Fresh green links

Unprotected Waters is a game from the Save Our Marine Life campaign. Help Sandy eat fish while avoiding the dangers; if you last long enough you get a bonus round in protected waters. I made it to 1 minute 32 seconds

Stop the Slapp – a site dedicated to helping the final 4 defendants of the Gunns 20 case, where Gunns is trying to sue people for protesting their actions. The trial starts next Tuesday. (via @Deskimo, a sustainable design business)

Pimp your street – New Zealand’s Good magazine has 21 tips for making your neighbourhood a friendlier, more sustainable place to live. (via @Richard_001, a UK guerrilla gardener)

Impossible Hamster – what if the global economy was a giant hamster? or: infinite growth on a finite planet. A silly and cute video on Treehugger, about the limits of growth in nature, with some interesting links in the article.

Australia loves winning environmental impact trophies – also at Treehugger. Highest per capita emissions, highest extinction rate for mammals, most time lost to economy by sitting in traffic jams… we’re number one!

Tests for effective climate policy (PDF) – the Australian Conservation Foundation lays out what we want our politicians to acheive when they go back to work on our climate policy this year.

Alarm at oil leak company’s bid – Remember that oil spill that took 3 months to clean up, and the rig exploded in flames? Yeah, the company is getting even more access to Australian waters.

Oh, and if you’re in Perth, tune in to 6PR between 1pm and 2pm on Saturday. I’ll be on their afternoon show, talking about greenwashing.

Review: No Impact Man by Colin Beavan

You’ve probably heard of No Impact Man before – he’s the guy who spent a year trying to get his environmental footprint down to zero, and blogged about it. Some people reckon it’s all just a cheap stunt, others think it’s the way of the future. Now you can read his book (or see the documentary about him) and see if you think he’s on the right track or not, because in it he explains exactly what he was thinking of by cutting off his electricity and traveling by rickshaw.

Beavan used to be the type of person who worried very much about the environment, and politics, and the effect the rat-race has on us all. But he wasn’t doing much about it. The No Impact year was his attempt to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk: he wanted to actually demonstrate his idea of the right way to live if we want the planet to survive.

What makes No Impact Man a different read from the usual stories about eco-friendly people taking on a challenge for a year or so? It’s that before starting his project, he’d made no green changes in his life at all; he was starting from scratch. He and his wife drank takeout coffee, ate takeaway food, took taxis and planes everywhere and generally were living in the exact way that TV advertisements recommend. It really was an eye-opening experience for him, which is where a lot of the humour in the book comes from.

The other major difference is that Beavan lives in New York city, and has no intention of becoming a hermit in the woods for the sake of eco-purity. He believes, as do I, that cities can be a really efficient and low-impact place to live, as long as we rethink the assumptions we’ve made about the availability of cheap oil and electricity and convenience products.

Is there any point to individual action? What are the possibilities and benefits of radically changing your lifestyle? Beavan’s project gave him the opportunity to find out. It seems like it was a real roller-coaster ride of emotions and thoughts. He had to confront his own hypocrisy and moral certainties. But he also spent so much more time with his wife and daughter, he got fit, and he met a bunch of really lovely people.

One of the topics that really interested me was about a standard of living that might be a restriction on us but would be a huge improvement for people in Third World countries. Beavan found out just how much of our consumer-driven lifestyle can be given up before your daily tasks become a burden. Hint: he won’t be going without a washing machine again!

I’ve been reading the No Impact Man blog for ages now, so I thought I knew more or less what to expect when I read the book. But the thoughtfulness of Beavan’s writing really puts his decisions in context in a way that little blog posts can’t.

And what I learned from the book was this: it doesn’t matter if you don’t have all the answers. You should just dive in, make the changes in your life that you think are right, and let things develop from there. If you wait until you understand sustainable living completely, you’ll never begin at all.

Recommended?
This isn’t a book with a lot of detail on environmental science. It’s not a how-to book on sustainable living either – you can get better information on that just about anywhere on the internet. But it’s a great read for those of us still trying to put our ethical beliefs into practice without opting out of modern life altogether.

If you’re wondering what the point is of making eco-friendly changes in your home when 80% of Australia’s electricity comes from coal, No Impact Man has a pretty good answer. And if you’re wanting some inspiration to start a crazy eco-project, this is absolutely the book for you!

What are your eco-friendly skills?

A while back Planet Green had an article called 99 Skills for an Eco-Friendly DIY Life. It’s a long list of different skills that would make living an environmentally-conscious life a lot easier.

I rated pretty well overall, without being a particular expert in any one category. I got 61 out of 99 overall: that’s 13/26 in food (mostly on the easy ones, although I throw a pretty fantastic eco-friendly party), 9/15 at maintenance and repair, 11/18 in gardening, 4/6 in energy and 15/15 for conservation, which seems to be a bit of a grab bag of stuff that didn’t fit in the other categories.

But why should we limit ourselves to our own skills, as if we’re planning on becoming hermits in our green future? If I include skills that my family and friends know, my score goes up by 22 points, which gives me a rather good 73 out of 99.

I know how to knit my own dishclothes and sew clothes, but I don’t know how to tune a bicycle or build a cold frame for winter vegetables. But I’d be happy to knit dishcloths for my bike-riding friends in exchange for a lesson on bike maintenance, or sew shirts for my father-in-law in exchange for him making us a greenhouse like the one he built in his backyard.

There’s no need for us to be entirely self-sufficient as long as we stay in touch with our communities, our families and friends.

How do you rate on eco-skills by yourself? How about if you add in your circle of friends and family? And are there any skills you’ve got that aren’t on the list?

Personally, I think knowing how to keep cool without air-conditioning should be on there, or knowing how to shear a sheep – not that I can do that, but my father-in-law and his brother do. Or knowing how to give a really good massage, although maybe I’m suggesting that just because I receiving them.

Fresh green links

Airport vs Black Cockatoos and Orchids – the Perth airport authority wants to clear land that’s home to 3 endangered species (Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo and two types of orchids). Clare at Ockham’s Razor is writing to Peter Garrett about it, since the land is under Commonwealth rules, and has some suggestions for what you can do about it.

Low-carbon push for new Industrial Revolution – Sir Nicholas Stern says that changing to a low-carbon society will not just save the world, it’ll spark a revolution in technology and societal changes. He also says world leaders are unaware of how enormous the risks are of ‘business as usual’.

Ethical underwear – Isismade has a comprehensive list of places you can buy sustainable and sweatshop-free underdaks. [via]

How to have backyard bees and happy neighbours – Trish at Little Eco Footsteps has a new hive, for the honey and vegie pollination, and wants to make sure the bees aren’t annoying her next-door neighbours. One of her tips includes bribery with honey!

On Good Authority: An Affordable Wardrobe – op-shopping isn’t just for the ladies, there’s more than a few dapper gentlemen getting in on the act. Clothing with a Conscience is a blog about finding ethical clothing for men on a budget.

How to create a paperless kitchen – SimpleMom talks about the difficulties you’ll face, and how to work around them.

Coal power plant timelapse video – very eerie with the choice of music by Ligeti (which you may have heard if you’ve seen The Shining).

The rat race: who needs it?

There’s  a good post by Johann Hari over at the UK’s The Independent that you might like to take a look at: We Don’t Need This Culture of Overwork. I found out about it via Jonathon Hiskes at Grist.

Hari talks about how in Utah, the state government changed their office hours from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday to a new 8 to 6, Monday to Thursday. Employees worked 4 ten-hour days and got a 3-day weekend. Customers got to pop in to get business done on their way to or home from work, instead of having to take time off. And everyone seems to be living happily ever after.

It’s also good for the environment: the state government saved huge amounts of money on lighting and heating all their buildings, and fewer people were driving. This means less pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

I can tell you from personal experience that a 4-day work week is awesome. I switched to part-time (4 x 7.5 hours) nearly a year ago and have been so happy with the decision.

I now have time to work on my own eco-projects at home, in my pyjamas. I get almost as much work done in the office as I did before – previously there was a lot of time spent hanging around waiting for things to happen, now I march up to people and demand my content/briefing/etc because I’ve got to get stuff done before COB Thursday.

I did have to re-work my budget to account for the reduction in pay – but since my bills were decreasing from our energy-saving changes and I’m trying to live a less-consumerist lifestyle, it’s worked out pretty well.

Going part-time or working an unusual set of office hours isn’t for everyone. But it’s more practical than people assume. If you employ staff, would you rather they worked quickly and efficiently, or made their work stretch out to fill the hours they have to have their bum on a seat? It can make as much impact on your bills as any other energy-efficiency measure.

I honestly believe that in the future we’ll have to re-think our economy, and how we treat our work lives. The rat-race doesn’t just make people unhappy, it’s damaging our environment. We don’t want it, and we don’t need it.

As always, the future is what we make of it – it might be worth doing the sums to see if you can switch your working times or even cut them back by a few hours. You never know, it could be the start of a whole new way of life for you!