A sneak peak into a life without wings

I live in Southwest London, a leafy suburbish part of the world that just happens to be in the Heathrow flight path. Since the Icelandic volcano, an eerie calm has descended upon us. For a while we couldn't quite work out what it was - but then it dawned on us - 'twas the deafening silence of a world without planes.

While I know this aircraft lockdown has been a near tragedy for many (including my poor little sister who is currently stuck in Singapore), the plus side (along with the peace and quiet) is that it provides us with food for thought about what the world might be like without international air travel. The philosopher Alain de Botton was on the radio this morning imagining just that. In his view, a future world without aeroplanes might be as follows...

"Children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies... Everything would, of course, go very slowly. It would take two days to reach Rome, a month before one finally sailed exultantly into Sydney harbour. And yet there would be benefits tied up in this languor. Those who had known the age of planes would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel."

This reminded me of a Middle Easern saying I once heard that goes: "My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a jet plane, his son will ride a camel".  Perhaps in a couple of generations time we may actually live in a new world like this. As mineral resources and fossil fuels dwindle, the idea of air travel in the distant future - say 2110 - may be completely ridiculous. We may by necessity return to a lifestyle that no longer depends on Kenyan beans in the shops, but rather stocks local produce; one that doesn't expect to be able to get to New York from London in an afternoon, but rather to take a week on a boat. As that great geezer Gandhi put it: "There is more to life than just increasing its speed." So maybe, unlike the current pace of things, the future might actually be slow.

Wouldn't that be nice.

Why car-free is care-free - in praise of the pedestrian lifestyle

In 2008 we gave up our car. It was a nice Prius too, so when we waved it goodbye it was a sad day. But nearly two years on and I can honestly say that the car-free life is the only way for me.

Today is a beautiful sunny day in London and we are off for the weekend to a friend's house in the countryside. We have a 12-year old and 2 year old in tow and we need to get two trains and a rural (ie. two a day) bus. But this is no lament, I am really looking forward to it. Apart from the schlepping the buggy up the stairs at the train station, everything else in this journey is an adventure. 12-year old can play with her dad's i-phone and read a pile of magazines that her online life at home prevents her from getting round to, 2-year old can look out the window and shout "moo moo, horsey and doggie" to his heart's content and dad can read the paper. And the bus ride will be the best bit - a chatty two year old will on average make five new friends on every bus ride. Of all the commuter modes there are (car included), the bus is the most friendly. People sometimes smile at you. Old ladies chat to you. You can see the driver (unlike the tube and train). It can be a bit skanky sometimes, but generally, the bus is best.

I have been without a car for practically the whole of my son's life and I have never felt limited by it - in fact we've probably taken more trips into town than my car-bound friends who would find parking impossible, so prefer to stay in the suburbs for fear of the dreaded parking warden.

And that is my biggest problem with the car - the stress. If you look at car advertising you would think that a car brings freedom, safety and speed, but the reality of car-life it is more like fear, danger and fines. Here are some cases in point:

Fear:
A good friend of mine came to visit last week with her two kids. Some idiot kids chose her car to break into and smashed her window. She had to drive home on the motorway with a binliner over the gaping window with two small children screaming in the back. She then had to get it fixed which costs a fair whack because if she claimed on insurance she loses her no claims bonus. The whole event left us feeling like the city was a fearsome and miserable place (which in truth, it's not)

Danger:
Far from being the safest mode of transport, the car is the most likely method of road transportation in which you will have a fatal accident. Horrid point - but true.

Fines:
This is where I have found the most relief now that I no longer have a car. In London there are so many ways you can end up paying fines. If you forget that you drove a little too far down Hammersmith Road, you get fined for not paying the congestion charge. If you drive in a bus lane and are caught on camera you get a £50 fine. If you park anywhere in London in the middle of the day and forget to pay your ticket or get back late to your car, a parking attendant will hunt you down on a motorbike and charge you £60, and if you go a teensy weensy bit over 30 miles an hour on the approach to the A13, you get done for speeding. Yes all these things did happen to me when I was a car-user. No wonder I was such a stress case.

So car-free is the way for me. I know it can't work for everyone - rural life generally requires private transport, but I feel that if you live in the city, it really is not a loss to go without. And of course, it is generally better for the environment, but you're probably tired of me banging on about that, so I'll stop there!

“I promise that I will do my best”... The problem with pledging

At 8.30 tonight it is Earth Hour in the UK – our timeslot in a worldwide initiative led by WWF to get everyone to turn the lights off for the same hour to make a point about energy consumption and climate change. I like the idea and took part last year. This year I have plans to go out which were arranged long before I realised and so we won’t be home to turn the lights off and it’s a big ask to get the babysitter to do it. But anyway, that’s not the point I want to make. What this made me ponder was the gap between the pledge that you make when you join a campaign and changes in peoples' actual behaviour.

Social and environmental campaigns have gone global over the last few years and there always seems to be a big media event trying to capture our attention. Whether it be Red nose day or Race for life, there are plenty of good causes to pledge your allegiance to. But this is my problem: while effective communication is great, what is the long term impact of getting people to buy a bracelet or switch their lights out for an hour? My worry is that, just by pledging, we actually feel we’ve done our bit.

I have two examples to illustrate this point. The first was that big sexy Make Poverty History campaign which attracted the world’s most famous to front the ads and click their fingers. I always remember with a wince that moment when Will Smith started clicking in rhthym with a massive concert audience in Philadelphia to illustrate the pace of child mortality in Africa – that kind of dumbed death down a bit too much for me.

But there were other awful moments – most memorably the celebrity endorsements. There were posters of various famous types looking serious in white shirts and wristbands all with the simple tag: Make Poverty History. The one that stood out particularly for me was of Ashley Cole. I was struck by the incongruity of a premiership footballer who earns £35,000 a week standing there telling me to do my bit for poverty. It seemed the most enormous hypocrisy, and yet, because he had pledged himself, had lent his name, he was therefore helping write off third world debt. Making poverty history takes quite considerable more work than that in real life – it takes diplomacy, legislation, cancelling national debts, capacity building and equality measures – some of which Bono might have had a hand in, but Ashley Cole wouldn’t have been seen for dust. Needless to say, a few years on and poverty has somehow not been made history and Ashley is still living in a £7.5 million mansion near Haslemere in Surrey (well he was until Cheryl kicked him out).

And then there is my own tale of shame. Earlier this year, alongside Colin Firth, the Conservative party and other celebrity tree huggers, I signed up to 10:10, the big campaign to reduce carbon emissions in the UK by 10%. Nice idea. Nice website (http://www.1010uk.org/). I took the test and worked out what I needed to do to make my 10% reduction in carbon that I had promised to do. I know I need to insulate the loft with 400mm depth lagging and I need to replace two windows. But three months and a £300 gas bill later, I have done nowt about it. So it is now time to bridge that say/do gap and get my arse in gear, because if I don’t get that insulation up, then effectively I am no better than Ashley Cole: lending my name to a cause but actually doing sod all about it.

Tonight I wish Earth Hour all the best, but rather than leave the babysitter in the dark, my Earth Hour pledge is to work harder at reducing my everyday energy usage and actually do something about climate change rather than just talk about it.

Confessions of a shopaphobic

When I was writing about hand me downs the other week, I made a quick mental calculation about my own annual expenditure on clothes and I realised that I only bought three items of clothing in 2009 and 2010 so far. While I would love to claim that this was in aid of saving the planet, it is actually because I hate shopping. I really cannot understand the appeal and I go to the mall only when I really have to. This weekend, however, I was dragged against my will into the Southside Centre and (even worse) into Primark by my 12-year old stepdaughter. Under normal circumstances (ie: the need for a replacement school skirt) I’d find an excuse to wait outside while she grabs what she needs and waits for ages in the queue to part with her fiver, but this time she convinced me to go in.

My God it is a terrifying experience.

The amount of tat that you can buy for two or three quid is just extraordinary. You can’t help but think of sweatshops when you look at the piles of cheap shirts, but whether the clothes are made in sweatshop conditions or not (and it’s important to note that I have no knowledge of poor working practices at Primark), it is the culture that comes with the cheap fashion phenomenon that is the real problem.

My stepdaughter loves Primark. “It is so cheap, you can just wear it once or twice and then chuck it” she said. This made my heart sink. I tried to talk to her about the environmental impacts of the clothes that she was buying but it was not the conversation she wanted to be having on a Saturday afternoon. And this girl is no tween airhead, in fact she is a very smart, cool kid, who has actually studied sweatshops in school, but while she really does care about the state of the world, what matters most in her life is her friends and their common interests, and what 12-year olds like to do in their spare time is shop.

So, maybe she’ll grow out of it... Not if my favourite futurist Ronald Inglehart is to be believed. His hypothesis is that individual values (eg. materialism) are embedded as a child reaches adulthood, and very little changes thereafter. He says: “The relationship between socioeconomic environment and value priorities is not one of immediate adjustment: a substantial time lag is involved because, to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years”. So if shopping is the most common cultural activity for a kid during their early socialisation years, their future as avid materialists is pretty much set in stone.

So what can we do as parents or activists to stem the tide of materialism and help kids see that there really isn’t the need to have more and more stuff? How do we help them see the long-term consequences of buying clothes and then chucking them after a couple of washes, especially when retailers like Primark are so good at catering to their needs? I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure I know what gave me my distinct fear of shopping. Actually yes I do... I worked on the cashdesk at H&M in Oxford Street for the best part of my teenage years. Seeing shopping from the other side of the counter must have put me off it for life.

That’s what my stepdaughter needs then – a job in Primark.

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.