There are good things.

Judging by the name of this blog, you can imagine that the contents of the posts are not always cheery. There are some great signs out there that things are changing, and most encouragingly for me - mindsets.

One little example is pet training. We recently welcomed Spencer into our house. Spencer is a puppy - see picture. We decided to get him all trained up and so started finding out about puppy training schools. Most training schools these days appear to work entirely with non-violence, all training is done through encouragement and rewards, and ignoring bad behaviour.

What does this all have to do with the state of the world? Thinking about this, I thought that there is no way that these sorts of ideas could spill over into the trainer's and the human trainee's (it's as much about training the custodian as it is about training the dog!) lives. I quickly checked the cynic in me. I think it is safe to presume that if a trainer is training people through encouragement rather than punishment, they will treat people close to them and who they interact with in the same way.

So this is just one small example of how I see mindsets and attitudes changing. Yes, I blog about a lot of really bad stuff happening out there in the world, but things are changing, quickly.

The mo continues…

Mo on a train...

So it's heading towards the end of week 3 of Movember, and think the my moustache is coming on nicely. I must say that I am rather relieved it's only one more week.

As you probably know by now, we're raising money for Project 90 by 2030. I work there, and one of the reasons I do is because they think cradle to cradle. The things we buy and use come from somewhere, and need to go somewhere to be used again. In contrast to cradle to cradle is cradle to grave - that things go somewhere "else" when we're done using them (the "away" in "I'll just throw it away"). Two illustrations of this: one of my colleagues posted a link today of how many raw materials we use in our lifetime, while another recently spoke at a "green burial" colloquium. The second really taking the idea and running with it (personally I'd like to be exposed, I just hope I'd still be edible with all the toxins in my body!).

Now the question is - what to do with my mo once its time has come... Answers in the comments please.

The secrecy bill and the constitution.

Pierre de Vos is a constitutional lawyer and writes a blog about current events seen through the constitution.

One of his latest blogs is about where he thinks the secrecy bill and the constitution clash. A good place to start if you want to know what is wrong with the bill and how it could be fixed.

http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/how-to-fix-the-secrecy-bill-and-make-it-constitutionally-compliant/

More mo

So if nothing else, at least Movember has me blogging again! The idea behind it though is to raise money, and so far there is not much happening. I hope it is like my 'tashe though - a slow starter.

The current mo. A little more than stubble.

There are three of us in our office, and as many will let you know, I am a sucker for competition, so I would very much like to try and raise more money than Dan or Stephen. I might be pushing my luck though, as I recently competed in the Red Hill Challenge and got a lot of my friends to sponsor me for that. They me be a little uit gesponsored (see, I can still talk a little Afrikaans...).

If you are not one of them, I think you should sponsor me. Here's why:

It's the end of the year, and at this time we give prizes to our Project 90 by 2030 clubs. We are still looking for prizes for this year, and so need your money to be able to reward our clubs hard work this year. What have they done you ask? Well, all sorts of inspiring people to act on climate change, and a whole lot of acting themselves. Hell, one of the clubs is even building their own wind turbine! The prizes themselves are given with the objective of cutting more carbon, so you can be sure your money will help do something tangible. The fact that all this happens at schools means that it not only reduces the schools carbon footprint, but also provides an example for the learners of what technologies and actions can help wean us off fossil fuels.

I'd like to aim for R1000, so if you can contribute a bit to that, no matter how small, it would be very much appreciated. If you'd like to donate directly, you can via the Project 90 website. Please let me know though!

Movember and me

Once again it is Movember, the time of year where you get to look silly for good.

I have had various attempts at 'tasche growing, the first was with Fat Tire Bike Tours in Berlin, for their annual Rattiest Tasche compo. Here you can see the result - a good demonstration of the handle bar if I do say so myself.

The second was for Movember itself when I worked at Greenpeace. We dressed as village people - apparently - and raised money (particularly through allowing people to shave them off), and donated it to prostate cancer research. Movember is about raising awareness of prostate cancer and to raise money for cancer research.

During this second Movember the conversation started around the fundraising goal - why are we trying to treat the symptom? Surely going after the cause would be better and smarter? I don't think it is easy to pinpoint one cause of cancer, but there are many that we know about - scientifically and intuitively. I can't be certain, but I would imagine that the rise of cancer tracks the rise of our petro-chemically fuelled civilisation a little too closely. All those toxic substances, working more hours, building nuclear plants - all of this contributes to cancer (and yes, probably some more benign things as well, like burnt toast).

So for this Movember, two colleagues and myself are growing moustaches to raise money for the organisation we work for, Project 90 by 2030. Project 90 by 2030 challenges South Africans to reduce their carbon footprint and change the way they live and relate to the environment. We believe that achieving this goal will not only help us avoid catastrophic climate change, but also have other positive effects, like lower cancer rates. Of course there are other very clear benefits of growing moustaches:

If you'd like to sponsor us, leave a comment below, or e-mail me: glen@90x2030.org.za. If you're on facebook, come find me (if you haven't already). I'll be updating my profile pic every week so you can see the progress...

Something good to eat

Yes it's really hard to always eat the right thing, especially if you're paying money for it. On top of that you've got to watch your weight, make sure you're getting the right vitamins and minerals, the list goes on.

So growing your own food is probably the easiest way to go about things, but can be really hard to do. What often makes it so hard is often the type of things people try to grow. The fruit and veg we buy in the shops has been selectively bred for specific traits - often what makes them most marketable, things like size and shelf life. To get to this point though, they often become hard to grow, particularly in small quantities and without the use of agrochemicals. And I'm not suggesting that we all should be growing heritage varieties either.

Budding gardeners (yes, I did) often joke that all they can grow are weeds. Well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. At least for one, and I'd be prepared to bet a lot more. Pigweed. The name might get you thinking that you should be growing it for other animals, but humans can eat it too. It is considered a weed and in the US it has become resistant to certain over-relied on herbicides and is causing mayhem for farmers of genetically modified cotton. The local variety, Amaranthus hybridus, is still easy to grow, but is not invasive.

Getting on to the eating part, pigweed has many benefits. One serving of the leaves, cooked like spinach, will provide you with five times the iron you need, twice the calcium, 20 times the vitamin A and nearly half your daily protein requirements. I've yet to eat it, but the next time I'm at Kirstenbosch, I'm going to pick up some seeds, grow it and eat it. It could be a while, but I'll report back!

*Most of the info here was taken from an article in Veld and Flora, December 2010, Volume 96(4)
**Photo from www.southeasternflora.com. Used without permission - please don't sue me.

International eating

Food has gone international in a big way. Walking around Checkers (a local supermarket) in Muizenberg yesterday I was blown away by the amount of food coming from overseas. Agricultural dumping aside, it is amazing to think that the products have travelled hours and hours to arrive in South Africa from Finland, the US, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. Most of it was packaged food (Idaho powdered potatoes anyone?) but there is a lot of fresh food as well.

I have long sneered at Kerrygold Irish Butter in my local Pick n Pay, but now there is cheese from England there too. Stop for a minute and think about the logisitics of this. How much cheese would you have to send over to make importing cheese from england viable? And how do they do it? The cheese was vaccum packed in England in plastic (with a nice stylised picture of the country side on it), but how did it travel out here? I would imagine on a refrigerated shipping container - using up left over space on passenger planes seems like a bridge too far. So there is a giant shipping container filled with cheese humming away in amongst loads of other containers with who knows what in them (toxic chemicals in some no doubt, as the population of coastal Africa repeatedly find out). I'm not sure about you, but imagining the food I am going to eat in such an industrial setting just doesn't do it for me. However, If you live in a city it is hard to avoid these types of food miles, but there are choices to be made too. My mother has organic gouda in her fridge that she picks up from an equally lovely woman who distributes organic food from small producers. And that is one end of the spectrum - you could just buy local cheese on the shelf next to the imported one.

Returning to the dumping issue. It's an old one, and one that sites like farmsubsidy.org have been going on about for ages. Huge farms and agricultural industries in Europe and the US receive massive (think around EUR 55 billion in the EU alone) amounts of money every year to produce more food than the populations of both regions could ever hope to eat. They feed loads to animals (acknowledged as being a wasteful way of using plant energy as food) but even so there is an amazing amount left over. So what do they do with all of it? Well, Africa is starving right? Ship it over there of course. Good in theory, but when all this cheap, subsidised food arrives in Africa (and you can bet it's not the perishable organic food that's being shipped) it robs African producers of their market. You begin to get a picture of the inequity when you imagine the jumbo jets full of organic fresh succulent beans being flown from Kenya to Europe and the bits of chicken other than the breast (because dieting Europeans want the lean and best meat only) being shipped to Africa.

A huge and complex problem. Or is it? Often when these global issues descend on us all we really feel we can do is stop watching the news - it seems a lot more simpler then. With this issue at least, there is something we can do and it's flippin easy. Check where your favourite food brands come from - it's right there on the label. If they aren't produced in your country, don't buy them. Better yet, buy food with only one ingredient. Think fresh veg, legumes and grains.

With all the gourmet eating that's doing the rounds, it's easy to think that we need to buy food from all over the world. In South Africa though, we are really lucky that we can grow most foods right here. We don't need to buy from overseas to cook amazingly.

Spreadsheets

Someone in our office has a mug that says "I (heart) spreadsheets". I am think I'm pretty safe in saying this is meant sarcastically.

I don't want to slate spreadsheets completely - being a planner and freak for order, I do like using them. It just occurred to me, walking around our office and seeing a couple of people sitting staring at them that they more or less sum up what is wrong with what has become our way of life.

We have become so removed from reality and the real world - trees, soil, wind, grass and sunshine. How can we ever hope to care about the world when we don't interact with it? When we divide up pieces of it into cells (appropriate term) on a spreadsheet, to be divided, added and totalled up.

When we start to see the world through spreadsheets, we may often think we are valuing it - we are giving it importance. The truth is we are stripping it of value. We will never love what we cannot hug, and I have yet to experience a satisfying embrace with a spreadsheet.

The food industry gets up my nose...

Two things that have made my blood boil from the BBC's "Farming Today" podcast. Both of them are parts of the same theme - the lie that the more we treat food production systems like an assembly line the better off we'll be.

Firstly Paul Conway, vice president of the global grain trader Cargill, says that food security is not the same as food self-sufficiency. Global food trade is apparently "the rational thing to do." Therefore people in countries that grow grain for European cattle should do so. What will they then eat? The cattle imported back from Europe? Oh no, food grown with technology like "precision farming" (the buzz-phrase "precision bombing" craftily recycled - from chemical warfare to agrochemicals) and GE (genetic engineering) - food which apparently only the rich can afford to reject.

Seems to me that in Mr. Conway's world, everybody dances to the tune of the global food industry - and the quality of food, as well as the quality of many people's and animal's lives declines rapidly. As for his view that only the rich can reject GE, I do wish he would look at poorer African countries rejecting food aid on account that it is GE, and the fact that there is a moratorium on GE brinjal in India because the farmers and public protested its approval so strongly.

Secondly, the application for a mega dairy near the small town of Nocton in the UK has been rejected. This is of course great news, so what pissed me off? The farmers (I would hazard a guess they are more business men, and yes I use a gender specific term) that applied for the dairy refer to it as a "high welfare animal establishment". High welfare meaning it is unlikely the cows will ever venture outside, and will eat grain (probably supplied by Cargill). If you have ever seen a free range cow grazing on soybeans or munching a corn cob, please let me know. I'll bet you haven't, because cows eat grass. That is what there stomachs are designed to digest.

This is the food industry's idea to enable us to produce more food - feed plants we can eat to animals which can eat plants we can't.

I'll be sticking my middle finger of both hands up at Mr. Conway and friends the next time I go food shopping by buying the least processed, most local, organic food I possibly can.

Cartoon

Here's a great cartoon from Stephanie McMillan, who is great in her work against global ecocide.



You can check out more of her work here: http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/