I’ve been enjoying the 15-minute series of programmes this week on Radio 4 called New Year Solutions which are about living more sustainably. They are non-preachy and seem to be pretty well-researched on the whole. There are five programmes as follows:
- Monday – meat – I thought this was very good.
- Tuesday – cars – I haven’t listened to this one yet.
- Wednesday – clothes – I thought this was good but I already do most of the things suggested (except put my jeans in the freezer)
- Thursday – water – again, good.
- Friday – space – I haven’t listened to this one as it has happened yet! You can catch it at 13:45 today
And less interesting, I thought, was this Media Programme episode which I listened to because Ian Gregory was one of the participants. That’s Ian Gregory whose campany Abzed featured in George Monbiot’s cracking article The Grouse Shooters Aim to Kill: the first casualty is the truth. It was interesting, though not that interesting, that Gregory portrayed himself as a defender of the little guys and standing up for the truth. Ho! ho! ho! – Merry Christmas! And, by the way, the YFTB website still has a couple of non-Hen Harriers illustrating its Hen Harrier page.
[registration_form]
What is the photo of?
It’s the BBC complaints portal
Lizzybusy – part of the base of the statue The Meeting Place at St Pancras station.
“Gregory portrayed himself as a defender of the little guys and standing up for the truth”.
Bit like the current president of the US presenting himself as a champion of the people. It seems that these days, the more outlandish and diagonally-opposed to reality your claims the further you can get. 🙁
I was hearing on a Radio 4 phone in someone complaining that his 6 children couldn’t afford a house.
We also hear from environmental conferences that we should cut our consumption by some percentage. so how does this gentleman in his partner’s quota get distributed between the 6 children?
Any toughts?
I’ve just listened to the programme on space and thought it was brilliant. The subject of living in smaller homes and sharing resources\utilities is not raised often enough, I live in a small block of flats myself and would dearly love if we had a community launderette (I used a little launderette in Hay on Wye when I was doing the recycling at the festival and adored it) so very much better than each home with a washing machine susceptible to breakdown and leaks, what an incredible waste and inconvenience. Shame the programme didn’t properly discuss the idea of tool libraries which have phenomenal social and environmental potential. My problem with the programme is one of the issues where I sound like a broken record player in the comments I make on this blog – that Climate Change was given as the sole environmental reason for making personal changes. Nothing about saving natural resources on a finite planet so everyone can have a decent life or stopping wilderness and wildlife from real destruction e.g the expected assault on the Amazon by agribusiness when we currently waste a third of the world’s food. I can’t see how projected\extrapolated future change in the climate is more of a concern than absolute annihilation of wildlife habitat right here and now or how it matters if farmers will be affected by shifting weather patterns in the future (maybe) when their soil will be long gone and the lack of family planning services means they can’t control the size of their families even if they want to. The speculative given precedence over the immediate and incontestable, CC at worst only adds insult to injury, but if you prevent the injury as you should (deforestation, rampant population growth, horrendous food wastage) then you avoid the ‘insult’ too. Sadly the environmental movement departed from this years ago which is why we’ve ended up with insanities like chipping forest for biomass to ‘save the planet’. Of course a lot of people have just switched off completely. Put it this way if new findings meant CC would be insignificant does that mean everything will be hunky dory now and we don’t have to bother? The programme implied that.
I wish everyone would stop talking about saving the planet. Come back in a million years and the planet will be fine. There’ll be some interesting new species which genus Homo will not be there to see.
Get with the programme everyone, we’re saving our own miserable skins. This truth might concentrate minds a bit more than worrying about some vague “planet”. When it comes down to it, most people just aren’t that fussed about a few bloody polar bears far, far away, but most do care at least a bit about themselves and their children.