going greener

This weekend we watched Al Gore’s film « An Inconvenient Truth ». In a way, it didn’t present us with anything surprising. We already knew there was a global environmental crisis, and Al Gore shows just how true this is. Part of me feels totally pessimistic about it – changing anything will require sacrifices on the part of a lot of people who don’t want to make those sacrifices. And when it comes down to it, human beings are fundamentally selfish. The only hope we have is that we will realise that we need to work for our longterm self-interest rather than having an ostrich-like focus on our short-term comfort and economic growth.

Marc and I are trying to become more environmentally friendly. We’ve recycled for a long time, and have found lots of tips to improve our impact on the world from the Generous online community. I would encourage anyone to go onto their website and have a look. As they say about themselves:

"Basically it's a rapidly growing crowd of people who think that if a lot of us begin to make small changes in the way we live, then together we will create a big change in favour of the planet and its people.

"There's now more than a thousand of us signed up and each month we get emailed some suggested Generous Actions and the idea is to try and commit to taking on one or two - and then making them part of our everyday life.

"Some are easy (takes five minutes to sign up online as an organ donor), some are more of a hassle (switching to an ethical bank, putting a plastic brick in your cistern to save water, starting to shop local and fair trade) and some are more challenging (cutting back on your car use, offsetting your airmiles, improving home energy efficiency).

"Every time a Generous member commits to an action, it gets logged on the site - for example there's now 415 people who have stopped taking carrier bags from shops, 365 who turn off the tap when cleaning their teeth, and 308 who have unplugged their chargers to reduce their emissions.

"If it sounds like your kind of thing, you can read more about it here
http://generous.org.uk/about/"