* I couldn’t be there myself, but after reading Sarah’s post on the Reclaim the night march it felt as though I was. Although there are issues around it, as Don’t Stray makes clear. I’m glad that the Green Party placards chose to focus on domestic violence – it does worry me that the concept that the streets aren’t safe for women actually propagates unreasonable fear (and I think young men are under at least as much risk on the streets as women) rather than an understanding of where the risk really is – in the home.
* An interesting take on contraction and convergence – or how we all need to live – apparently most promulgated by the Swiss – what we all need is the 2,000-Watt lifestyle. I doubt I make it, but I try. (Astonished to read that people send £1,000 a year on energy. Okay I have a reasonably small flat, and I try, but my electricity comes to about £10 a month and gas about £15 in winter.)
* Just been pointed to WorldMapper, a site that takes the map and morphs it according to hundreds of characteristics, from poverty, to maternal mortality, to greenhouse gas emissions, on which the US looks very fat indeed.
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The “2000 Watt Lifestyle” article had much food for thought. I remember in my Hammersmith and Kensington bedsit days of decades ago, the hall light switches were push-button jobs that stayed on long enough–just!–so that one could make it to one’s door and maybe fumble for a key before being plunged into obfuscation. A simple way to curtail electric use–and it worked. Unless one’s flat was on the third or fourth floor.
WE have a couple of the energy-auditing gadgets on sale over here but for most of us, it’s pretty simple to figure out where we’re leaking the watts and BTUs. Turn off the power strips, use a clothes line instead of the dryer, swop out the incandescent bulbs for CFs when appropriate, maybe even (gasp) go to work via ‘bus in unironed clothes–these are the ways one whittles down the energy bills. Most are pretty painless, requiring mainly use of brain cells; a lot of ‘rocket science’ has gone into making energy efficiency relatively easy to obtain while incurring no major sacrifices or even, really, inconveniences. Maybe the hardest thing is acquiring the reflex of shutting off devices that are usually left on “idle”–like my computer, or the television, or the timers which turn on the oil radiators in our bathrooms a half-hour before we humans hit the cold, cold tiles.