It made me realise that I need a little break from regular blogging and public green commitments. I want to spend more time working on personal projects for a few months – installing water-saving devices, maybe (finally?!) getting a bike, and little things like that. And I need to spend more time on my day job – I’ve recently completed an online course at the University of South Australia, and have a lot of programming to learn still! All these things eat into time I would normally spend researching, writing and editing my posts.

So you won’t be hearing much from me for the next while, at least not here. I’ll still be reading all your blogs and tweets and am always happy to answer email if there’s anything I can help you with.

If you need some eco-friendly reading, I heartily recommend The Greening of Gavin, Little Eco Footprints, and G Magazine.

In the meanwhile, I hope you’ll all keep trying new eco-friendly things and keep an eye on environmental issues in your neighbourhood. I’ll leave you with a pic of our summer vegie patch for now – click on it to see the full version.

Wishing you many good things and good times, and with big hugs for everybody,

Julie G

Coal Seam Gas : By the numbers – the ABC is gathering data on where coal seam gas companies have wells and leases. See if there are any near you, or let them know about any they’ve missed.

Stuffed to the gills – how crap took over one guy’s life, and how he intends to get it back.

A review of Prosperity Without Growth, which is going on my reading list. I heard about it while reading about the OWS protests. Has anyone else read it? Let me know how you liked it.

Capitalism vs the Climate – I skimmed the stuff about the deniers, since it’s pretty much the same as always, but really liked the sections where the writer lists some steps for moving forward on climate change.

The Great Kilowatt Challenge – if you haven’t joined in Gavin’s energy-saving challenge yet, it’s not too late.

The Occupy protests haven’t been as popular or well-attended in Australia. I think this is because our situation is better overall than in the USA. Our two-speed economy caused by the mining industry has got problems for sure, but our unemployment rates are ok and we have a better safety net in the form of Medicare and legal redress for employment issues, and our rising higher education costs are nowhere near the obscene levels they are in the US. Still, our political and corporate leaders are racing to make our legislation more like America’s, so we shouldn’t be complacent about income equality here.

Some people feel like the Occupy Wall Street protests are vague – the protesters haven’t issued a list of demands or proposed any legislation. But I think they’re working at a much more fundamental level than that. They’ve looked at the devastating effects of corporate greed, and decided that they’re fed up with it. They’re not going to quietly put up with it anymore, and they’re letting the stockbrokers and CEOs know that things have got to change or else the 99% will change things for them.

As Matt Taibbi put it in his excellent article How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the OWS protests, it’s

…much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it.

Meanwhile, back at the eco-friendly headquarters…

For decades now environmentalists have been trying to save the world with hardly any resources and very little support. This has led to most campaigns being last-minute rescues: save the whales, protect the Franklin River, Lock the Gate.

I’ve never met a single eco-activist who hasn’t been keen for more time, more money and more public support for their cause. And I’ve never met one who hasn’t known that achieving their goal would be no more than a tiny band-aid on the great damage being done to our planet. They all believe that the real solution for the long-term is in changing the way we think about our natural resources. We can’t save the world one bit at a time: it’s too hard. What we need is a sustainability culture.

What’s this got to do with the OWS protests?

For the first time in a long time, many people are looking at the culture we’ve created with economic ‘rationalism’ and deciding that they don’t like it. They’re hungry for new ideas and better suggestions on how we can live happily, take care of people who are struggling, and still be able to earn a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

I believe the environmental movement has the answers the OWS protesters are seeking. Ditching consumer culture and quarry vision in favour of new ways of thinking like collaborative consumption, clean and distributed energy, community-supported agriculture, walkable communities, and so on have made us healthier, wealthier (in terms of what’s important, not sheer volume of cash), and maybe even a little bit wiser. And we’ve still got time to stop and smell the native roses and pat the wombats.

If ever you’ve wanted to speak up about your big ideas on how to save the planet, the time is ripe right now. Mainstream people are looking for something new, something more fulfilling than the endless round of working and shopping. If we stay quiet, we might miss our chance. Brag about your simple green lifestyle; invite people to your group meetings; write a book or a poem or a letter to a newspaper or whatever forum you have a voice in. I think people are more ready to hear it than they’ve ever been before…

Bittman agrees with many of us that our current food system isn’t good for our health or our environment. We’ve all heard the statistics on obesity before, as well as genetically modified crops, over-medicated animals treated cruelly, and excessive use of chemicals for pest and weed control. There’s lots of groups working on trying to fix this situation via regulations, boycotts and trying to convince people to change their diets.

But Bittman thinks there’s another way to replace destructive agribusiness methods with something better for us and the planet. His suggestion is that we need to teach more people to cook. We’re not talking fancy gourmet stuff here, just sandwiches for lunch, and a pasta or stir-fry for dinner. Maybe a nice steak, or a roasted chicken, or some grilled marinated tofu to make a more substantial meal.

He comes up with 10 reasons that learning to cook leads to wide-ranging and lasting improvements. People who know how to cook choose less processed food. They can tell the difference between quality seasonal vegies and the limp stuff that’s been kept in long-term storage. Food tastes better when you cook it yourself, the same way the wonky beanie I knit myself is more valuable to me than the one I bought for five bucks at Woolies. Plus, cooking gives you control over what you’re eating, and independence from the giant corporations who want you to eat whatever gives them the most profit.

Which is all very nice for us as individuals, but the benefits go wider than that. More home cooks means more demand for real food over processed food. It’s a political statement (whether you mean it to be or not) that your time and your money are best spent on doing something healthy for you and your loved ones, and not on corporations with questionable ethics. It creates a more diverse and robust local economy, which helps everyone along.

So do you cook much? I do, at least to the level that Bittman is talking about. I can chuck together some herbs and mushrooms and parmesan and stir it through some pasta. I can roast a chicken and make either mashed veg or a salad to go with it. It’s not fancy, and I won’t win any prizes for presentation, but it tastes good. It feels satisfying to know I can provide for myself and my husband and friends this way. And I have noticed the personal benefits listed above.

If you’re not a confident cook, don’t let that stop you. Once every couple of weeks, look up something from taste.com.au or some other cooking site and give it a whirl. I guarantee that it’s pretty hard to make something completely inedible. And there’s always beans on toast if you do

If you are a regular cook, how do you think we can get more people to try it? So far I’ve thought of a couple of ideas:

• teaching a friend, Jamie Oliver style;
• inviting someone around who doesn’t normally cook for themselves, and making them a meal while they watch and maybe have a glass of wine. Showing is always more convincing than telling, and maybe after a few tries they’ll get involved.

What do you think?

Bittman’s booklet is available online via byliner.com for just under three bucks (US), and you can read an excerpt for free. If you’re interested in food issues, it’s well worth a look.

This little fella decided he liked the look of our garden recently. He’s a rainbow lorikeet, which means he’s not native to WA. The population here came from aviary releases, according to Birds in Backyards. The other birds here don’t seem to mind – maybe because lorikeets eat nectar and the other native and introduced birds near us are all about the insects.

He’s got a cheerful little chirp and loves our bottlebrushes and grevilleas. I think he must have been tame, if not an actual pet, because he landed on my father-in-law’s head and was happy to run up and down his arm. He didn’t mind the noise of the guys loading up a trailer full of building rubble either, while the other birds kept their distance.

The funniest part was when I brought out a bread bag with a couple of crusts in it to see if he’d eat them (we didn’t know then they prefer nectar) – he perked up and ran right towards the bag making lots of chirping noises! I guess he knows that bread bags mean it’s lunchtime

We’ve given him some fruit now – apple and strawberries. Not that he needs it, with our driveway-length of bottlebrushes and 3 grevilleas, and some unknown orange-flowered thing that he seems to like too. It’s just that Dave can’t bear to have an animal so close and not provide it with food, water and pats on the head!

Update!

It turns out that lorikeets are considered a pest in WA. We only found this out after a bit of an adventure though.

About 5 minutes after I finished posting what’s above, we could hear our little guy squawking madly in our neighbour’s yard. Dave looked over the fence and her dog was having a go at the lorikeet. Dave jumped the fence and rescued him, but he seemed to be a bit injured in the foot. We rang the Wildcare line, which is run by the state government to put people who find injured wildlife in touch with vets or rehab places that can help them.

We ended up at Kanyana Wildlife centre, where a lovely volunteer took our feathered friend and told us what happens next. Because lorikeets are a pest here, they can’t be released back into the wild. However, there’s a lady who takes them in, and keeps an eye on the newspaper ads to see if anyone’s lost one so she can return them. We’re going to call back in a day or two to find out how the little fella is doing.

It’s the fruit from a potato plant, after it flowered. Frank went to look at it and it just came off in his hand. It’s very much like a cherry tomato, except that it feels tougher and the skin is more like a capsicum.

Apparently if you chop it finely and put it in water, up to 300 seeds will be released and sink. Once you’ve salvaged the seeds, you can plant them and get what I can only imagine would be a lot of potatoes! I’m used to growing potatos from tubers or seed potatoes, not from actual seeds. Have any of you used one of these fruits before?

How farmer’s markets help me to eat well – a great guest post over at Limes and Lycopenes, which is a really interesting food blog with a focus on making sensible health choices.

The case for unsustainability – a thought-provoking idea from Paul Hawken: why is it that we must prove the benefits of a sustainable lifestyle? We should be asking the business-as-usual supporters why they think all this pollution and waste is such a great idea.

Remember CCS? – an update on the latest numbers. Turns out it’s extremely expensive and although the ‘Carbon Capture’ part works ok, the ‘Storage’ part is proving to be very difficult. I’m sure you’re all very suprised by this shocking news

How climate change denial works – in a flowchart, via Treehugger. Anyone want to make an Aussie version?

But how did the current bike culture start? This 6 minute video tells the story of how it happened. (Subtitles in English and other languages are available).

As the narrator points out, the situation wasn’t unique. A combination of economic circumstances, rising petrol prices and the public loudly asking for cycle paths isn’t impossible to achieve today. There are more and more cycling groups around the country, and we’ve all noticed rising prices already… the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

Clean air tied to decreased levels of violent crime – an unexpected benefit of controlling air pollution is that it helps babies’ brains develop to be more resilient and less prone to impulsive and agressive behaviour. That has long-term effects for our whole society, as well as being a health and resources issue.

How I created a tool library in under two hours – there are lots of exciting sharing services online these days, but sometimes all you need is a mailing list of like-minded people.

Pricing pollution at the point of extraction – as you might remember, I’m happy to back most methods of pricing pollution. It might be a little late for Australia to try this method, but then again, our carbon tax legislation will still be open to amendments after it passes the Senate.

Sharing the value of volunteering with your child – Tricia posts over at Childhood101 about how it’s easier than you think to include your kids when you volunteer. I know from my own experience that no-one expects vollies to provide highly-skilled or expert services, they’d rather have long-term enthusiasm they can count on. So introducing your kids to the idea so they’re used to it by the time they’re ready to pick their own causes is a fantastic way to build your community and teach your kids about it.

As you can see from the lower-right of the pic, our original “soil” barely qualifies for the name. It’s pure grey sand! We’ve added a lot of organic matter to the vegie patch itself, but there’s still a long way to go yet.

We’ve had huge quantities of snow peas and carrots, and more parsley than I know how to handle. Seriously, if you’ve got a way of using great big bunches of parsley I’d love to hear about it!

We’re still waiting on the garlic and onions but I think it won’t be long now. And I’ve finally worked out what to do with the larger/older spinach leaves: espinacas con garbanzos. It’s a Spanish dish in a simple home style (although there’s a fancier version here), and just right for cooler weather. It also makes great leftovers on toast the next day.