Go Greener, Australia

This Tuesday the Perth Green Drinks are on again, organised by the lovely Wilma We’ll be at the Claremont Pub from 6pm, and there’ll be a couple of short talks: Wilma is telling us about Scoodi, and Alex is telling us about the Somerville Eco Village project.

If you’re not in Perth, see if there are any Green Drinks events happening near you. I don’t always have the time to go, but every time I’ve been I’ve had a lot of fun. It’s good to chat with likeminded people, and I always find out about some new green venture that’s getting started.

The Garnaut Climate Change Review is releasing it’s draft report on 30th June. If you live in a capital city on the mainland, you can attend a public forum to have your say about it. Professor Garnaut will be travelling around the country from the 7th to the 11th of July to host community discussions about the report. Individuals and organisations are encouraged to attend, but if you can’t, you can email or write in with your comments.

Each forum is held in the city’s town hall, from 10:00am to 11:30am. The dates are:

• Perth 7th July
• Adelaide 8th July
• Melbourne 9th July
• Sydney 10th July
• Brisbane 11th July

If you’re interested, you can register to attend through the review website.

The Garnaut review is the only independent study about the impacts of climate change that’s focusing on the Australian economy, and will be making recommendations about long-term policies and frameworks for Australia. I’d love to go to one of these forums, to see how it’s shaping up, but after taking a day off work to go to the Water Forever workshop I don’t think I can manage another day off so soon! If you do go, let me know if you’d like to write a guest post to share with the rest of us how it went.

A friend reminded me that one of the earliest posts I made was about going to the Sustainability Home show last year - I checked and realised that today, June 13th, is the first birthday of my blog!

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who’s been reading since the beginning, and welcome to anyone who’s picked me up recently. When I started writing here, I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in reading what I had to say, but I’ve had lots of friendly support and met such interesting people because of it. I love hearing from you all in the comments, and getting recommendations for new books, products and ideas.

Other places you can find me online are:

• MyFolia: I keep track of our organic vegie patch here
• Flickr: photos for the blog, and other green-ish things
• YouTube: I favourite any good videos I see on environmental issues
• Del.icio.us: my shared bookmarks for good eco-websites and environmental issues

If you have accounts at any of those sites, please feel free to add me as a friend or contact.

Is there anything you’d like me to write more about on the blog? More how-to’s, more news, more product reviews, or more book and movie reviews? Or maybe there’s stuff you could do without Leave a comment if you’ve got ideas.

This Wednesday I’m going to the Water Forever Options workshop, held by the Water Corporation here in WA. The day will feature presentations about water use, efficiency, sources, recycling, climate change and so on, with a “Have Your Say” section as well. I don’t really have much to say myself, but I’m interested to learn what the Water Corp is doing about getting enough water for our growing population.

I got involved by visiting their Water Forever website. It’s got a survey where you can answer questions about your thoughts on the future of water use in WA, and information about the figures the Water Corp is using to project our expected water use over the next 50 years. It’s very detailed and there are lots of downloads so you can see how their plans are coming along.

I’ll report back on the workshop later this week. It’s reminded me that one of my resolutions this year was to make my home more waterwise - I haven’t done much towards this yet, but a few weeks ago I did ask the Water Corp how much water I was actually using so I’d have some numbers to compare against. They very kindly sent me a spreadsheet showing the results of their meter readings since we moved in. We’re currently using about 146kL a year, so I hope we can get this down a bit.

Tomorrow, June 5th, is World Environment Day. It’s a UN Environment Program (UNEP) event that takes place every year with a different theme. This year, the host city is Wellington, New Zealand, and the theme is “Kick the Carbon Habit”. Cities around the world are having events to mark the day, but I couldn’t find just one list for the Australian happenings. You might have more luck by searching for ‘world environment day’ plus the name of your city, local council or any professional group you belong to.

Or you can just mark the day by taking a new action to reduce your carbon emissions. A few suggestions:

• If you haven’t already signed up for green power in your home, check out the GreenPower website to find a supplier near you.
• Walk, ride or take public transport to work tomorrow: check your public transport website for times and routes, or your state/local government for bike maps.
• Write to a business or government office you deal with to ask what they’re doing to cut their carbon emissions.

What I’m doing: Learning more about carbon trading options. Later this year the Garnaut report will be finalised, and then the debate will be on over the type of carbon trading scheme Australia adopts. I want to be informed before journalists start mashing up the facts! If you have any good resources on this subject, please let me know.

I hope everyone has a Happy Easter, and enjoys their long weekend. I’m trying to be a bit healthy and have asked people not to buy me any chocolates!

But I wouldn’t want my nieces to go without a little treat, so I got them some Bilby chocolates from Darrell Lea instead of the usual eggs and rabbits. A percentage of the price goes to the Save The Bilby fund. Bilbies are cute little desert mammals who are endangered by feral cats and foxes, and having farms move into the areas where they used to live.

If you’re not into chocolate, you might want to try traditional egg-dyeing instead. Curbly has a video demonstration of how you can dye eggs using food easily found in your kitchen. I haven’t dyed eggs since I was a kid - I want to try it again with my nieces, but I think they’re a little bit too young yet. Maybe next year!

I’m away for the next couple of days, but here’s a link I hope you’ll like:

Grist.org’s Sermon on the Mounting: How to Green Your Love Life

As they say, “greening the bedroom is easier, more erotic, and involves a heck of a lot more nakedness than any other eco-action we can think of”. Have fun, see you next week!

I went to the Perth Big Day Out on Sunday, and had a great time. Bjork and Rage Against the Machine were the headline acts, and put on a great show. I noticed on the Big Day Out website that this year they’ve gone carbon neutral, made more of an effort with the recycling, and provided some green tips for people.

The carbon neutral plan is interesting, and based on an audit made last year of their energy needs. It would be better for them to concentrate on efficiency, to reduce the amount of electricity and fuel they use over the whole series of concerts. But I think the organisers only have control of their own equipment and transport, and wouldn’t be able to do much about what they hire, the local food vans, the venues and so on.

I really noticed the improvement with the recycling. In previous years, there were no recycling bins at all. Last year, I tried to use them, but they were overflowing with plastic water bottles by 1pm, with another 10 hours to go before all the bands were finished. This year, the bins were emptied frequently, and apparently the contents will be properly sorted and disposed of. There were still many aluminium cans and plastic bottles left on the ground at the end of the day, but I hope the cleaning crew will be helping with the recycling as well.

I liked that their suggestions for what we can do include voting and talking to politicians and business-people. For ourselves, we did use bottled water - they don’t want people sneaking alcohol in, so the only drink you can bring in is unopened clear plastic water bottles. One of the good things about the Big Day Out is that they don’t insist on you buying more over-priced water from the vendors. We re-filled our bottles with tap water, which we found easily from the hand-written sign above the taps they’d set up for the purpose. So we got to reuse our bottles several times, and took them home to recycle ourselves. Also, we usually take the train to and from the event, but this year we carpooled with friends and used the Prius. I have to admit that I was grateful for the car when we saw the train packed full of sweaty people - I’m getting a little bit old for that kind of action!

Here’s some of the Blog Action Day posts that I enjoyed reading (after making my own post!) and thought might be relevant to Go Greener readers:

50 quick, painless ways you can help the environment today at the Blog Action Day blog.

Deserts need people at the Transient Languages and Cultures blog. It’s about how indigenous ranger jobs can provide employment in the outback while being a way to pass on knowledge of local ecology.

29 Simple ways to become a more environmentally friendly freelancer at Freelance Switch - some ways for freelancers to work more greenly, although the “around the office” section would apply to any office job. Thanks Jaz, for sending me this one.

Easy Ways to Live Greener at Lifehacker. Their top 10 ways to live greener, sent in by their readers - you can vote for your favourite.

Compost for action: Greenfoot gives a great explanation of how to get composting today.

Environmental education through photography from Andipantz, about how you can use your photos to help people learn about environmental issues.

If you’ve seen any other good Blog Action Day posts, please let me know!

Next week I’ll be participating in Blog Action Day 2007. It’s one day a year when bloggers around the world all blog about the same topic, and this year the topic is the environment!

The point of the action day is to get the world discussing the same issue - we probably won’t solve fix the environment by posting about it, but we can all talk about what’s important to us, learn some new ideas, make new suggestions about how to move forward.

Bloggers everywhere will be talking about how our concerns about the environment intersect with their lives - most will still be posting about their usual blog topic, just in relation to the environment.

I hope that on the day you’ll see a lot of interesting discussion about the environment - please let me know if you see any particularly good Blog Action Day posts elsewhere!