One thing that amazes me is how many anti-environmentalists like to claim that “green” energy sources are impractical, and will never supply what we need. But what’s lacking is not the possibilities, but the will.
I’ve just been pointed to one other alternative form of solar energy, and been musing on the inventiveness of Homo sapiens sapiens, as delightfully demonstrated in the video below…
That’s where this blog ranked on Iain Dale’s list of UK political blogs – although he did kindly note elsewhere that he thought I was underrated. (For which I’ve put a plug for the associated book below!)
The top-ranked Green blog (unless I’ve missed any, please tell me if I have), is, deservedly, Earthquake Cove at No 110, with The Daily (Maybe) close behind at 125.
Now the challenge for next year is two-fold.
1. Get Green blogs up there – certainly there are several good enough to be in the top 20, if not higher – but they’ve got to be promoted.
2. Get feminist blogs in there. You couldn’t possibly be more “political” than The f-word, but it isn’t in the list, although I nominated it.
Promotion folks, promotion!
It struck me the other day how hard it is to buy liquid handsoap in an environmentally friendly way – even brands like Ecover and Waitrose, which should know better, don’t seem to sell (anywhere I can find anyway), refill bottles in which you can just put the old plastic pump thingy on the top.
So each time you buy handwash you buy a new pump: some future archaeologist excavating our rubbish dumps will probably think these were some weird cult item, used in daily ritual practice, due to their ubiquity, their arrival reflecting a sudden new religious trend.
But then I had a brainwave – I bought some bathwash – more than double the quantity for the same price, and am using that as a refill – and so far as I can tell exactly the same stuff.
But I’m going to go further – I’m giving up on bathwash and going back to soap – which when you think about it requires far less, even no, packaging. (Yes, okay it helps that I’m in Nice and bought a heap of lovely local, “all-vegetable” vanilla soaps, sans packaging.)
But this is just one more example of how we’ve gone mad on pointless consumption in the past couple of decades. (I can remember, just, when soap was all there was, arriving probably in a cardboard box, or possibly a thin plastic wrap around a six-pack – back in about 1980.)
It seems there’s an election in the air – zero-tolerance, support for “have-a-go heroes”, extra-clean hospitals, complaints about violence on TV – and that’s just from the Labour (ie supposedly “left wing”) side – who knows what the Tories will manage to find in response to that – “back to basics”? (Despite the fact it seems the leader’s wife, while now just doing the “supportive spouse” stuff, has both a real career, and a real politics – Green Party.)
But should we be writing the final days of a Labour government, I think this story sums it up: Britain is going to get rid of inefficient incandescent lightblubs, but very, very slowly, and only because big business has agreed it can.
Currys has agreed to stop selling the bulbs by the end of this year, Habitat by 2009, Woolworths, the Co-op, Asda, Morrison’s, and Sainsbury’s by 2010, and Tesco by 2011. Only Somerfield has declined to give a date for a complete phase-out.
A Million Woman March has been called for London next International Women’s Day. I’m interested, and impressed by the approach taken by what seems to be a linked (at least by name) American example from 2004.
But there are aspects of the rhetoric and approach in Britain that worry me. If it’s going to focus on issues like honour killings, forced marriage, domestic violence and rape (particularly the need to address community attitudes that lead juries to often acquit), and the need to defend reproductive freedoms, then great.
But equating a job-seeker being offered a lap dancing job (it doesn’t seem she was being forced to take the job) with matters of that seriousness, and promoting it as a day of prayer – prayer! when you look at the enormous violence against women’s bodies and dignity embodied in religion (just take today’s hideous example from the Catholic church) – makes me sway away.
Anyone know anything more about the people behind it?
I’ve finally got around to reading The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, which has been on my “must” list for some time. She had a very clear eye, and it’s clear that lots about gender relations hasn’t changed…
Those who criticize the female sex because they are inherently sinful are men who have wasted their youth on dissolute behaviour… they look back with nostalgia on the appalling way they used to carry on when they were younger. Now that old age has finally caught up with them … they are full of regret when they see that, for them, the ‘good old days’ are over and they can merely watch as younger men take over…
Those men who have slandered the opposite sex out of envy have usually known women who were cleverer and more virtuous than they are. Out of bitterness and spite, envious men such as these are driven to attack all women…(p18-19)
Christine is also surprisingly democratic; talking about women’s lack of knowledge. “As for this idea that … women’s inelligence is inferior to that of men simply because we see that those around us generally know less than men do, let’s take the example of male peasants living in remote countryside or high mountains. You could give me plenty of names of places where the men are so backward that they seem no better than beasts. Yet there’s nbo doubt that Nature made them as perfect in mind and body as the cleverest and most learned men to be found in towns and cities.” (p.58)
From the Penguin Classic, translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant 1999. (Although the translation is a little informal for my taste)
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