My big fat green wedding

My sister got engaged last week and this got me thinking about green weddings. When I got married three years ago I proudly touted it as a green event, but looking back on it, I’m not so sure it was so squeaky green. Here’s what we did:

• Invitations: I designed the invitations myself and had them printed on recycled card. I made all the table decorations from hand-made paper on and printed the menus on recycled paper.

• Venue: We got married in central London and encouraged guests to use public transport. We hailed a cab to and from the venue to avoid wasting cash and carbon on fancy cars.

• Dress: My dress was made for me by a local dressmaker. I tried to employ a “don’t buy what you don’t need” strategy because the frivolity can really get out of hand when you are in wedding shops. The lace was vintage, but the silk was not. My jewellery was either borrowed or made by a friend.

• Flowers: My poor florist got the full force of my Bridezilla as I asked her to source only seasonal and local flowers that were also dazzlingly beautiful in March. She did an amazing job and grew many of them herself, getting the rest from New Covent Garden Market.

• Food and drink: We went to great lengths to source local organic produce for our meal. The wine was all organic (although the champagne wasn’t!). We sourced our meat from the Ginger Pig, a butcher in London renowned for its ethical sourcing policy. (This was blinkin’ expensive!) We wrangled with the venue over the silliest things, over why frozen UK peas were better than fresh imported ones. I’m absolutely sure he was happy to be rid of us!

• Rings: a local craftsman in Ireland made our rings from white gold.

• Gifts: We asked that instead of giving gifts, guests could donate via justgiving to our two chosen charities (mine: the Rainforest Foundation, Brendan’s: The Connection at St Martins). We raised well over £1,000 for each charity but there were those who didn’t like the cold anonymity of cash donations and wanted to give us a tangible gift, so for them we set up a small list on http://www.ourgreenweddinglist.com. I must say it was nice to get a few gifts delivered when we got back from honeymoon, the most exciting of which was a rainwater butt (that is not sarcasm - it really was exciting!!).

• Transport: We encouraged our guests to offset their transport emissions via the carbon neutral company which invests in renewable energy projects.

• Honeymoon: we travelled around continental Europe by train and committed to making no long haul flights that year.

If I could do it all again, my top three tips would be the following:

1. Consider having a smaller wedding.
The carbon cost of the guests' travel was astronomical, so I would consider making it smaller in the first place or thinking twice about long-haul invites (er... not so easy when it is immediate family who live in Canada). Our wedding required 6 return flights from North America (6.6 tonnes), 2 from Australia (6.4 tonnes!!!), 60 from Ireland (12 tonnes) and 4 from continental Europe (1.2 tonnes). In total that is a whopping 26.2 tonnes of Co2!!

2. Go vintage.
While I went for a little vintage lace shrug, going the whole hog would have been better. Vintage (er... second-hand) is the answer to cutting the majority of both the environmental and ethical costs of the day. There are many vintage dress shops that can alter beautiful dresses to suit any figure, and were it not for the particular shopping madness that overwhelms most brides-to-be, I’m sure that this would be more common practice. Vintage jewellery could also help stem the tide of waste that accompanies gold mining: Payal Sampat, director of the No Dirty Gold campaign recently told Treehugger.com that: "Producing a single gold wedding band leaves behind 20 tonnes of waste at a mine site."

3. Look for an eco-venue or at least a place that has eco credentials.
Even though it was only three years ago, eco-venues are a lot more commonplace now than they were then. It was pretty knackering having to constantly explain our choices to our venue, when their major concern was cost and simplicity. It’s not like we weren’t on a budget too! Dealing with an eco-minded venue would have made the process a lot simpler and also given us the peace of mind that they have the energy efficiency and ethical sourcing parts of the wedding puzzle sorted. We got ourselves twisted up in knots sourcing our own food and wine to be prepared later by the venue. There are many eco-venues popping up all over now, so giving them the business over old-school room hire is the way to go I’d say.

The problem with proselytising...

There are perils that come with promoting yourself as a greenie in the blogosphere. The main one is that at some point you are bound to get caught out being un-green by some keen-eyed buddy who read your blog. I had never thought about that while I happily typed away about my fabulous virtuous low carbon life in the comfort of my own living room, but on Saturday night at a party a friend looked over my shoulder as I filled a plate full of chicken wings at the buffet and said, “Flexing that ’tarianism I see”.

Busted.

I had no idea where the meat came from and it didn’t cross my mind to ask. But having written about the virtues of carefully considered meat-eating, I was caught out ignoring my own rules. This is the problem with being evangelical about a lifestyle choice, nothing can sustain 100% perfection. I do try on an ongoing basis to live a good life, but there will be times when I fail. And that isn't the end of the world, it just proves that I am human. It has prompted me to think about the big hypocrisies that us environmental types fall prey to - fodder for a future blog...

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway: Making a transition from fearing the future to a life sustaining society

As I learn more about climate change I find it harder to avoid despair. With such an urgent call to save the planet, I often feel scared and useless. And it is the green movement that's pushing the fear hardest. The language of climate change is anxiety-based and blame-ridden. We talk about an imminent cascade of crises, environmental catastrophes and extreme weather. My anxiety about this future is then further exacerbated as a new mother whose child has his whole life ahead of him! But, then I remember that this fear is a complete waste of energy.

Now I’m not denying there’s a crisis, but where’s the fun in all that doom and gloom? Yes, there is a clear mandate for a transition to a low impact, post-materialist society, but must we fear that? How are we serving the next generation if we despair of their future? Surely joy and fun will also be part of a sustainable future alongside clean energy and low carbon buildings?

In order to maintain happiness, I aim to live lightly on the planet both in word and deed, and to remember that having a laugh with a friend might be as important in creating a brighter future as any action I take to reduce my carbon footprint. I have found solace in the writings of environmental philosopher Joanna Macy. She suggests that in order to quell the need for haste that comes with fear, we must hold a wider perspective about who we are as humans, recognising that we are a short life in a long history of many short lives. She says:

“As humans we have the capacity and the birthright to experience time in a saner fashion. Throughout history, men and women have labored at great personal cost to bequeath future generations monuments of art and learning far beyond their individual lives. And they have honored through ritual and story those who came before. To make the transition to a life-sustaining society, we must retrieve that ancestral capacity – in other words, act like ancestors. We need to attune to longer, ecological rhythms and nourish a strong, felt connection with past and future generations. For us as agents of change, this isn’t easy, because to intervene in the political and legislative decisions of the Industrial Growth Society, we fall by necessity into its tempo. We race to find and pull the levers before it is too late to save this forest, or stop that weapons program. Nonetheless, we can learn again to drink at deeper wells.” (Macy 1998: 136).

If I can detach from fear I can tap into Macy’s concept of “deeper time” which helps me to envision a brighter future. By projecting myself outside of my own generation, both to the past and the future, I can gain a better perspective about the present. I still feel the fear: don’t get me wrong, this crisis is real. But I live my life anyway, with as much laughter, snowball fights and kitchen discos as we can fit into a day.

The carbon credit crunch – why calculating your carbon footprint isn’t easy peasy

Today I decided to quantify my carbon tonnage. Yes, I know it was just last week that I was moaning about the oversimplification of the environmental crisis into Co2, but I figure that I might as well know what I’m talking about if I am going to rage against that particular machine. So, let’s think back to the beginning of 2009 when my husband and I committed to reducing our carbon footprint in an effort to live a low impact life. Now I want to see how well we – or more specifically, I – did before we set sail into 2010. To do this I used three online carbon calculators on the assumption that there would be a little variability but that I could get an average baseline carbon footprint. The results were more than just a little variable, here’s what I came up with...

Carbon Calculator # 1: Act on Co2

I started with http://actonco2.direct.gov.uk/actonco2/home.html , the UK government’s Act on CO2 web site, where I inputted a little information and was given the very modest score of 2.74 tonnes per annum. As I was under the impression that the average UK lifestyle had the output of about 11 tonnes per annum, this seemed too good to be true. I decided that rather than taking it as proof of my saintliness, my low score was probably down to the fact that this calculator only measures home heating, electrical appliances and personal transport and critically it misses out on water, waste, food and consumption. So this calculation only really accounts for around 40% of my carbon footprint. In a nutshell, this one is not the most accurate carbon counter there is but it is a helpful and easy to use site and it gives good tips on what to do to reduce your impact, just don’t be fooled that you are as good as it tells you you are.

Carbon Calculator # 2: Bioregional

I decided to find a more detailed calculator and googled “one planet living” to see if I could get a more comprehensive measurement. I was pointed to the One Planet Living microsite run by Bioregional http://calculator.bioregional.com/. This calculator took about 10 minutes to complete and looked at home energy usage, travel, household waste, food, water use, retail consumption, garden, wildlife habitat, health and wellbeing. It also includes some quite random questions like “Have you ever looked into the history of your local area?” (How exactly would that impact my carbon output???). After finishing the questionnaire on this site my carbon footprint shot up to 8.9 tonnes and I was told in no uncertain terms that if everyone in the world lived like me we would need two planets to support us, but I was able to take some solace in the fact that I am still below the UK average of three planets. This site gave me the most comprehensive analysis and clear tips for what I could do to further reduce my impact.

Carbon Calculator # 3: WWF

So then I thought I’d see what WWF had to say as they are the originators of the concept of one planet living. The WWF footprint calculator http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ has a bold interface and is very easy to complete with quick-fire questions grouped into four categories: food, travel, home and stuff. You get through the questions in about 3 minutes, but some of them do skim the surface a bit (eg. no specificity on the type of loft insulation you have which does make a difference). After the quickfire questions the site then encourages users to join the WWF campaign to reduce Co2 and gives snappy tips for how to make changes. Shockingly, however, it calculated my carbon footprint at a massive 13.78 tonnes per annum and 2.66 planets, which just about bowled me over.

2009 Carbon Calculations

I was left wondering how these three sites could take in the same data and come up with such different answers. Because they varied so wildly, I decided the most reliable calculation was the Bioregional one as it used the most comprehensive data. So I have my baseline: 8.9 tonnes, but did I also find out if I reduced my carbon footprint at all in 2009? Well, yes, but I had to seek out other web sites to help me calculate that. Specifically I wanted to calculate the savings made as a result of two key changes we made last year – 1) giving up our car and 2) composting all our food waste. Giving up the car saved 1.9 tonnes per year (source: the carbon neutral company http://www.carbonneutral.com/) and by composting all our food, garden and cardboard waste, we saved emissions equivalent to 0.28 tonnes of carbon dioxide. (source: Centre for Alternative Technologies http://www.cat.org.uk/). That is a total saving of 2.18 tonnes – which roughly means we cut our carbon emissions by about a quarter last year. That is not perfect maths of course, but then again those carbon calculator web sites were not exactly demonstrating Carol Vordeman precision!

New year resolutions

So if we managed 25% last year, we can certainly cut our emissions by at least another 10% in 2010. I have signed us up to 10:10 http://www.1010uk.org/, alongside squillions of celebs and big companies, and I’ve got a few ideas about how we can reach that target. Firstly we need to tackle the house – it is too draughty and the loft insulation we have is too skimpy. With a baby in the house we keep the heating on more than we did before so we really need to replace three windows and increase our loft insulation to 400mm depth. I also plan to invest in an electricity meter and a chimney balloon for the unused chimney stack. However, the area that I’m not sure we can impact this year is air travel as we aim to go back to Canada in the summer, so I will have to look into the issue of “love miles” in more depth in a future blog.

Reflections on climate change denial #1 – why oversimplification has made global warming a cult

There I was having a nice cup of tea listening to Radio Four when Peter Hitchens came on to talk about why energy saving light bulbs are proof of the tyranny of the nanny state and that man-made global warming was a load of old hokey. This got me rather hot and bothered even though the heating was off and my tea was cold, but rather than internally fume I decided to think more broadly about what he is saying. On reflection, what occurred to me is that climate science has become so dumbed down for public consumption that people now find it hard to believe.

So let’s look at the oversimplification of climate science. Two years ago few people knew what a carbon footprint was, but now it has become so ubiquitous that I even saw a man in Westfield shopping centre yesterday wearing a sweatshirt that said, “keep your carbon footprint low dude”. Some might say that this means that the message is getting across, but I bet if I’d asked that man what his footprint was he wouldn’t know. What we – the communications people – have done by reducing a complex science down to neat digestable messages and "top tips for what to do" is create this simple equation:

man-made stuff = carbon emissions = 2 cm sea level rise in 2050

By essentially editing out great swathes of scientific information we have made it easy for people to believe or deny that equation. If we broadened it to reflect the actual components of the environmental situation, it might look more like this:

Growth of mass production and consumption of commercial products, livestock, food, transport, services, minerals, etc + population growth = Deforestation + acidification of oceans + mass agriculture + species loss + peak oil, etc = Pollution, greenhouse gases, unstable international relations, war, poverty, extreme weather events, flooding, etc.

Because the true picture is systemic: whether we like it or not, man is a species that sits within – not outside of – the eco-system which in itself is entirely interdependent. Noone would deny the dependence of plants on bees for pollination or animals on plants for oxygen, but too often we take ourselves –  man – out of the system altogether which in turn enables us to deny that our actions make any impact at all.

By simplyifying our impact into a short equation about carbon emissions, we further distance people from the multi-species holistic eco-system that we live in and we make “man” the villain and "earth" the victim. This of course polarises people into “for” and “against” camps because who, other than bleeding heart liberals like me, wants to admit to being the villain? So by oversimplifying a complex problem into a digestable message, we therefore make it possible to deny the existence of an environmental crisis altogether. And the media then sees it as an argument with two sides and TV producers can make films called “the Great Global Warming Swindle”, and silly people like James May and Peter Hitchens get air time on BBC 1 and Radio Four to say “I don’t believe in man-made global warming” like it is a cult or something.

Climate change in itself has become an easily thrown about soundbite with the polar bear as its charismatic mascot. In this oversimplification, we no longer look at man’s actual impact on the environment, but rather we choose between the option of man = villain or man = hero, and select which side of this totally unscientific binary argument we sit on. It’s not hard to understand where climate change denial comes from when you look at it like that. Even I'd rather be a hero than a villain.

Recycle, Reuse, Re-Gift – how to have a planet-friendly Christmas

While things are hotting up in Copenhagen, London is getting a light dusting of snow and I’m feeling a little festive. So I thought I would look at the impact our Christmas will have on the environment. It is set to be a somewhat frugal affair this year, but before you label me a Scroogella, here’s how we plan to have big fun with a low impact...

Firstly, the gifts. There’ll be no new toys from Santa this year. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be toys at all. Senan is at that lovely age when the marketers haven’t got to him yet – at 18 months old he has yet to be swayed by the mantra that new is best and he’s fine with all his plastic gear being second hand. While there is no truer statement than “if you give a toddler a big plastic toy, he will get more entertainment out of the cardboard box”, sadly for me my son really LOVES brightly coloured plastic toys too, and so our home is far from plastic tat-free. My way of justifying this is to ensure it is second-hand. We have lots of great friends and neighbours with kids who are delighted for us to take their old toys off their hands and even better, we have a great charity shop for kids nearby (Fara Kids, http://www.faracharityshops.org) where I can pick up good-as-new toys cheaply and then take them back to the shop when he grows out of them for them to sell them on again – recycling and charitable giving all bundled into one!

Then there is the art of re-gifting. Trust me, this has to be done artfully. Regifting (ie. giving an unwanted gift away to someone else) has been a tradition in our family at Christmas since I was small, so I am not offended if I get back what I gave to my mother last year, but this will certainly not be the case for everyone. Here’s how to do it right...

1. Have a bag set aside for the gifts that you don’t really want or need.

2. After everyone has gone home and the home made thank you cards have gone out, audit the gifts into two piles, those that will make great gifts for others and those that can go to charity now

3. In the “go to others” pile, list who gave you what so as to avoid the mortification of giving it back to them next year

4. Keep the list with the items so you can refer to it next year.

Regifting doesn’t just have to be things that you received as gifts. I won a raffle this year – what a bonus – now I know what my husband is getting! The golden rule for re-gifting is never re-gift rubbish, just the stuff that is nice, but just not quite your taste.

Then of course there’s food and drink. We aim to get a local veg box delivery pre-Christmas and cook a free range turkey the Jamie Oliver way. There will undoubtedly be delicious additions from my family who are joining us for lunch – but local and seasonal is the goal for us all. Our neighbours will also be home this Christmas (emissions from air travel must go right down during a recession!), so we are flinging our doors open for some homespun cheer throughout the festive season. Mulled wine and mince pies for everyone – oh and some of that lovely chutney Mum made last summer.

And finally, our tree... Some might say that reusability is the only thing a plastic tree has going for it, given that it is likely to be made from polyvinyl chloride. However, with reforestation numbers not stacking up I am proud that we are reusing the plastic tree that my parents bought in 1972 and have had in their house every Christmas since then. My mother, the queen of posh bargain shopping bought this now 37-year old treasure from the Harrods window one snowy Christmas eve. They gave her the baubles too, and we still have them now. A good plastic tree can last lifetimes, so we are committed to reusing this baby for many years to come.

Calculating our impact.

After Christmas we’ll do a triple bottom line review of Christmas (oh yes we will, we’re nerds like that!) to see how well we did on minimising our impact. Watch this space to see if our measures for a low impact Christmas really stacked up on the day.

From veggie to flexi... In defence of a mixed meal

A couple of weeks ago, Barbara Ellen in the Observer lambasted the new, less committed vegetarianism that is spreading across the country with the rather unsexy name of “Flexitarianism”, she banged on about lack of commitment and people not having the staying power that they once did. This kind of riled me, because while I probably wouldn’t announce myself as a flexi at a dinner party, it is what I am and I actually think that it is the way to a more sustainable way of eating.

I was vegetarian for 23 years, but I did eat fish and eggs. This was mainly because I became vegetarian when I was nine and my mum worried that all I got for protein in my school dinners was a lump of cheese. I also didn’t really think of fish in the same way I did other animals, and as I was a sucker for a cute cow’s big brown eyes or the fluffy tail of a rabbit, the idea of eating them was totally unpalatable.

I made it through my teens and twenties without succumbing to a bacon buttie as so many veggies do, but then in my thirties a couple of things happened: I started to think about fish differently and I got pregnant.

The fish thing came first. I read a book called “Cod, the fish that changed the world” and began to comprehend the sheer decimation of the world’s fish stocks. Suddenly my tunafish sandwich habit felt utterly incongruent with my vision for a sustainable planet. So I decided I needed to eat less fish, and make sure I knew a lot more about the fish that I did consume. At the same time I started eating chicken, which seems odd, but I felt I needed a protein replacements (real veggies would call me lightweight I know!)

Then I got up the duff and alongside feeling DREADFUL, I also felt a compulsion to eat more meat. So I even tried (organic, local) beef, bacon and sausages. And ever since then I have been trying to wean myself off them for good. It’s as bad as fags though, you do get a craving.

So rather than chastise myself forever, I have embraced the concept of flexitarianism. I try to eat very little meat. I avoid my four legged friends altogether as they are largely responsible for rainforest landtake and methane emissions. My chicken habit is still pretty large I guess, but I always go for organic free range, and sustainable sourcing is key to eating fish. Paul Macartney’s idea for a meat free Monday even means that my red blooded Irish husband refrains from digging in to the rashers on a Monday – and in the grand scheme of things, I hope that makes a difference.

The moral of this tale, is that there is room for more than one type of diet when we are try to do our bit for the environment. Being a considerate flexitarian does not necessarily mean that you lack commitment, it just makes you an omnivore.