True to my word... I made some palm-free biscuits

However, I might be the only one in our house willing to eat these biscuits as they're a little bit burnt on the bottom. Senan turned his nose up straight away and even my husband hasn't had a second one (which is a very bad sign). Ah well... I'll keep trying!

Why the right choice for baby might be the wrong one for the Orangutan

The other day I was idly looking through the ingredients of the Organic baby biscuits that I had paid so handsomely for and to my horror, even though they are organic, I found that they contain palm oil. So I pulled out the rest of the biscuits I had in the cupboard (of which there were few as nothing keeps in our house) and from this unscientific study of one biscuit tin it seems that practically all shop-bought biscuits contain palm oil too, probably because it’s the cheapest source of vegetable oil. But its price belies its real environmental cost because generally speaking, most palm is grown on land that was once home to the vast rainforests of Borneo, and the natural habitat of the orangutan.

Nine years ago I went to Borneo. It was an extraordinary place full of lush forests and mangrove swamps. But even then, the conversion of forests to palm plantations was occurring on a massive scale, with large-scale logging and road networks being built. According to http://www.orangutans-sos.org/ it is these factors that are responsible for the loss of over 80% of orangutan habitat over the last 20 years. On our trip in 2001 we visited a protected area called Sepilok which is dedicated to the rehabilitation of orphan orangutans, where 80 apes now live free. It is an amazing place where I saw for myself the extraordinary likeness between a human baby and an orangutan infant and was left feeling powerless about the demise of this beautiful creature as a result of deforestation.

But the really sad thing that I am coming to realise is that as a consumer in the West, it is my consumer power that is actually (unwittingly) fuelling demand for the orangutan’s habitat - because I buy biscuits. Looking into this issue further I found a BBC Panorama investigation into clear-cutting in Borneo which claimed that the thirst for land on which to plant palm plantations is actually growing exponentially. The programme also criticised manufacturers for their dubious sourcing policies. The BBC said: “Many of the big manufacturers who buy palm oil via European wholesalers say that while they are starting to find oil from sustainable sources, they are not yet in a position to trace the origin of all of the oil they use. Currently, only 3% of the world's palm oil is certified sustainable, meaning it comes from plantations that pass an environmental and social impact test."

So as a consumer I have to make a stand. While I will watch with interest the progress of UK retailers and manufacturers who have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the best thing for my baby in the short term is home made biccies. I'd better get those recipes off my mum. That will be my small contribution to saving the rainforests. Whether he’ll like them or not is another question...

Sustainable Futures Hero #1 – Jamie Oliver

In my spare time I daydream about scenarios of a brighter future. Amid all the miserable news of public spending cuts, troop surges in Afghanistan and Katie Price’s new husbands, it’s sometimes hard to conjure up a vision of a better tomorrow, so when I hear a public figure putting his or her head above the parapet to make a difference, I feel I have to give them their due.

So Jamie Oliver, you get my first prize for Sustainable Futures Hero on this blog (a pretty unsubstantial accolade I know, but a gong nonetheless). I award this to Jamie because he has taken his campaign for healthy eating beyond the school dinners of Greenwich and is now trying to change the way they eat in America. There’s something special about that Oliver lad – he’s got gumption! Maybe it’s his passion, his cheeky chappiness or his complete fearlessness that does it, but his mission to change the way the world views food is truly laudable. It may seem like he’s on a crusade, but it is one that I totally believe in.

In case you don’t know who he is, Jamie Oliver has been on TV in the UK for nearly fifteen years and in that time has gone from being a goofy kid on a moped, to a school dinner champion, to a political heavyweight in the realm of healthy eating with Jamie's Ministry of Food. He’s now on a one man mission to fight obesity – and he’s taken it Stateside. He has some pretty serious statistics to back him up as well. Currently 10% of healthcare costs in the US go directly on obesity – and that is set to double within a generation. At the same time there are frightening indirect costs that bad diet affects: for example heart disease is the biggest killer in the Western world and in many cases is directly related to what we eat. His mission is to get food back on the curriculum in schools across the world in the belief that if children learn early about healthy food then they will eat well throughout life.

Jamie is up for the TED Prize in 2010 where his main goal is the following: "I wish for a strong sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity"

To find out what it’s all about watch his presentation on Jamie's TED Talk. Here he offers a brilliant incisive description of the way fast food is slowly killing us – and what we can do to change the way eat. I say: vote for Jamie for a healthier future.

Quote of the day - Prosperity without Growth

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100...

...But the current economic crisis presents us with a unique opportunity to invest in change. To sweep away the short-term thinking that has plagued society for decades. To replace it with considered policy capable of addressing the enormous challenge of delivering a lasting prosperity.

For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.

From Prosperity without Growth by Professor Tim Jackson, March 2009

Thought for the day

Hand-me-down and hand-me-round: Stylish secondhand toddlerwear

It's all got a little bit serious of late, so I thought I would take the pressure off and look at hand-me-down chic. Toddler style of course, because it is our little boy who enjoys the luxury of friends who give him all their old stuff rather than us. Now I realise that just by switching from new to secondhand we won't immediately eliminate the footprint of our clothing, but giving clothes a new lease of life does make some inroads in living a lower impact life. It also leads to some rather fine sartorial combinations. As illustrated by Senan here. To the right we see the little man channelling Arthur Daley for his best used car salesman look. For this we can thank his cousin Hannah for the coat, and his buddies Sam and Cameron for the hat and gloves.

The Urban Dandy look to our left is entirely thanks to 2-year old Cameron. 3-year old Mattie gave us the Weekend Sportsman look below. These secondhand clothes save in both fiscal and environmental terms and while this may sound laughably trivial, buying no new clothes for our son does make a difference in our low impact living. Calculating the precise carbon saving is not that simple, and as you may know, I don't like to look at things through a solely carbon lens. The impact of new clothes is also far bigger than carbon: the production of clothing consumes vast quantities of other finite resources such as water. For example: one cotton shirt takes 3,000 litres of water in its manufacture.

In a recent article in the Guardian, Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, said that we buy an average of 20kg of new clothes every year. He claims that each item made from natural fibres has a greenhouse gas footprint more than 20 times its weight. So not buying new clothes could actually lower our family's consumption by around a tonne of CO2 a year and that means Senan's hand-me-down wardrobe plays a big part in bringing down our impact. And once he's done with them they go on to his good buddy Sam who has just turned one. So they're not so much hand-me-downs as hand-me-rounds.

From Sustainability to Resilience: why a small change in terminology has big implications

This week there’s an ad in the Economist for a job at the UN as “Program Head for Climate Strategies and Resilient Development” to support climate adaptation activities in developing countries. So what? I hear you cry. Well, a year ago that job title would probably have been Head of Climate Strategies and Sustainability, and while it may look like a small change in terminology, moving from sustainability to resilience has big connotations.

Adaptation is very different to mitigation. The latter suggests the possibility of a sustainable future, the former accepts that if you can’t beat climate change, you’d better join it. But why the shift – is sustainability really unachievable? I think that if sustainability has become shorthand for maintaining the way we live today, then maybe it isn’t possible and resilience might be the way to go.

Climate change isn’t something that will just pop up in 2050 and bite our grandkids on the arse, it’s happening now. Climate scientist Dr James Hansen of Columbia University says that: “Changes are beginning to appear, and there is a potential for rapid changes with effects that would be irreversible.” In Strategies to Address Global Warming, his data demonstrates that we have already caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to increase from 280 to 387 ppm (parts per million) and this means that we are already beyond a safe limit. He says: “The safe level of carbon dioxide in the long run is no more than 350 ppm. Earth’s history shows that an atmospheric CO2 amount of say 450 ppm eventually would yield dramatic changes, including sea level tens of meters higher than today... we would hand our children and grandchildren a condition that would run out of their control, a situation that should be unacceptable to humanity.”

So even if we put in place mitigation measures, we should perhaps accept that we cannot avert some environmental crises and therefore planning for resilience is not a bad idea. The situation in Haiti demonstrates how preparedness is vital in responding to a national emergency. Can you imagine something like that happening in your neighbourhood? But hang on, before I spin off into utter gloom (you’ll know by now that I’m no fan of doom-mongering) what does resilience mean for us? Moving to higher ground with a load of tinned beans and a shotgun? I hope not. Here’s what I think we’ll need to hand our children and grandchildren.

Resilient communities:
This would probably mean neighbourhoods where the need for travel was minimised. That might mean families living near each other, producing the food supply from allotments and market gardens, and socialising and working locally. Critically though, protectionism should play no part in resilient communities – we need neighbours who are adaptive to change and welcoming if those from elsewhere need sanctuary.

Resilient services.
Again, localisation is key to this. We will need a local infrastructure that can provide food, education, policing, health services and goods readily in uncertain times. Removing reliance on global logistics to get us the things we need is key. Just look at how the snow affected the UK recently with schools, libraries and even supermarkets shutting. We need to be better prepared than that!

Resilient people.
This is the hippy dippy bit. Resilient people will be those who can live through crises without succumbing to fear, depression or protectionism. To be adaptive to change is not easy, but we must raise loving, kind and, most importantly, adaptable kids. They’ll need to be flexible if they’re going to live fulfilling lives in uncertain times.

So does that mean “Sustainability is dead, long live Resilience”? I hope not. I hope that our collective efforts to reduce our environmental impacts work and we can retain the better parts of our modern society long into the future, but a little forward planning for what we might do if they don’t won’t do any harm.

Endnote. I must acknowledge that this post is based largely on a conversation I had with a colleague on my masters alumni weekend. He is the brainy one who made all the salient points and I just added the bit about shotguns. I hope I reflected the discussion appropriately without him feeling used!