After I wrote my homage to the aga… it broke. After I relished in the delights of early spring… it snowed. So it is with some trepidation I write this. Could the obvious power of my blog could trigger some worldwide natural disaster?
One of the most noticeable changes we have undergone, is that we are now living in a country that signed up to the Kyoto Agreement. And as such, is now it the grips of nationwide carbon footprint hysteria. Our weekend paper includes green and ethical sections, columns, and it overrides almost every relevant article (OK, yes, we are reading the Guardian, flagpost of the left-leaning middle class world).
But it has also pervaded fashion, consumerism and even – gasp – politics, to the extent that the conservative party proposed a tax on airmiles recently – the more you fly, the more nasty carbon dioxide you are responsible for, and therefore the more you pay.
In the retail world, not only has Bono’s wife launched her own range of ethically produced garments, but M&S stock organic cotton undies and Top Shop has embraced the fashion ethics fervour with it’s own organic fair trade range of tees. This is the same Top Shop that I used to negotiate down to lowest penny for, with more thought to the bonuses offered for the highest margin products than to the sweatshop conditions in the Far East?
We have been a little half-hearted in joining in with this ethical cleansing. Yes, I drag my recycling down to the local depot twice a week (no pick up in our village), I buy fair-trade bananas and coffee, and we have a few energy efficient lightbulbs. But we have not installed our own DIY wind turbine (available at Homebase), we run two cars that are not hybrids or even diesel, and we would rather fly to France than endure 8 hours car/train journey with two small children. And I understand that my personal carbon emissions from the Sydney-Heathrow flight was greater than the average African will contribute in his entire lifetime.
Perhaps I should subscribe to one of the many websites that enable me to “buy back” these emissions in the form of paying for tree planting or wind turbines. It seems a little ironic that most well-off people, rather than radically altering their lifestyle, would prefer to “pay” for their environmental damage, in order to reduce their carbon footprint to zero. I guess it is better than nothing.
And yes, I did finally get around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth last night on DVD. A compelling argument… with a bit of luck John Howard will have finally cottoned on to the fact that most of the rest of the developed world has reached an environmental tipping point, and public debate in Australia will be about more than just water.
The major difference, really, is that nearly every consumer transaction here has an ethical or green option. In the same way that UK supermarkets embraced organic fruit and vegetables so early on, the size of the market here can sustain that degree of choice.
I’d be interested to know if, in our absence, Australia is going through much the same shift in public conscience. Let me know! Maybe I should stock up on wind turbines while we are here…
PS You will be relived to know the Aga has been fixed – our landlady’s dad came over and worked his special voodoo on it! Of course, an oil-burning oven that runs 24/7 is not especially envirnomentally friendly... maybe I had better go turn it off again.
One of the most noticeable changes we have undergone, is that we are now living in a country that signed up to the Kyoto Agreement. And as such, is now it the grips of nationwide carbon footprint hysteria. Our weekend paper includes green and ethical sections, columns, and it overrides almost every relevant article (OK, yes, we are reading the Guardian, flagpost of the left-leaning middle class world).
But it has also pervaded fashion, consumerism and even – gasp – politics, to the extent that the conservative party proposed a tax on airmiles recently – the more you fly, the more nasty carbon dioxide you are responsible for, and therefore the more you pay.
In the retail world, not only has Bono’s wife launched her own range of ethically produced garments, but M&S stock organic cotton undies and Top Shop has embraced the fashion ethics fervour with it’s own organic fair trade range of tees. This is the same Top Shop that I used to negotiate down to lowest penny for, with more thought to the bonuses offered for the highest margin products than to the sweatshop conditions in the Far East?
We have been a little half-hearted in joining in with this ethical cleansing. Yes, I drag my recycling down to the local depot twice a week (no pick up in our village), I buy fair-trade bananas and coffee, and we have a few energy efficient lightbulbs. But we have not installed our own DIY wind turbine (available at Homebase), we run two cars that are not hybrids or even diesel, and we would rather fly to France than endure 8 hours car/train journey with two small children. And I understand that my personal carbon emissions from the Sydney-Heathrow flight was greater than the average African will contribute in his entire lifetime.
Perhaps I should subscribe to one of the many websites that enable me to “buy back” these emissions in the form of paying for tree planting or wind turbines. It seems a little ironic that most well-off people, rather than radically altering their lifestyle, would prefer to “pay” for their environmental damage, in order to reduce their carbon footprint to zero. I guess it is better than nothing.
And yes, I did finally get around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth last night on DVD. A compelling argument… with a bit of luck John Howard will have finally cottoned on to the fact that most of the rest of the developed world has reached an environmental tipping point, and public debate in Australia will be about more than just water.
The major difference, really, is that nearly every consumer transaction here has an ethical or green option. In the same way that UK supermarkets embraced organic fruit and vegetables so early on, the size of the market here can sustain that degree of choice.
I’d be interested to know if, in our absence, Australia is going through much the same shift in public conscience. Let me know! Maybe I should stock up on wind turbines while we are here…
PS You will be relived to know the Aga has been fixed – our landlady’s dad came over and worked his special voodoo on it! Of course, an oil-burning oven that runs 24/7 is not especially envirnomentally friendly... maybe I had better go turn it off again.
