“Bottled water has been described as “one of the greatest cons of the 20th century” and as “marketing’s answer to the emperor’s new clothes”(1)
Rather than typing some thoughts into this post, I invite you to watch the video clip above. CINE-ONU will be screening the full film “Tapped” for free to mark the World Water Day on March 22nd. If you are in Brussels and would like to see it, register with an email until March 21st 5:30 to cine-onu@unrig.org.
This blog post is about meat, fish and veggies and how you can easily make better choices.
Meat
Am not going to go into the environmental effects of meat production (especially red meat), but rest assured it takes a lot more energy and causes more pollution to produce. For more info, you can start reading here or here.
Against what you may expect I am not going to advertise going all vegetarian. Why? Because I believe that everybody’s body works differently and that sustainable solutions mean that they have to be a free choice.
Take me for example, I consider myself 95% vegetarian (sorry if you are a 100% vegetarian and this offended you), but this is my sustainable approach (I don’t care if my food has touched meat (makes it way easier to be invited for dinner), I eat fish (whilst recently paying attention to MSC..) and I will have duck for Christmas!)
Somebody once told me rather than buying the cheapest meat to eat every day, he now buys quality meat to eat once a week and I thought that was a great approach. As a side effect he discovered his creativity in the kitchen (and his taste butts )
Fish
According to Greenpeace “More than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are ‘fully exploited’, ‘over exploited’ or ‘significantly depleted’ (click here for more info), but there are still fish that can be consumed with a good conscience. The Marine Stewards Council is labelling them with their MSC logo, so keep your eye out for that! But even outside the labelled items there are better and worse choices, click here for a printable overview (which by the way fits conveniently into any wallet).
Vegetables
The less vegetables (or any food for that matter) travel to get onto our plate, the better – not just because of the transport costs, chances are they will be fresher (vitamins!) as well. Here two charts (pdf, html) for which vegetables are in season (paying attention to low prices in supermarkets and Belgian product logo gives you a pretty good idea as well ). You can even order a calendar for 2011 with this info at info@bruxellesenvironnement.be (pdf version here). Alternatively there are the deliveries of organic and seasonal fruit right to your doorstep.
Plastic – this wonderful light material, that comes in so handy in our daily lives, does not just fill up billions of landfills worldwide, where it takes 200-400 years to decompose, but is also carried out to sea via rivers where it ends up floating in collections of ever smaller getting pieces in several places in the oceans.
The biggest of those garbage accumulations at sea with “… roughly the size of Texas [one could also say France], containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash…” (source: http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org) is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and with this it is the biggest rubbish dump on earth. No need to go and look for it on GoogleMaps (as I did), because of it being broken into small pieces it cannot be seen via satellite..
In some areas the density of plastic particles (and sometimes toxic ones) is 7 times higher than plankton. Fish consider it as a (quite possibly not so healthy) food source and also birds eat the small plastic pieces. Some die while others are eaten and so the plastic makes its way up the food chain..
Ideally of course the whole plastic should not ever make it into the oceans in the first place and maybe one day this will be made a priority (with lots of wishing and hoping..), but until then reducing the amount of plastic bags, water bottles and other throwaway plastic gadgets is the way to go.
Nature is pretty to look at, nature is an inspiration for science, nature provides a lot of things that would cost us dearly to do by ourselves or would frankly be impossible to do at all.
Think about the bats that eat mosquitoes (up to their own body weight each day), worms and slugs that recycle organic waste and loosen the ground or bees that fertilize our crops..
Now, some of them are in a bit of trouble, the bats in Belgium have troubles finding caves to hibernate over winter and the bees are globally on a very steep incline because of use of pesticides. They are pollinating 90% of our plants! And “Multiple scientific studies blame one group of toxic pesticides for their rapid demise..”
As for the bees there is something you can do for them.. Avaaz, a global web movement, which helps enforcing environment friendly policies through petitions, is currently collecting signatures to hopefully provoke a global ban on pesticides. I signed already, why don’t you sign it as well? http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_bees/
Somebody at the ecovillage, I visited in summer, said to me:
“It’s sad how we take nutrients from the earth and
rather than giving them back we waste precious drinking water (see toilets) or fill dump sites.”
Good point, I thought.
Shortly after that I got introduced to wormeries and decided that this was my chance of giving back (a little).. What is a wormery?
“A Wormery is a box system that contains composting worms .. [and] .. is an easy, convenient, environmentally-friendly and efficient way of turning your waste kitchen scraps into high quality super-rich compost all the year round.”
For a normal compost one would need a garden, but the good thing about a wormery is, that it can be done indoors as well, in fact the worms work best at temperatures between 14-25° Celcius. I don’t really need all that earth, but some friends already expressed an interest in it and I bet the trees on my street will be happy takers as well.
So how do you get started?
Get 2 opaque boxes and a lid (In my case I use another box as the lid). Of course you can also buy wormeries in stores, but they are rather expensive (over 100EUR I was told)
Punch holes into one of the boxes and the lid. The box with no holes will be at the bottom, this is where very nutritious water (leachate) released in the process will be collected. The lid needs to have holes, so the worms can breathe.
Fill the box with the holes with a mix of 2-3cm shredded newspaper and cardboard. (I just teared it into small pieces.)
Get some worms and place them on top of the shredded paper mix. (Worms come with the compost they currently live in and can be picked up here for free)
Add some organic waste, approximately the amount of the compost with the worms. (Do not use orange peels or anything cooked.)
Cover with a sheet of wet newspaper (this will keep flies from enjoying the waste)
Leave the compost to itself for 1-2weeks. The worms have to get used to their new environment.
Now you can start adding more organic waste. Remember to always cover it to keep out flies (If you don’t like the newspaper approach a cotton towel can be used as well.)
Questions? Check out this FAQ or comment on this post.
Lately I have heard the word Permaculture mentioned more often, but did you know that the first book on it was written before I was even born! More than 30 years ago the Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were looking into ways of permanent agriculture (hence the name Permaculture), for the industrial agriculture was bad for soil fertility, but good for pests (which then were fought of with chemical warfare).
So what is all this about?
=> It’s about increasing biodiversity, which amongst other things stops pests (and us worrying about how to get rid of them), but provides us with a good variety of food throughout the year.
=> It’s about studying the land carefully and making adjustments that rainwater will be available to the plants for longer, thus making plants happy (and us too as we don’t have to water them ourselves).
=> It’s about letting newspaper and other mulches fight against weeds (rather than us doing so in back-breaking activities).
=> It’s about allowing certain weeds to grow for a while as they provide nutrition to the other plants.
=> It’s about even more than that, I think it’s certainly about time that I bought my mother (who loves her garden) a book on this (so she will not ask me to plug weed again next time I’m in town).
To sum it up, if permaculture has been set up carefully it will behave like a little paradise without depleting the nutrition, without letting wind and water take the soil away (which in turn could ruin water systems by changing their nutrient level) and all of that with hardly any human effort.
A small boy, age 9, wades through the stinking city dump outside Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh looking for trash to sell. If he does not bring home enough Riels (Cambodian currency), he risks that his parents, child soldiers under the Khmer Rouge, won’t have dinner for him when he returns home after a days work of collecting and selling garbage.
His life path seems set, but there is a chance it could all still turn different..
In 1995 Christian des Pallières, young retiree in humanitarian mission for reconstruction of a primary school system, had visited a Phnom Penh garbage dump and was appalled by seeing kids eating its filth. He and his spouse, Marie-France, had to act, first with bringing meals to the dump, then by establishing an association called “Pour un Sourire d’Enfant”(PSE, in English: “For a smile of a child”), which by now provides schooling and professional training to 6000 kids like the 9year old mentioned above! In addition children that have been beaten or worse are provided with a new home.
I learned about this organisation through Patricia, a colleague of mine,who had spend her summer vacation at PSE looking after groups of 40 kids aged 3 to 17 over the summer months as the real teachers were off. Breaking the regularity of the kids coming to school over the summer months would risk them not coming back in September.
Her enthusiasm really touched me and after talking to her, I saw the video of PSE and it touched me even more. (Let me know if you are interested in watching it also and I can lend it to you.) There is also alot more information on what PSE is and has achieved on their website, as well as information on how to get involved.
Surrounded by gentle Welsh Hills, close to the Pembrokeshire National Park lies the little ecovillage “Tir Y Gafel”. Only since March 2010 all inhabitants live on its land, which is divided into nine eco-smallholdings, each of them operating rather independently from each other. All came for the natural lifestyle, but each has a different plan on how to live from the land. According to Welsh legislation 75% of one’s needs, need to come from the land. All will use hydro (and solar power) for electricity. Once the whole energy system is setup, an expected 20 000 Pound worth of power will be fed back to the electricity system. They will live in low-impact houses, which are currently being constructed from locally found building materials, such as old bricks and wood from their own forest or by reusing of existing materials such as wood planks from IBM acquired via eBay. After years of livestock on its fields, the soil is claimed as too poor for crops. Mono culture crops this is, for each single inhabitant has proven that vegetables grow here. The bio-diversity has already increased and more bird varieties have been spotted circling the land. They will supplement their income by making willow sculptures, furniture, farming fish and pigs and producing own cheeses.
In July I had the opportunity to spend a week volunteering there and experience community life up close. Hoppi, the main contact for volunteers did a great job in organising and so I was able to help out on several pots, learning different things from stripping trees, cleaning bricks, liming a round house, repairing a water way and chopping firewood. Others helped the beekeeper to find the queen or put the reciprocal roof onto a roundhouse. We were six volunteers in total and a nice bunch of people – everybody coming from a different angle. I learned alot in terms of alternative constructions, saw an example of a community and had lots of interesting conversations.
The inhabitants are people like all of us, they came because it was their childhood dream or because of a very environmental consciousness or the urge for a change in their life. They might have a little bit of experience as hobby gardeners or hobby furniture makers, but all have lots to learn still and I admire their courage. One thing that stood out for me was a very strong sense of the motto Learning by doing: “If the roundhouse gets a crack, well then we have to fix it. Next time we will know what to do different.”
The ecovillage is part of the Lammas Project, which aims to show that there are sustainable solutions to the challenges of climate change, peak oil and rural regeneration. There will be also a community hub building that allows others to learn about this kind of lifestyle and benefit from lessons learned at Tir Y Gafel.
All the best to all plot holders and thanks for a great week,
Sylvia
PS: For all who would like to visit themselves. There are guided tours offered and another volunteer week is coming up in September, just subscribe to the Lammas mailing list to be kept up-to-date.
A few months ago I was talking with an American friend who proudly told me about the Mozarella cheese, he had just made – in about half an hour, he said. I was impressed. Living in Mainland Europe, it should be even more tasty due to access to fresh milk, he claimed. I really wanted to try myself! But where to buy rennet (needed to split the curds from the whey)? The only place where I found it was in a pharmacy for 20Euro and this did not feel quite right!
So I partly gave up and focussed on other things, such as vegetarian paté, tzatziki, houmous, bread, gnocchi or vindaloo curry from the base incredients. All alot easier to make then I would have expected (except maybe for the curry paste) and really yummy, not to talk about the excitement and joy of exploration.
Then I found rennet by chance in a Welsh store whilst on vacation. So I re-embarked on my cheesy goal, I still needed to get a cheese cloth and a thermometer and some fresh milk. All of which I found at or close to the Marché des Abattoirs in Anderlecht (Belgium). Onto the internet it was for some instructions, in the end I settled on a goat cheese (which does not even need rennet, but just some vinegar!) and now I am a happy owner of my first (yummy) cheese.
There was a meadow and then people from all over came and the meadow turned into a bustling village. A month later the tents were gone and if he would not have seen it with his own eyes, he would never have known they were there..
photo by Flickr user: fireflies604
A few days ago on my way back home from vacation I sat next to another home-coming guy, who had just left 30 degree warm Finland, where he had spent close to a month at a Rainbow Gathering. What’s that?
Wikipedia describes it as follows:
“Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities, typically held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media.”
Jean-Louis, the man from the bus, goes there every year. It’s back to a simple way of life for him and the place is full with good musicians. He told me that everybody finds a place in the community, be it entertaining or cooking or chilling or helping with other chores. Imagine a bunch of people preparing yummy food, being surounded by musicians and then when the meal is served a hat is passed around and you put in there what you like. Some will put 10Euros each meal others not a penny in four weeks. And it’s all good.
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