Bicycology

"Bicycology is a collective formed by riders who wanted to build on their shared experience of the 2005 G8 Bike Ride and organise future events of a similar nature. Like so many people today, Bicycologists believe that our environmental impact on the planet is currently unsustainable. We desperately need to cut our levels of all forms of pollution - not just CO2 - to create a greener, safer world. Cycling can be a viable alternative to car use, but we need to change the perception of the bike, and build a physical and cultural space where cyclists can feel safe and respected.But cycling is about more than the environment. Cars epitomize the automised society we live in. Drivers close themsleves inside a box, and amongst hundreds of other road users, the car owner is alone. Cycling encourages community and reciprocity: without a surrounding metal enclosure, the cyclist feels closer to the things around her."

Find out more about Bicycology and help to change the perception of the bike at http://www.bicycology.org.uk.

Triumphs of the last week

- Went on the TRAIN to Oxford to do some photocopying for my dissertation
- Did DOUBLE-SIDED photocopying whilst there
- Spotted one giant WIND TURBINE, one house with PHOTOVOLTAIC SOLAR PANELS and one house with HOT WATER SOLAR PANELS on the train
- CYCLED back home from the train station
- Put RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES in my bike lights
- Passed on information about ENERGY-SAVING LIGHTBULBS (more about this soon) to a colleage of my Dad's who is the office sustainability officer
- Insisted on us buying our weekly fruit and vegetables from the LOCAL MARKET instead of the supermarket, which was cheaper and meant most stuff came from the UK instead of South Africa
- Watered my TOMATO PLANT with rainwater from our WATER BUTT in the garden
- Switched my stereo off at the plug overnight so it wasn't ON STANDBY
- RENTED A DVD from the library instead of buying a new one
- Took some more glass to the BOTTLE BANKS up the road for recycling
- And put "RECYCLED" toilet paper on the shopping list
- Changed my bedlinen and WASHED IT AT 30.C using ECOVER LAUNDRY LIQUID
- Put the dishwasher on using the "ECO" SETTING of 50.C
- And tonight me and 3 friends are CAR-SHARING to go into town and get the new Harry Potter book

Number of parents feeling slightly harrassed at the never-ending diatribe against our carbon-hungry lifestyle: 2
Carbon emissions reduced by doing all these things: masses

The ethics of milk

I had a question from Mavin in Texas about whether its ethical to drink milk or not, so after my previous post about reducing meat consumption I thought I'd talk about this. Drinking milk isn't fabulous for the environment, because cows produce a lot of methane and this greenhouse gas contributes to global warming and climate change. But there are ways in which you can reduce the impact that drinking milk has on the environment, and I think if you do these its perfectly justifiable to continue drinking it. After all, if you're trying to cut out a lot of red meat from your diet, you're going to need some protein from somewhere, and full fat milk will be a great source of that. Its probably better to be vegetarian and continue drinking milk than eat lots and lots of meat and cut milk out completely.

A lot of cows kept for milk are farmed intensively, which means they live in pretty awful conditions and have very short lives. Intensively farmed dairy cows are kept in sheds for a lot of the time and hardly ever see daylight. They are kept pregnant for most of the year so that they continue producing milk, and this is such a strain on them that their milk production drops after a few years and they are slaughtered, even though a healthy cow would normally live for 20 years. Because they are pregnant for so much of the time, they produce an awful lot of calves. Because keeping every one of these calves would result in a huge cow population, a lot of them are killed to produce more meat for hungry humans.

So what's the solution? I don't know about the situation in Texas, but here in the UK an alternative is to buy organic milk. Organic milk will have come from cows that live in much better conditions, being outside in fields for much of the time, and will not have been reared intensively. They will be fed only on organic feed, which reduces the impact of farming cows for milk on the environment even further. Look for the soil association mark, which indicates that the producer of the milk has been awarded organic certification for the product:

Organic milk usually costs about a third more than normal milk in UK supermarkets but sometimes the price will be equal, because of supplier issues. If its the same price as the normal milk, go for the organic one! It means so much better welfare standards for the animals, as well as a lower impact on the environment.

Going veggie

I am ashamed to admit that in my household we eat quite a lot of meat. We have something containing meat or fish almost every day of the week. When I'm at university, I try to limit the amount of meat that I eat to maybe once a week. This is because producing meat is extremely energy intensive compared to vegetables or other food products. This is from The Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping (by Duncan Clark, ISBN: 1-84353-265-4), pgs 117-122:

"...most animal products are very inefficient to produce. Take beef, for instance. Producing a single kilo of intensively farmed beef typically takes around 10 kilos of grain for feed. Beef is among the worst culprits, but similar problems apply to most meats.

The rising demand for animal feed has a number of implications, one of which is a growing demand for farmland to grow feed crops such as soya. This is already resulting in the clearing of rainforests in the Amazon.

Even if rainforests weren't at risk, the intensive production of animal products would create a range of serious environmental burdens. For one thing, the production of feed crops and the farming of animals uses up an astonishing amount of water. It can take 100,000 litres of water to make a single kilo of beef.

And then there's global warming. Farm animals are thought to account for around 10% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Partly this is due to the fact that meat production uses a lot of oil - to power farm machines, make fertlizer for feed crops, transport feed and animals, and so on. All told, meat requires around 10-30 times the total energy input per kilogram than corn or soya. But it is also because cows and other livestock annually burp and fart out an astonishing 80 million tons of methane, which is a particularly problematic greenhouse gas."

After reading this I can't think of any justifiable reason for me to be eating meat every single day of the week. Of course humans are omnivores and do need a bit of protein in their diets, but I've found that eating meat or fish only once a week or so is enough to keep my muscles bulky enough to do the 3 1/2 mile cycle into town and back for my vegetables from the market.

For those who just can't reduce the amount of meat that they consume (e.g. athletes), buying locally produced meat is a good way to reduce the environmental impact. You can have more control over whether its intensively produced or not and the distance that the meat has had to travel to get to you. Farmers markets and farm shops are one of the best ways to do this. If you buy meat in a supermarket, then you could try to stick to British meat and avoid products such as New Zealand lamb.

If you, horror of horrors, regularly go to McDonald's, consider this. They're currently making an effort to appear green, saying that they'll re-use their chip fat oil as biofuel for their fleet of cars and lorries etc, but they are responsible for the deforestation of huge swathes of South American rainforest, just so they can ranch cattle for a neverending supply of hamburgers. I've boycotted them since I was 14.

1 wind farm, 3 solar panels & 4 trains

Last weekend I went to a family wedding at the other end of the country in Durham. I tried to convince my parents that we should go on the train instead of driving but they weren't having any of it. So we drove up there, the traffic was absolutely dreadful and it took 9 HOURS. Still, the weekend was pretty good and I even managed to sneak away to watch some of Live Earth in the evening. I decided to take the train back home, however, and this just shows how great trains are...

5 & 1/2 hours. Thats all it took to get from Durham to Chichester. Woohoo. It left me with time in the evening to plant out some more cabbages! (Which the slugs promptly decimated. I'm going to try putting broken eggshells down, I've heard that keeps them away. Dad said I should use slug pellets and I told him forcibly that we are an organic establishment and will not be using anything of the sort.)

Anyway on my journey I thought it might be "fun" to see how many indications that the UK is going green I could spot. Going from one end of the country to another (with 3 changes, hence 4 trains) I spotted only one wind farm, and 3 houses with solar panels on. (2 of these houses had the hot water solar panels, and 1 had the photovoltaic electricity-generating solar panels). Come on, Britain! You can do better than that! Next time I go from Durham to Chichester I want to see 3 wind farms and 10 houses with solar panels!

Go to http://www.tvenergy.org/sources-solar.htm for information on solar panels and make your house one of the 10.

http://www.liveearth.org

Need I say more.

Change your world, one mile at a time

From the 1st to the 7th of July its Change Your World, One Mile at a Time week (http://www.changeyourworld.org.uk). This campaign is encouraging everyone to swap one car journey they would normally make during the week for for a bike ride, walk or train/bus ride. Car journeys make up 13% of the UK's CO2 emissions so reducing the number of car journeys you make can drastically reduce your carbon footprint.

So what's my car journey I'm swapping for a low carbon alternative? Well I have a cold at the moment and I'm not really leaving the house much, but I had planned to go to the cinema this evening with my friend Jane. I could have driven to the cinema, which is about 4 miles away, but I thought I could get the bus instead. The bus station is only a 2 minute walk away from the cinema. (However this is a hypothetical car journey replacement as I'm not actually going out, I want to stay by my box of tissues instead, so I'm not making either a car journey or a bus journey.)

Oh dear.

Had the "can we please get solar panels" talk with the parents on Friday evening. Didn't go down too well. Dad mentioned him and Mum going on holiday in September and I said if perhaps you didn't then there would be a spare couple of thousand of pounds floating about wouldn't there. I said wouldn't it be nice to use that money to get some solar panels and get free hot water for life with 0 carbon emissions. I even offered to pay my £1000+ university tuition fees myself out of my savings to free up an additional thousand pounds in the household budget for some panels.

Solar panels for the average family house cost about £5000. You can get a government grant to pay for half of this so it would only cost us £2500 to get panels and I figured £1000 could come from me paying my tuition fees instead of my parents and £1500 from them not going on holiday.

But Dad just laughed. And said I was the Dick Strawbrigde of the family. Which is an extremely high compliment to make but I still would have preferred a "great idea Charlotte! Why didn't we do it before!" response. Or him saying I was the James Strawbridge of the family, that would have been even better. And Mum... well Mum got a bit angry and said she couldn't put up with any more being green stuff. To be fair she is starting a new job today and is very stressed but again I would have preferred a "great idea" response.

I then said ok, well I won't mention solar panels again but I will move on to talking about switching our electricity supplier to a green renewable supplier next week. HA.

PS. Mum hope you enjoyed the Fairtrade coffee samples I gave you to take on the train to your new job this week. x