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/

Creative gift wrapping

If you're looking for some creative gift wrapping this festive season, check out Wrap Sacks. A gift bag that you give and then is re-givable. Nice idea.

Attending IDFA

It's IDFA time in Amsterdam - the International Documentary Film Festival. Probably one of the best times in winter in the dam. It happens every year and normally involves me running from film to film trying to see as many as possible, or sitting in a theatre an entire Sunday watching the 10hour "best of the fest" marathon.

This year I've been pretty moderate, only going to see 5 screenings, a couple of which are double screenings, so I'll see 8 in total. I've seen 7 already and there have been some awesome ones among them.

il Capo

A film about marble mining in Italy, and particularly the hand signals used by the "conductor" who shows the diggers where to push and pull the marble. The questions afterwards focused on the type of marble, what it is used for, and about the diggers. I didn't get to ask my question about whether there was any protest against the mountains being ripped apart for rich peoples floors and kitchen counters. This film made me want to protest mining in any form. Our comfort should not come at the cost of ripping apart the earth.

My Playground

A Danish film about free running or Parkour, people running up and down buildings, and urban design for more than just one use. I enjoyed it and it made me want to use my body to the fullest all the time, and of course become a free runner!

Maswife: Life in Camp Pinchinat

About life in one of the camps set up to accommodate homeless people following the earthquake in Haiti. It captured the grimness of life in the camp very well. People living in truly diabolical conditions, and the kinds of structures and hierarchies that spring up out of these conditions. I didn't feel good eating popcorn during this one.

MINUSTAH Steals Goats

Another film about Haiti - this one about the UN mission (known as MINUSTAH) there that begun in 2004. Primarily a peacekeeping mission, the film posed questions about whether there was need for economic "development" as a more sustainable way to bring peace. I think the film tried to include everything, and could have done with more focus. It made me wonder about the ideas of development and what it would take for organisations like the UN and countries to rethink what development is and what aid should be.

Into the Belly of the Whale

This was less a documentary and more a reconstruction of life in the smuggling tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Just before this film I heard the voice (cries) of my new niece for the first time.

Abu Jamil Street

Another film about the smuggling tunnels, this one was an actual documentary and did well not to take sides, but just to show the people working in these tunnels. Often just trying to make money in a way that is presented to them. The last thing the film showed was them smuggling a Lama through the tunnel for the Gaza Strip zoo. This film made me not want to live in a place where explosions are routine. I think we dismiss the value of peace.

Al-Halqa - In the Storyteller's Circle


I love telling stories and wish I could be a lot better at it. This was the film of the festival that I really wanted to go and see. It was brilliant, all about Moroccan storytellers and particularly a father teaching the art to his son. How to assemble a Halqa (a circle of people listening to the story), use the words and remember the stories (some of which can go on for four years like a mini-series). Such a wonderful tradition, and way to build and bind community, something I long for and think we are continually moving away from as opposed to towards. This film made me want to tell stories even more, and become good at it!

The last film I'm going to see is on Tuesday and is called Cane Toads: The Conquest. Many have said I am weird for wanting to see a film about cane toads. Perhaps true, but it seems really interesting, and it's about a country I have grown a sudden affiliation too, and I am really looking forward to seeing it, and hopefully learning about cane toad whispering.

WWF at Schiphol

WWF (The World Wide Fund for Nature or Woof Woof) have put up some advertisements at Schiphol airport asking people to [in English] "Look, Look, but don't buy". The ads are asking people not to buy souvenirs from the countries that they visit on holiday that are produced by killing endangered plants and animals.



It seems like quite a straight forward ask, but when we know about things like climate change, mining disasters (even though this is an oxymoron, I use it to indicate the ones that affect humans immediately as well - think Chile and Hungary). The issue I have with this is the thinking behind it. WWF no doubt spent thousands for the advert, and I am sure hours of strategic meetings and planning went into the text, photos and style of writing. I imagine that tactically WWF (who also works on climate change) thought this would be an obtainable ask - something they think the public would take notice of and actually act on instead of ignoring. The issue is that this is a cosmetic change. It is the same as putting a disney plaster on an amputation.



As long as big NGOs and others trying to do something about the various environmental challenges we face continue to work on what is obtainable and doesn't offend funders, they will only act as a salve to our conscience as we head toward environmental collapse. We need organisations to shout, loudly, the inconvenient truths we are facing. No, we cannot afford to take intercontinental holiday flights, we have to change our patterns of consumption. We have to start listening to nature, seeing ourselves as part of a very intricate system and begin playing by the earth's rules. Seeing a small group of animals and plants as endangered misses the point. We are amongst the endangered species, time to call a spade a spade.

Fish

This deserves a blog.

AquaBounty is a Canadian company that has developed a GE Salmon. This Salmon is genetically engineered to grow year round (unlikely normal salmon that only grow for some of the year). The result is a bigger fish, quicker.

I'm not going to get into the science of all of this, or the fact that the eggs are being shipped to Panama (as it is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity) to be grown, and then shipped back to the US and Canada to be sold.
Consumers will of course be saved from seeing salmon that looks like it has been stretched and pumped up with a bicycle pump, as they will no doubt be offered the salmon, unlabelled as GE, in neat little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays.

The bit I'd like to talk about is the company's (AquaBounty) argument for this fish. They claim, quite straight faced, that it is needed to address world hunger. This will no doubt be met with delight by the French who are trying to grow GE vines (which fortunately keep getting ripped out by volunteer reapers, even after public consultation and a fence being erected around the trial). Obviously the starving people in the world will soon need a chilled GE Chardonnay to wash down their GE salmon.

Jokes aside, could they be any more brazen? Salmon as a solution to world hunger? There are so many outrageous things going on here that it's hard to know where to start. How about with salmon. There used to be streams all over the Western US and Canada that were so full of Salmon in season that people scoop them out with buckets, and bears would take one bite of one fish and then move onto another. Many of these rivers and streams have been dammed for various reasons (something about progress and development) and the fish can now no longer return to the spawning grounds as they always have. This is perhaps not such a problem when, with all the money you've made by damming rivers in your own country, you can build fish farms in places like Panama and farm fish there. All good and well except these fish need to be fed something. Mostly they are fed wild fish, but it takes much more than a kilo of wild fish to produce a kilo of farmed salmon. Slowly it starts to look as if AquaBounty may not have the poor and starving peoples interests at heart after all.

We need to look at what we will need to do to enable people to eat salmon without having to make them artificial and raise them in artificial environments completely removed from any type of ecosystem. A good start would be to start questioning companies trying to sell snake oil by promising to feed the world with it.

A wonderful morning moment (another)

An amazing moment on the way into work today that inspired me, gave me hope and added to an amazing start to the day.

While riding along and listening to K'naan's "Take a minute", I was getting nearer to GP Berlin, and as a taxi backed away from me (there was a truck blocking the street that I had just squeezed past) I saw a women, perhaps 45, walk across the road and notice a dead bird that resembled much less of a bird having been run over repeatedly. I lost sight of her as she got off the street between two parked cars, but as I rode past, I saw her again. She was looking back down at the bird with so much tenderness and sadness.

Just amazing.

Clearly, it's the little things.

Man with a gun

Here's a little story I told myself on the way to work today.

I started off thinking about the police, and got onto thinking about the argument that you can't criticise the system while you continue to live within it. However I think we are forced to live within the system (or civilisation).

Say I choose to live outside the system. Okay, so I'm feeling hungry, and reckon I'll get something to eat. There's a supermarket. I go in, get something to eat and walk out. No paying right - I'm living outside the system. Well unless a friendly wave, a thank you and a mental note to do something nice for the cashier sometime counts.

As I'm outside eating my food, a guy with a gun arrives and takes the food away, and says something about "ever catching me again", arrest and jail. Well, as it turns out I wasn't that hungry, so I decide to turn in for the night. I walk back to my modest flat and get into bed. I haven't paid rent for a couple of months as I live outside the system. Just as I'm drifting off to sleep, there is a knock on the door - same guy with a gun. Man, he's really beginning to be a problem.

So no, we cannot choose to live outside the system, we are forced to live within it. And for some the easiest thing to do it put on a jacket and tie, carry a bag full of lies and smile, smile, smile, smile that colgate white smile.

** To be fair this wasn't really my story, but a bad mismash of Derrick Jensen with a little Promoe stuck on the end.

A recession for the poor

The media reports the economic recession as something terrible for all people. However there are some different stories that are seeming to come up every now and again. These tell of how there seems to be one (or more) "recession-proof" sectors. These sectors are always (in my brief analysis) luxury sectors and also tech sectors. Some articles proclaim the good news factor of this - one even appearing on "South Africa - The Good News" website.

I imagine the writers of particularly the second type of article - showing that there is some good news despite the recession - are wanting to show that at least one sector is doing it right, or, more vaguely that "there is hope". The truth is that the global recession is only a recession for the poor. Food price increases aren't affecting any of my family or friends (or me). I hear of vary few CEOs losing there jobs, but plenty of blue-collar and government workers out of work (again, it seems as the important ones are still there - the EU still has a commissioner of "Digital Agenda" - important one that).

This recession is a recession of and for the poor. The rich continue to buy their iphone apps, expensive "handmade" watches and luxury yachts. And what's more they are buying them in ever greater numbers, despite the increasing number of children going to bed being "fed" water to stop them from crying because there is no food in the house.

So next time someone with an iphone complains about the recession, slap them and go and do something useful to take down the system that causes the inequality which allows a simultaneous recession for the poor and boom for the rich.

Making Hlodnik

Kasia, who is from Poland and works in our finance department, brought in some Hlodnik the other day and proceeded to let us taste it and then when we all really enjoyed it, she promised to bring us all some the next day. She did. We like people like Kasia.

Hlodnik is a Polish soup made from beetroot and yoghurt (amongst other things). It is served cold and is very refreshing on a summers day. Once having tasted it I made some (a HUGE batch) at home and included the cucumbers as well as a large amount of other veggies (as is required by the recipe). It wasn't nearly as good as Kasia's, but I think it will be a learning experience!

Here are some pictures of the herbs, the other ingredients and the cooking process. Enjoy.


The herbs (chives, dill, basil, coriander).


Yoghurt.


Beetroot.


Cucumbers and Kholrabi.


Hlodnik!

And a good blog about it if you want more...

Bioplastic

We all know how much we rely on plastic in our everyday lives (if you don't, just look around you!). Plastic is made from oil, and this tends to bother environmentalists. As well as being non-renewable (i.e. it will run out someday), oil is rather polluting when dragged from the ground and "used" - read: burned. And of course, besides all that polluting the C02 it emits also contributes to climate change.

One of the lowest hanging fruit (in this culture's mind's eye) concerning the struggle to be more sustainable is the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag and wrapping that food products are sold in. To replace conventional plastic bags and packaging, bioplastics have been invented. These are plastics manufactured from "renewable" sources - mainly glucose which normally comes from refined maize (or potatoes or beets). Increasingly you will see advertising on shopping bags saying that they are biodegradable, these are invariably made from bioplastics. With regards to there biodegradability, my aunt and uncle (who actually have a very functioning compost heap - nice) have tried to compost them, but have been unsuccessful up until now, apparently they persist long after the rest of the food scraps, paper, etc. Biodegradability is only a measure of the amount of time it takes something to breakdown anyway - but that's another blog post.

So bioplastics are becoming increasingly popular, especially by those who *really* want to be seen to be doing something good for the environment. At my local supermarket, all the organic fruit is placed on a recycled cardboard tray and wrapped in a very loud crinkly bioplastic (the normal fruit of course gets the conventional thin plastic bag - which are somehow exempt from laws banning plastic shopping bags...). The problem with bioplastics is that there production consumes a lot more energy than conventional plastics. The actual production of the plastics obviously takes energy in both cases, and it seems that bioplastics consume more energy in their production, but it also takes energy to produce the feedstock. Oil obviously requires drilling, transport, etc. But glucose (or starch - made of lots of glucose molecules) needs all the inputs required to grow it on top of the energy intensive refining process. And when you boil it down, these inputs are essentially oil (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, petrol for the tractor) - I'm assuming a company will use the cheapest glucose around, which with our skewed subsidies is more than likely not organic!

So it turns out that at the end of the day the more environmental choice would probably be conventional plastic. Of course neither of these are really environmental choices at all, and if I was writing this post for my other "live simply it will help the planet" blog I would probably end off by saying we should all be re-using our cotton, hemp or plastic bags. In this case though I imagine you can guess what my solution will be...

The oil spill

Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, said after speaking to BP CEO Tony Hayward, "The prime minister is also clear that we need constructive solutions and that we remember the economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America."

The oil spill and people's response to it confuses me. And at the same time it shows how brilliantly this culture has turned us from citizens - people - to consumers. Just looking at the response to it shows the lies we are being told. I mean chemical dispersants? Plastic bags to put the oil in (and then dump it where? another planet?)? Oil absorbent booms? Plastic protective gloves and clothing? The common thread? ALL these things use oil either as an ingredient (plastic, most chemicals) or in their production and transport to the spill. Bad for the economy? The economy is loving it! All this buying up of oil fighting equipment, all the media flights and trips on boats. Pathetic. Real solutions? Try supporting nature in it's own ability to deal with the spill.

When I see a video on youtube of a US man mocking BP's response to the oil spill and encouraging people to dump their garden "waste" on BP's property to get back at them, the madness is clear. To punish a company that in their NORMAL operations rapes and kills the earth by "dumping" the most valuable product the earth offers us on their property is beyond nonsensical.

I'm waiting for the "Buy American" campaigns telling people to buy their petrol from US companies - because there products are a product of nature (1) that do not kill the earth? Does anyone really think other oil companies are better? One encouraging sign is the couple of "radical environmentalists" talking about oil companies, particularly Shell's destruction of the Niger delta, and comparing it to the Gulf oil spill.

Looking at the quotation above, one can only marvel that Osborne is still a publicly employed official. People might actually believe that? Even if you think in purely economic terms, BP is destroying the economy by vacuuming up "resources" that could be used for "development". Let's not even get into the bit about how they are destroying the planet. You know, that thing that all of us - our children and all other species depend on for LIFE. And then the little sinister leer and knowing wink - bringing economic value (a prime example of an oxymoron) "to people in Britain and America". To clarify, not to Britain and America, but only to people, and by that we mean some people, not all, and by that we mean an infinitesimal portion of the people in the UK and US, and by that we mean the ecocidal maniacs who are destroying everything the rest of us (including the cute and cuddly, big and ugly, inanimate, breathtaking, tiny, new and old) rely on for LIFE.

We don't need a better response to the oil spill, we need a better response to the assault on our planet. We don't need people angry at BP, we need people angry at this culture. We need more Greenpeace, we need more Sea Shepard, we need more MEND, we need more people who refuse to take responsibility for the death of the planet, but begin to dismantle the industrial economy, starting from where it is weakest.

-----

(1) Oil might be a product from nature, but petrol is certainly not. There is also a reason nature stored the oil underground.