardly any coverage of it in the press and I didn’t see a single placard for the Labour party or the Conservative party, still at least the Lib Dems bothered to turn up.

Or at least slow the increase.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, according to an article in 2002 by friends of the earth aircraft emissions in 1990 were 17million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide, and that is expected to increase 70-80million tonnes by 20-30. You can read the article here. In a similar article in the Guardian on October 6th, Ian Sample says that while aviation only contributes 7% of CO2 emissions from private vehicles it is on course to equal other transport methods by 2012. That is only six years away.So what is the point in the rest of us cutting our emissions if the aviation industry is only going to make up the difference? Richard Branson’s gesture of donating all profits from Virgin Atlantic to invest in research for cleaner fuel is a good start but seeing the fruits of this is at least 5 years and probably 10 years away. Action needs to be taken now. No airline is going to ground its planes voluntarily; they don’t make money that way. So what can be done, environmentalists have been calling for a tax on aircraft fuel for years and it certainly would push up the cost of flying and put some people off, but I doubt that there would be the political will for the level of tax required. According to a Department of Transport forecast written in 2000 the introduction of a 10% fuel tax would cut estimated growth in air travel by 10% (I think that I have read that right), however growth has outstripped the forecasts in every estimate since 1994. One example of why a fuel tax wouldn’t work on aviation is that during the high oil prices of 2004, British Airways registered an increase in passenger numbers of 8.1% even though they had to increase prices by up to £10. Well let’s face it; £10 isn’t going to break the bank for someone paying £200 for a flight.

So if increasing the cost of flying by a fuel tax isn’t the answer then what is?

Well according to someone I was chatting to in the pub the other night, I forget who and where it was, most of the fuel is used up during take off and landing, so perhaps one solution would be to ban all flights under 500 kilometres. So all those short hops from London to Newcastle, and sadly London to Dublin, would be out of the question (although you could still fly from London to Cork or Belfast). This could then be extended to 1,000 kilometres later with special exceptions for light aircraft servicing had to reach places such as the Outer Hebrides or routes without an alternative solution, such as London to Ireland. The distances measured would have to be airport to airport and as the crow flies. And you never know this might lead to companies developing high speed rail links instead, besides it would give Eurostar a boost since London to Paris flights would be out of the question as well.

Two weeks ago I tried to make my first steps towards cutting down on food miles in my quest to go carbon neutral. I bought English apples from a nearby Co-op. They weren’t bad, a bit small and slightly soft but decent apples nonetheless. So I decided to continue in that vein, so when I did my weekly shop at my local Tesco’s I went looking for the apples supplied by British growers, there weren’t any (well there were some English cooking apples, but they’re not too good to eat) except some expensive organic apples sold in packs of four. Now I can’t afford to buy solely organic produce and more importantly I wanted five apples not four, and certainly not eight, also I don’t want to buy my fresh produce pre-packed as cutting down on packaging is also something that will help the environment.

As a result, on Saturday I thought that I would be good and buy my apples from the local market. After all we always told to shop at markets because they sell local produce and if I’m going to go carbon neutral then cutting down on food miles is going to be very important. Imaging my surprise when I opened up the paper bag only to find that the good English apples I thought I had bought were in fact flown in from New Zealand, exactly the same country as the apples I buy from the supermarket.

I was even more surprised when I went to the supermarket on Sunday afternoon to discover that they have a stock of
English grown apples. So my attempt to buy English apples ended in complete failure but all the other fresh produce I bought was definitely sourced in England, and bought from the supermarket. Which does leave me to wonder whether there is any point in raging against the ‘evil’ supermarkets, they seem to stock more locally (well British anyway) grown produce than the stalls at my ‘ethical’ market, and it is cheaper as well.