Don't Buy a "Green" Thing

There are so many “green” products out there – from eco ironing spray to solar powered cherubic water features – that it’s easy to miss the simple fact that avoiding a purchase entirely is usually the greenest choice of all. The truly green alternative to a mains-powered water feature, for instance, is not a solar-powered one with a huge manufacturing, transport and disposal footprint, but an entirely non-electric one (like this made from a bathtub rescued from landfill), or just doing without a water feature altogether.

Making something pretty by re-using what would otherwise be wasted is a nice idea, and there are loads of projects and websites on making funky clothes, jewellery and desk tidies from reclaimed waste. But how often are you likely to wear a newspaper dress, how many pen holders could anyone really need, and how much jewellery would you avoid buying new if you mastered the art of making bottle-top earrings instead?

We’re so hooked on consumption that we’re coming up with ideas to reduce it by essentially consuming more. We’re inventing more “needs” that we can satisfy with ideas borrowed from sustainable solutions, while forgetting that we already have real needs far more deserving of our efforts to meet them more sustainably.<

Along with this, almost all products which are actually useful have just about succumbed by now to the natural state of decay known as the Shoe Event Horizon, which caused global societal collapse on the planet Brontitall in “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams:*

“The foundation of the Shoe Event Horizon theory is that when depressed, people tend to look down, and when they look down, they see their shoes. To cheer themselves up, they might buy themselves a new pair. Thus, in a generally depressed society, demand for shoes will rise.

In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.”

It seems to me that it is no longer economically viable to manufacture anything much other than cheap, shoddy products that don’t properly withstand normal wear and tear, that are deliberately designed not to be repairable by the average user and that are inherently disposable, thereby ensuring the future purchase of replacements as often as manufacturers think they can get away with. The result is that we’ve stopped expecting anything to last, we don’t expect to have to form the habit of maintaining anything, it rarely occurs to most of us to even attempt to fix anything that breaks and we’ve largely lost the skills we need to do so even if we wanted to.

How come so many people who grow their own vegetables don’t know how to sharpen the tools they use? Why, when everyone knows they should only boil the water they need, do they not also know to regularly de-scale their electric kettle to prolong its useful life? How many people use an energy efficient light bulb in a lamp, but throw the lamp away when it stops working because they don’t know to check and change the fuse? How many of those designing exciting “eco” clothing ranges throw away good versatile T-shirts from their own wardrobes when they don’t know how to get rid of a stubborn stain?

Instead of making very beautiful bottle-top earrings and pen holders, perhaps we should concentrate on things we couldn’t just entirely do without – basic clothing, tools, lamps, kettles, bikes, taps, everything that serves a useful purpose and is a solution to a real need rather than an invented one. We then need to teach each other about how these things are made, which designs are most durable, how to fix them when they break and how to maintain them so they break less often.

Why has learning simple repair and maintenance techniques yet to become fashionable the way "eco chic" apparently has, and where are all the reduce-reuse-recycle-but-see-if-you-can-REPAIR-it-first sites?

I’ve made myself a new “repair and maintenance” tag for this kind of thing and I hope you all have nice sharp garden shears now. I'll try to find something else to fix while you're busy descaling your kettle.




* Sorry to stereotype but I imagine I’ll now get Douglas Adams fans commenting that they’ve memorised the entire text of HHG and the planet Brontitall isn’t in it, so thought I’d better just mention that it’s only in the original BBC radio show and that memorising the entire text of HHG isn’t likely to get you a girlfriend.

Introducing Mizzy

My good friend The Neighbour’s Cat suddenly and unexpectedly got sent to live with someone else just before Christmas last year. I had no idea she was going, didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and for months afterwards kept thinking I’d glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye sitting on the windowsill or hiding behind the curtains.

I’d been thinking for ages about getting my own cat, and last week I finally took the plunge and answered a classified ad on Gumtree. Someone nearby needed a new home for a ten year old, overweight, black-and-white cat with dandruff, so I’m now sharing my flat with a fat old lady cat called Mizzy.

By pure coincidence she has very similar markings to Neighbour’s Cat, but measures at least twice as much around the middle and currently weighs about five kilos or 11lbs, which is a lot of cat. Apparently an “average” cat weighs about four kilos, which I worked out is roughly the equivalent of me weighing well over 11 stone instead of 9. She’s going on a diet.

She’s very chatty and friendly and lets me rub her belly, and her string chasing technique involves lots of amusing rolling over to use all four paws, so we’re getting along fine.

I’ll be adding her opinions to mine here if she has any interesting ones, although so far she’s still eating Go-Cat because I didn’t realise it was made by the evil Nestle, who she will be boycotting when we get to the end of the packet. She much prefers home-made toys like the string and a feather to the annoying jingly balls actually sold as cat toys, so that’s a good sign. We haven't discussed vegetarianism yet.

Sort Your Shears Out!

Everyone’s been clipping everything in sight since we’ve had some sunshine here. On Monday the council used a petrol ride-on mower for all the grassy paths, the neighbours had a gardener doing their lawn with an electric push-mower, all the housing associations sent their hedge-clipping-chainsaw-thing man round and almost everyone else I saw was laboriously hacking at hedges and undergrowth with blunt shears while sweating a lot. So it might be a bit late to tell you this.

It’ll all need doing again in about two weeks though, and the simple non-electrified garden shears that most of us use are about a hundred times easier and more effective to use if you maintain them properly, so here’s how to sort out a pair of shears:

First wipe them clean so you’re dealing with handles and blades rather than a layer of plant goo and grit. Little bits of grit will totally mess up the sharp edges and the pivot, so rinse them even if they don’t seem muddy, just in case.

Close the blades together, hold them up to the light, and look between the blades to see how well aligned they are. If the blades are bent away from each other even a tiny bit then at best they’ll only cut part-way through everything. If they meet at the pivot and the tip but there’s a chink of light in the middle then you’re holding a pair of self-blunting shears. Blades bent in towards each other will scrape their sharp edges together every time you close them, so they’ll be blunt in no time even if you just open and close them without cutting anything.

Bend the blades carefully back into shape until they pass each other very closely and lie flat against each other – you shouldn’t see any light between them sideways-on when they’re shut. I tend to do this by wedging one handle between my foot and the ground, putting a brick under the part of the blade I want to bend, another brick under the loose handle to stop the blades closing together, and then pushing with slow steady pressure on the blade until I can just feel it start to move. Don’t hammer blades or apply pressure too fast in case they snap, and check the chink of light between the blades every time you may have bent them even slightly – a little makes a lot of difference!

Once you’re sure they’re aligned properly, sort the pivot joint out. If they’re stiff you might have grit or gunk in the joint, which a scrub with an old toothbrush in warm soapy water will probably sort out. If it’s rusty then take as much rust off as you can with fine sandpaper and wipe clean with something dry. Then work some oil into the joint so it opens and closes easily. If they’re still stiff then it might be worth undoing the bolt to sand the parts you can’t otherwise reach, putting the bolt itself in Coca-Cola overnight before cleaning its screw thread with a toothbrush and soapy water, then drying and oiling the whole thing before putting it back together.

Finally, you need a sharpening stone. If you’ve ever chewed a piece of grass you’ll know that it’s very fibrous, and so are woody things like hedges. Clipping the stuff will blunt blades quite quickly, so they need sharpening up again every ten minutes or so to keep them cutting easily, otherwise you’ll spend lots of effort just bruising grass.

If they haven’t been sharpened for ages then it’ll take a bit longer first time, but once they’re done they’ll only need a few scrapes to get going again when they start to lose their edge. If they’re very blunt or if there are any nicks in the blades, take them to a locksmith-and-cobblers shop first and ask nicely if they’ll grind them on their machines before you use a sharpening stone for a smoother finish.

Get the sharpening stone wet, look at the blade to see where the tiny slope at the edge is, then drag that sloped bit across the stone – you don’t need to press very hard. If you then look again at the blade the part you’ve scraped will be shiny, so you’ll see easily if you’ve got the angle right and with a bit of trial and error you’ll soon work out how to get a decent sharp edge on a blade – ask a good chef to teach you how to sharpen a knife if you're struggling.

Go off and cut things, enjoy the nice clean slicey noise they’ll now be making, remember to sharpen again a little bit every ten minutes or so, and you’ll gradually stop thinking of shearing as really hard and difficult work.

No petrol, no battery, no mains lead, no fuel costs, no sweat.

Ian Tomlinson - It Happens All The Time

I went to protest against the meeting of the G20 in London last week. I listened to a samba band, chatted to lots of lovely random people, ate slightly squashed sandwiches in the sunshine and was nowhere near where Ian Tomlinson died.

To briefly fill you in if you’ve been on another planet for the last week or so; someone who had nothing to do with the protests was walking home through it all, and was hit and pushed over by a police officer in riot gear. Video of this happening was recorded on at least two different cameras by other people nearby - which you can see here and here - and we’ll probably eventually see footage from CCTV cameras in the area too. It is pretty clear that it’s assault. He died in the street soon afterwards of a heart attack, and it seems that police officers actively hindered the efforts of a medical student to give him first aid, and then delayed an ambulance attending the scene to resuscitate him.

Plenty has already been written about the G20, the protests against it, the police tactics used and the press coverage of it all.

The one thing I don't think is being said enough at the moment is that the tactics and behaviour of the police last week were entirely routine. Just about every major protest I've ever been on, as well as many smaller ones, has been policed in more or less this way – in fact you can always spot a first-time attendee at any protest because they are the only people still expressing astonishment at what they see police officers do.

Kettling, crap (i.e. obviously arbitrary) arrests, police provoking violence, hitting people on the ground with batons, shoving very hard with shields and intimidating people who aren’t even involved happens at almost every protest. Lots of us simply expect it now. Most people who are attacked by police officers never bring a complaint - it’s not usually possible to identify individual officers after the event, and onlookers are often busy being attacked themselves rather than filming what is happening. But it happens all the time.

I’ve seen countless protesters with head injuries, because lines of police often raise their batons above their own heads to beat indiscriminately down on crowds of people, after pushing them back so they’re packed too close together to be able to avoid the blows.

Every time there is any liaison between protesters and police, we ask them to ensure that all officers’ identification numbers are kept clearly visible precisely so that we can hold them accountable for this behaviour. Every time they fail to do this.

They actively prevent people from recording their actions by filming or taking photos. Even people who realise that media coverage is biased often have little idea how profound and widespread the bias is. Unprovoked and disproportionate police violence is massively under-recorded and under-reported, preventing any individual case from being seen in its wider context of routine police brutality.

If Ian Tomlinson had not died last week there would have been no investigation. If there had been no footage of the assault then it would have been assumed that the police had acted reasonably, and the attack would have become one of thousands of police assaults which go completely ignored every year. It’s a matter of time before someone else dies, and a matter of luck whether anyone will manage to get clear footage of it next time.

I hope the investigation into Tomlinson’s death doesn't allow everyone to narrow the focus of discussion to just this one fatal incident. It's high time that the whole nature of the role of policing at protests is called into question and that some real accountability is forced on the police.

Turn On, Plug-In, Opt Out!

Starting today, Google will be collecting information on the web pages you view in order to target advertising at you.

They don't need your permission - if you don't opt out then the law apparently allows them to assume your "implied consent". They also have little obligation to make sure you know they're doing this, which one might think would tend to make it rather difficult for you to choose to consent to it even if you wanted to. Anyway, now you know, so now you can choose to opt out.

In fact I hardly ever see any advertising on the internet any more since I got the almighty Adblock Plus for Firefox. Honestly, even if you're the least technical person in the universe, if you use Firefox then click here, click on "Add to Firefox", and let it install. It will tell you to restart Firefox, and then you need to click on a filter to tell it which ads to look for - pick the first US one if you're in an English-speaking country. That's it.

It's easy, I promise it won't go wrong, and I swear I only see advertising on the internet now when I use someone else's machine which doesn't have Adblock installed. Then everything is suddenly plastered in the stuff, which the normal user of the machine usually insists they "never really notice". If they really don't notice that amount of junk on the screen all the time then advertisers must practically have electrodes implanted directly into their subconscious. Give yourself a couple of weeks without the distraction of incessant advertising, and then see how cluttered and shouty other people's experience of the internet begins to seem.

Google, however, will still be collecting information about the pages you view in order to target advertising at you, even if you're not actually seeing the ads. It's the data collection aspect that I object to most, so I still want to opt out of their intrusive scheme and stop them virtually spying on me in the first place.

Trying to find out how to do this involved having to read pages and pages of corporate drivel about how to "improve your online experience" by letting Google show you "the most useful and relevant ads online" which can be "tailored to your interests" with a system based on "transparency" and "choice".

To save you the sheer annoyance, click here, and then click on the big blue thing that says "Download the advertising cookie opt-out plugin". If you have more than one browser then you'll need to do this in all of them, e.g. you need to do this once in Firefox, once in Internet Explorer, and once in Chrome or whatever else you use for browsing the internet. (If you're not sure then you probably only need to do it once.)

After that they should bugger off and leave you alone, at least until the surgeons call round to give you that lobotomy you've implied your consent for by failing to let them know you didn't want it.

Eccentric-Looking Allotment Project No.97

We're without water on my allotment site again this spring because of a massive underground leak. My plot isn't looking as wacky as usual at the moment either, since the bender greenhouse has bitten the dust and I can't put the tipi greenhouse back up until I find new poles for it, so this weekend I've been ressurecting my solar still which should help on both scores.

Our water is metered and not as good for some things as rainwater, so I always collect the rain in loads of mismatched plastic containers I've pulled out of skips. But for the last couple of years we've had no rain for weeks at just the time I'm trying to plant my seedlings out, and with vandals wrecking our water supply I've had to carry water in from the carwash around the corner just to keep everything going.

So how to collect fresh water on site when it isn't raining and the taps don't work? "The Global Warming Survival Kit" by Brian Clegg had an idea I thought I'd try out.

I already had a big hole in the ground, about three metres square and 30cm or so deep, where the tipi greenhouse used to be. I dug a smaller, deeper hole in the middle to put a big plastic container in, and then stretched clear plastic sheeting over the top and held it down around the edges with bricks. The idea is that water evaporates out of the ground, condenses on the underside of the plastic sheet and runs into the middle, where small stones keep the lowest point directly above the container to catch it all.


I got a good few litres a day this way over the summer last year, and when it does rain the sheeting also collects lots of water in the top, so now I should end up with a decent supply of water whether it rains or shines between now and planting time.

Of course today has been cloudy and windy, just to annoy me.

I've Forgotten How to Blog!

I recently sent work-related e-mails from home and forgot to erase the automatic signature, which says http://alice-in-blogland.blogspot.com/. The recipient noticed, and then several other work people turned out to have read it too, including my boss...

I’m sure I must have left the same signature at the bottom of something or other I’ve sent my mum at some point as well, although god knows whether she’ll have figured out what a “blogspot” is or what to do with it, especially since it doesn’t begin with “www…”

For some reason I mentioned this blog to my half-sister too, who I’ve never met but who I’ve been in contact with for the first time recently by e-mail, and on whom I’m very much still making first impressions…

And then, before xmas, I went to a big co-op party where, (at least as far as the more coherent parts of my memory of the evening suggest,) about three different people said they'd read something or other I'd written here. Although come to think of it those could all have been the same person wearing different wigs…

Now every time I sit down to punch random musings into my grubby keyboard, I keep imagining my boss, my mum, someone who’s going to be my sister and every Leeds activist I’ve ever met, all in different wigs, all gathered around the same computer screen waiting for me to do something worthwhile here to justify the publicity. It's been making it a bit difficult to write.

I feel quite a lot like a rabbit again, this time one caught in headlights.

What if I say something stupid?

I suppose that question implies that I don't think any of those people have ever heard me say anything stupid before, which is extremely unlikely given the rubbish I come out with in person when I don't even have to be able to spell any of it.

Anyway, deliberately pitching to specific audiences is for advertisers, I'd rather write about whatever I want and assume that only people who'll tend to like it will tend to read it. I guess really I just can't decide what to blog about, and the more I think about it the less I can prioritise.

Plenty of better-informed-than-I-am people are already writing about Gaza, on which subject it's as much as I can do to suppress a scream every time I hear words like "proportional" and "right to exist" - some things I get too pissed off to even rant coherently about.

The UK government has just given the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, which I probably will rant about when I've caught up on reading everyone else's rants and worked out what actually needs doing next about it.

And of course capitalism continues to eat itself, with some amusing and some scary consequences which so far haven't included me losing my job, being repossessed or having to do a masters degree.

So how to get this blog habit going again?

My most productive days often start with a lot of aimless but active flitting around, just feeling the caffeine kick in and tidying things up entirely at random whether they need it or not. I then usually start seriously doing about three or four things at once, while making huge lists of other things like taking the bins out and finding out where that smell is coming from (those two things are "on my list" right now), which I may or may not do when I lose momentum on any of my supposedly primary tasks, or if I somehow manage to actually finish any of them.

Sometimes I'll then suddenly be seized with a very specific project that I'm absolutely compelled to completely immerse myself in right this minute, develop and expand into all available physical and mental space, and concentrate on to the exclusion of everything else until it occurs to me that I haven't eaten for hours, I haven't slept for days and I haven't returned anyone's calls since last Tuesday. That's how shelving gets put up.

I think I'll have a good flit around, aimlessly tidy up this blog a bit and see what happens. Making a nice cup of tea is usually a good start.

Rabbit photo © MzePhotos.com, Some Rights Reserved

'Eds Up!

Someone's somehow let that bastard Charlie Brooker back on the telly again. Watch the episode on advertising here before Tuesday 'cos I think they take them down again after a week.

BBC4, 10:30 on Tuesdays if you've got BBC4.

November

So, November already. I've spent all afternoon raking up beautiful pink and orange cherry tree leaves in the garden, and planting bulbs which I'll now forget all about until they cheer me up on some still far away spring day next year.

I've just come back from Bruges, which is beautiful - all medieval architecture, horse-drawn traps and autumn leaves drifting through the November fog into canals full of swans. They have amazing lace, very tasty beer and every object, person or animal you could ever imagine made out of chocolate. I bought a chocolate Pope, just for the rather bizarre experience of eating him.

There were also hundreds of British tourists, many visiting World War One sites to commemorate Armistice Day on 11th November. I've written about Armistice before, and was annoyed that I'd forgotten to take my white poppy with me to wear instead of a red one.

Both of my previous posts on the subject prompted some interesting responses last year, and lots of people also got in touch to ask where they could buy white poppies. It's a bit late now to buy them online, but there is a map here showing all the places you can find shops or people selling them in the UK.

I'll be wearing mine on 11th November, when I always try to be in a crowded place at 11am to observe the silence. The silence of a large group is incredibly powerful, and it's a tradition I've always liked - I remember mass silences being called often during protests against the war in Iraq, and what it does to the mood of both participants and observers is quite moving.

I'm saving all the programmes I want to listen to on i-player until tomorrow, when I won't be able to turn the radio on without being assaulted with cannon fire, hypocrisy and Nicholas Bloody Witchell.

Back From Reality

Right, first things first: I've been unexpectedly absent from this blog for a couple of weeks due to some Real Life stuff that isn't blog material. This has meant that I haven't mentioned the Daily (Maybe) Best Green Blogs 2008 yet, which has meant that I've only got three votes for the "People's Choice" with one day to go. You can vote here if you read this in time, but I think I may have missed the window for frantic self-publicity. Oh well. I've lost the top spot I had last year, but I'm frankly amazed to still be included in the Top 20 given the quality of all the others. I'm especially pleased to see Beansprouts in there, which I've liked for ages - Hi Melanie!

Second thing second: It's surreal, dark and part-animated. It's called "The Wrong Door", and it's on BBC3 at 10:30pm on Thursdays, or here on i-player if like me you still don't own a freebox digiview thing. In general I don't really like CGI animation - it so often doesn't move convincingly, and fails to be truly life-like while also missing out on the rich and distinctive characters and textures that scruffier stop-mo techniques can give. For a sketch show though it'll do nicely, especially if it matures a bit further into edgy weirdness.

Other things in no particular order:

Wasp thing - why are so many wasps dying in my flat suddenly? Is there something in here that attracts dying wasps, or something that kills passing wasps, or something that attracts lots of wasps which then die in average numbers given the time of year but it seems like a lot because there were so many to begin with? And how long will it be until I step on a not-quite-dead one with bare feet?

Fat furry thing - my neighbour's cat is back, along with quite a few extra rolls of cat fat she's acquired over the summer. As soon as she's settled down I'm going to start chasing her twice round the flat every day for exercise. I'm just cultivating a false sense of security for a while by putting a blanket on a table for her and rubbing her ears...