The lovely Bryan wondered whether my silverbeet was dying. It isn't. And though my last post (gee, it's getting a long time between posts) was despairing, it wasn't to do with failing on my small domestic front.
The pep talk to self:
We've still not bought a heater, and I've not turned on the one we've got - including last week when temperatures dropped to an icy 3 degrees Celsius in Sydney.
I've still not had a backlash on compacting, and in fact I think I may have a few new subscribers to the experiment after some friendly campaigning at a kid's party recently.
I've targeted my two converts and have made serious inroads into their consumption and footprint patterns, though they're not yet ready to commit to anything.
I knitted a scarf, planted seeds, made stock, (all largely symbolic rather than meaningful).
But really it's the bigger picture that occupies my imaginings. And reading Capitalism 3.0 gave me some very good ideas abouts what wrong with the world and how we might go about fixing it (a recommended read! ) http://onthecommons.org/node/680
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Be the change / be the clock
My partner, trying to teach the tots about clockwise and anticlockwise, gets annoyed with me when, trying to join in, I get confused about whether I'm supposed to "be the clock" or "mirror the clock".
Being the change I want to see in the world (and I'm not, by a long way) has had me wrapped up for a long time, but I'm getting confused as to whether that's really where I should be.
I want to know my kids, and the whole of humanity, have a future and my motives range from the personal and selfish to the intellectual and abstract.
On the intellectual front, I want to know that our great achievements were not for nothing. That our music and art and philosophical breakthroughs and great novels will be there and will be enjoyed by someone like me in the very distant future. My babies are my proxy for all that, I think of them sometimes as the first chain in a link to a distant time.
On the personal front though, I am starting to think of them and even myself as victims of our time. The ones who inherited a world that was too late to save. And this makes me really scared.
And a victim mentality isn't good.
It doesn't make me want to be the change or save the world. It makes me want to protect myself and my kids from it with all the might of a last ditch overweight footprint. Buy and hoard stuff we might need in difficult years. Avoid sharing the message so I don't create competing demand for stuff I might need to keep us on top of things. Quit my save the world job and go back to work in my higher-paying former career so that I can cushion us all against the inevitable future financial downturn.
It's a panicked, knee-jerk, out-of-control sort of feeling. And I wonder how much of the consumption culture we see is other people - not disengaged from the bigger picture of a devastated biosphere and a decimated social fabric, but rather attempting to fiddle while they know Rome burns. If the glaciers are going anyway, let there at least be some singing and shopping.
I'm trying to keep a lid on this feeling, but it's really an effort of will at the moment - which may signal impending madness - which is a very real possibility given my genes. But I think too exploring the idea offers a useful insight into the link between disempowerment and selfishness / self-preservation and credit being the opiate of the masses and a window into how to galvanise wider change.
Or something.
Being the change I want to see in the world (and I'm not, by a long way) has had me wrapped up for a long time, but I'm getting confused as to whether that's really where I should be.
I want to know my kids, and the whole of humanity, have a future and my motives range from the personal and selfish to the intellectual and abstract.
On the intellectual front, I want to know that our great achievements were not for nothing. That our music and art and philosophical breakthroughs and great novels will be there and will be enjoyed by someone like me in the very distant future. My babies are my proxy for all that, I think of them sometimes as the first chain in a link to a distant time.
On the personal front though, I am starting to think of them and even myself as victims of our time. The ones who inherited a world that was too late to save. And this makes me really scared.
And a victim mentality isn't good.
It doesn't make me want to be the change or save the world. It makes me want to protect myself and my kids from it with all the might of a last ditch overweight footprint. Buy and hoard stuff we might need in difficult years. Avoid sharing the message so I don't create competing demand for stuff I might need to keep us on top of things. Quit my save the world job and go back to work in my higher-paying former career so that I can cushion us all against the inevitable future financial downturn.
It's a panicked, knee-jerk, out-of-control sort of feeling. And I wonder how much of the consumption culture we see is other people - not disengaged from the bigger picture of a devastated biosphere and a decimated social fabric, but rather attempting to fiddle while they know Rome burns. If the glaciers are going anyway, let there at least be some singing and shopping.
I'm trying to keep a lid on this feeling, but it's really an effort of will at the moment - which may signal impending madness - which is a very real possibility given my genes. But I think too exploring the idea offers a useful insight into the link between disempowerment and selfishness / self-preservation and credit being the opiate of the masses and a window into how to galvanise wider change.
Or something.
Monday, 2 July 2007
50% down - an update
These entries are a wee bit out of order, what with diarising offline and then not being able to get those entries from computer A at home to computer B on the net. So anyway, you've so far been spared the whinge about the cold, the extra effort, the rain and all that. But I will paste it in
How's it going? (asked the lovely, encouraging Brian). The answer is I really don't know. Over the weekend, (a long weekend for me) I spent the most serious amount of time in the garden cutting weeds. Like all day. I don't know if cutting weeds is the right thing to do, but figured I couldn't leave it all there, with the berries all ripe and ready to drop and turn into new weeds just where I want to be able to plant my vegies. All this in preparation for the vegie patch, which has yet to be approved by the landlady. Which brings me to a very interesting quandry.
We have always, until now, been homeowners. If we wanted to put in a skylight, install gas or a composting toilet, we just did it (OK - not quite. None of these examples were options in the apartment). Whereas now, none of those things are within our jurisdiction, which brings up the very interesting issue of perverse incentives. Why should a landlord put in instant gas hot water to replace the electric storage heater - when it's the tenant that will benefit from the lower bills? In theory, that kind of thing should be reflected in higher rents for the better amenity. In practice, people just don't do that kind of math when comparing properties to rent.
Fortunately, our landlady is lovely, and her son (the decision maker) seems quite environmentally-minded. I think what I need to do is to pioneer some kind of written agreement that says we give them 15% of our energy bill every quarter (or whatever it is we would save) as a payback for the improvement. If we don't get to stay a decade, we haven't subsidised their capital improvement. On the other hand, they aren't stuck with the bill for someone else's reduction. Looking forward to some spreadsheeting on this one to work it all out.
I think, if I'm honest, things are not going well. We're back to disposable nappies at night and have bought serious warm clothes (new). Wet bedding is a disaster in the cold and impossible to launder in the rain. It has really made me appreciate a generation (many generations) of (mainly) women whose babies had no option but cloth, rain or shine, in colder, wetter, climates than this. It's no wonder they toilet trained them so young.
I am currently losing a battle about a heater (although even the language my husband is using suggests to me we've made significant progress) but I've found myself boiling and reboiling water for hot water bottles, microwaving wheat packs and deep-bathing the children to warm things up - none of which, I'm sure, is much of an improvement on heating the house. On the upside, I've planted seeds, fed a sick neighbour and 90% convinced a friend, KB, to take the 50% down journey with me. I suspect she'd been secretly compacting since hearing of it some months ago, but she purchased flanelette sheets instead of an electric blanket the other day - breaking the compact in order to save on energy.
In practice, I'm still working towards getting the internet on at home, sorting out the phone, unpacking the boxes and keeping all the balls in the air.
So if I'm honest, it's not going all that well.
How's it going? (asked the lovely, encouraging Brian). The answer is I really don't know. Over the weekend, (a long weekend for me) I spent the most serious amount of time in the garden cutting weeds. Like all day. I don't know if cutting weeds is the right thing to do, but figured I couldn't leave it all there, with the berries all ripe and ready to drop and turn into new weeds just where I want to be able to plant my vegies. All this in preparation for the vegie patch, which has yet to be approved by the landlady. Which brings me to a very interesting quandry.
We have always, until now, been homeowners. If we wanted to put in a skylight, install gas or a composting toilet, we just did it (OK - not quite. None of these examples were options in the apartment). Whereas now, none of those things are within our jurisdiction, which brings up the very interesting issue of perverse incentives. Why should a landlord put in instant gas hot water to replace the electric storage heater - when it's the tenant that will benefit from the lower bills? In theory, that kind of thing should be reflected in higher rents for the better amenity. In practice, people just don't do that kind of math when comparing properties to rent.
Fortunately, our landlady is lovely, and her son (the decision maker) seems quite environmentally-minded. I think what I need to do is to pioneer some kind of written agreement that says we give them 15% of our energy bill every quarter (or whatever it is we would save) as a payback for the improvement. If we don't get to stay a decade, we haven't subsidised their capital improvement. On the other hand, they aren't stuck with the bill for someone else's reduction. Looking forward to some spreadsheeting on this one to work it all out.
I think, if I'm honest, things are not going well. We're back to disposable nappies at night and have bought serious warm clothes (new). Wet bedding is a disaster in the cold and impossible to launder in the rain. It has really made me appreciate a generation (many generations) of (mainly) women whose babies had no option but cloth, rain or shine, in colder, wetter, climates than this. It's no wonder they toilet trained them so young.
I am currently losing a battle about a heater (although even the language my husband is using suggests to me we've made significant progress) but I've found myself boiling and reboiling water for hot water bottles, microwaving wheat packs and deep-bathing the children to warm things up - none of which, I'm sure, is much of an improvement on heating the house. On the upside, I've planted seeds, fed a sick neighbour and 90% convinced a friend, KB, to take the 50% down journey with me. I suspect she'd been secretly compacting since hearing of it some months ago, but she purchased flanelette sheets instead of an electric blanket the other day - breaking the compact in order to save on energy.
In practice, I'm still working towards getting the internet on at home, sorting out the phone, unpacking the boxes and keeping all the balls in the air.
So if I'm honest, it's not going all that well.
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