The Planet Will Be Just Fine Without Us

There was a recent article in the NY Times that the website Epicurious had stopped publishing beef recipes. They had done so for some time but no one apparently noticed until they announced they had done so. Then loads of folks got up in arms about it, which mystifies me. I mean, they haven't removed their old beef recipes - and how many ways does one need to have to cook something which is generally agreed not to be great for the planet or for human health if consumed too much. Personally, I applaud Epicurious for having done the obvious that so many others haven't.

I am aware that we are in a pickle if we don't drop our carbon emissions drastically in the coming years. There is an increasing amount of information about this in the media, but not a lot seems to be changing. I mean, everyone knows - or should - that flying is a really bad idea, but newspapers still have travel columns extolling a holiday in some faraway place. My WI magazine still advertises luxury cruises (also a climate nightmare). Recipes for beef continue as normal as well as all the cheap fashion shops with online outlets.

The UK government will ban sale of petrol and diesel cars in the near future. We've been discussing the purchase of a hybrid, should they still be available, when this car gives up the ghost. 

One could be forgiven for thinking, "Well, it's an 'emergency', but not really an "EMERGENCY." We do get a lot of mixed messaging. Like the fact that the UK government removed the tax breaks that had been attached to environmentally friendly purchases such as solar panels. That they set up a green housing scheme but then abandoned it shortly after. There has been a planning application approved for a new coal mine in Cumbria. The inconsistency is fairly confusing.

I do think we should stop saying 'Save the Planet', because the planet doesn't really need saving. Sure, we've wrecked a good bit of it and killed off an awful lot of plants and animals, if not entire ecosystems. However the planet was around long before homo sapiens developed and will likely be around - sun failure or major cosmic collision aside - for a terribly long time after we've starved or nuked ourselves out of existence. Other species will arise out of what's left and plants will overtake the empty cities and the planet will just carry on. I think Sixth Extinction is a better term, but perhaps we should make it even plainer: Extinction of the Human Race. 

I know that we humans are more attuned to thinking short term - looking forward to our next vacation, what's on my calender this week, what's for dinner tonight. Mind, the really rich guys - Bezos, Musk and even Branson all have space programmes. Presumably they've already given up on Saving the Planet and are looking for Planet B - or perhaps just a space station. I can't think of a less attractive proposition myself. Or perhaps they only want to offer a new sort of vacation. The ironic thing is that space programmes are even worse than airline flights for carbon emissions. So whether they are looking for a new home or just how to get away from this one for a while, they are helping to kill us all off.

Do I spend a great deal of time worrying about this? No. I don't expect to live long enough to see the really hard times. Also, I think we are fairly resilient in that we live - I was going to say 'quietly' but I think the word is 'modestly'. We eat very little beef, no lamb, more and more beans and grains and seasonal vegetables. We strive for a zero waste kitchen; our waste bin could be emptied every two or three months, but our recycling bin is much fuller. We seek re-uses for the packaging that comes into our house. We both wear our clothes to rags, walk for most errands, keep a car until no longer serviceable, haven't flown in two, perhaps three, years. I buy most of my clothes and books second hand. Neither of us routinely showers every day, but when needed - closer to twice a week. We wash our clothes after several wears and recently purchased a 'guppy's friend' washing bag. My crafting tends to be to make useful items, not just 'stuff' and I mend our clothes and household linens regularly. Our Christmas tree is at least 20 years old and the ornaments are from the mid-1940s on, bar the lights. We use brown paper wrapping or re-useable fabrics and Bill's kids are used to me retrieving bows and ribbons for re-use. In the past few years we've taken to exchanging food hampers rather than tat as gifts. I build a wishlist rather than buy every book or sewing kit I want and ask for these at birthdays and Christmas. I quit shopping on Amazon about three years ago. 

I looked into heating our house electrically and it would cost four times as much as using gas, so that hasn't changed yet. I could easily heat one room at a time, but Bill can't cope with that. The main need of our car is for Bill's walking expeditions, requiring him to meet up early on weekend mornings to obscure places, negating the use of public transport. I must admit I prefer to drive to any necessary places if it's pouring outside. I am in the habit of turning out the lights when leaving a room, but I sometimes forget and leave the oven on or time my jar heating badly when making jam. While we're both prepared to put on extra layers of clothing rather than turn up the thermostat (set at 19 C / 66 F), when my fingers are cold, I want be warmer. Our heating goes off at night. Our duvet is more than adequate in this temperate climate.

I still hope to meet my Norwegian cousins in the US and see the house in South Dakota and I still have family and friends in the US I'd like to see. I intend to make more trips at some point, depending upon how the pandemic goes. I would still like to see Norway and explore the area my Dad's ancestors inhabited. I can likely reach Norway via boat, but I can't envision boat travel all the way to the US. I know at some point I won't be able to manage long haul travel and there will come a point when I won't ever see my uncles again. As long as they are alive, I'm content to intend to see them, if that makes any sense. Perhaps only a procrastinator would understand that. 

Bill and I could potentially live in a much smaller house, however we have deemed this one to be our 'forever house'. Bill has already stated that if he survives me he is likely to sell and move closer to one of his children. Lately, however, he has come to appreciate the social contacts he has here and realises those would be hard to replace. If I survive Bill I expect to stay here for as long as possible - probably heating one room at a time. We are discussing what improvements are feasible to make the house more air-tight. 

Have you given any thought to reducing your carbon footprint?

Who Gives a Crap?

I suppose you've seen the ads on Facebook and elsewhere for Who Gives a Crap? I am always inclined to cringe a bit each time I see the name. I still remember coming home from 7th grade, feeling very cool and grown up and throwing out that word 'crap' in front of my mom. She promptly marched me to the bathroom and washed my mouth with soap. I was  too astonished at the whole process to resist, but I carefully watched my language around Mom from then on. 

I believe this is an Australian company. The advantages of ordering from them are 1) they donate half their profits to promote water, sanitation and hygiene projects in developing countries; 2) the come with pretty wrapping paper which can be seen in various craft projects; 3) it is delivered to your house via courier; 4) if you were so inclined, you could subscribe and never have to buy TP at the supermarket again. (However, you do have to get a bag to carry the stuff, make several trips upstairs and find a place for 48 rolls; in this case, the more loos you have, the better off you would be). 

I thought I'd give it a go, just out of curiosity. I ordered the regular TP, not the luxury bamboo type, though I might consider trying that later. Making a comparison with other toilet paper currently in the house will have to wait until we get another package down from the loft, as I never remember what qualities I've selected from the last shop. I tend to avoid brand names and definitely avoid anything scented. I sort of miss the pretty colours we used to get, but I gather this wasn't good for the environment. 

What I did do was weigh a regular toilet roll and a WGaC roll. The regular roll (quilted tp) weighed 85g. The WGaC weighed 182g. I noticed they were the same height, but the cardboard tube was much narrower for the WGaC roll. Also, the wrapping around the tube seemed tighter/more dense. I've noticed that the cardboard tube gets wider and wider with the off brands. In one case I saw that the rolls were also shorter. Mind, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about toilet paper, I just hate being ripped off. Also being treated as though I'm too stupid to notice such things.

That said, I did take note about how long each roll lasted. The ordinary one lasted from about mid-day on Wednesday to about mid-day Friday (2 days) The WGaC roll lasted from mid-day Friday to Monday evening (4 and a bit days), so a little over twice as long. This tp isn't quilted, it isn't very thick, but it's not the thinnest tp I've ever seen, but I do tend to use more of it than of the quilted.

Since I paid £36 for 48 rolls of tp, that is 75 pence per roll; the regular tp (according to Sainsbury's website) is about 25 pence per roll, but even if I use 50 pence in worth in the same time period, the WGaC is still slightly more expensive, which I don't mind given their charitable aims. My main concerns are two: 

1. Is the carbon cost of having it delivered to my house higher than having the supermarket deliver ordinary tp with all the rest of my groceries? (My guess is yes, but it is a guess).

2. What am I going to make with the pretty wrapping paper?

How Bad are Bananas?

So, on Tuesday I had nothing to say but I've finished a book since then: How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee. I was thinking he had invented the internet, but I had him confused with his brother, Tim. There are a few brain cells in that family for sure.

I can recommend the book for readability and for straight-forward explanations, but there isn't a great deal of good news in it. Frankly we'll all need to give up quite a bit of our comfortable lifestyles in order to save the human race and I don't see it happening, at least not until the planet gets fairly uncomfortable for a lot of us not at high risk. Which means it will be lethal for quite a few poorer people initially. 

He does give a good list of what we can do and one of the easier things is eating in season. He gives a list of fruits and veg grown in Britain by month. If we don't select from this group he recommends going for tinned or frozen to avoid air-freighted luxury items. Interestingly, bananas aren't much of a problem as they are grown with natural sunlight and the keep well enough to be shipped by boat rather than plane. So that's a relief. 

He also gives a website produced by the Marine Conservation Society to help people select the most sustainable fish:  Good Fish Guide. 

However, food only makes up a quarter of the average Brit's foodprint of 12.7 tonnes and we all need to aim for a 5 tonne footprint. Berners-Lee says a meat orientated diet can easily make up the whole of a 5 tonne foodprint. We have a lot of work to do!

A Life on Our Planet

I finished reading this book by Sir David Attenborough a week or so ago and it still resonates with me. I read it as a library book but decided to buy it because I wanted to re-read and study it. I want it to inform a lot of my purchasing decisions. I actually think it should be required reading for everyone on the planet - or at least for everyone with young children. 

Although this book is packed with scientific information, it's an easy read - except perhaps for the Glossary which I found I had to concentrate to get through. All those terms placed in context with his straightforward style of writing were easy to take on board when introduced in the text. 

It isn't a terribly depressing book either. I had watched his television programme of the same title and found that though the information presented was alarming, the gorgeous photography and the history of his career (in black and white) was fascinating. This book does present much of the same information but it also presents some of the possible solutions being developed. He sets the stage for us all to make some adjustments as well. 

One of the things I love about A Life on Our Planet is that is explains why some things are important, eg 'diversity'. I've recently come to associate this term more with racial and other minority people being more included in society, but of course diversity of species is one of the necessary criteria for health of the planet. Or, let's be right about it, health of the human race. The planet will be just fine, thank you very much, without humans. The plant life we work so hard to beat back will re-grow, various inconvenient species will thrive and the ecosystem will set about re-creating itself. The species we've killed off may never return, but other species will develop to take their place, in time.

For example, Attenborough explains why we needed to stop killing off whales: 

A key problem restricting life in the open ocean is the availability of nutrients. When conditions are right, plants and animals live in the surface waters and, when they die, drift continuously downwards as 'marine snow'. Where nutrients are not freely available, the surface waters of the oceans can be almost sterile. Just as land plants need fertiliser as well as sun and water, so phytoplankton, the photosynthesising foundation of the food web, need nitrogenous compounds in the sunlit surface waters if they are to thrive. There are places in the ocean where the decomposed marine snow is stirred and carried upwards by the currents flowing over submarine mountains and ridges, and here the phytoplankton - and hence fish populations - can flourish. But the rest of the open ocean would remain a vast, blue desert were it not for the whales. They are so big that when they dive to feed in the depths or rise to the surface to breathe, they can create a great stirring of the water around them. That helps keep nutrients near the surface. And when they defecate, the waters around them are also greatly enriched. This 'whale pump' as it is often termed, is now recognised as a significant process in maintaining the fertility of the open ocean. Indeed, whales are now thought to be responsible for bringing more important nutrients to surface waters in some parts of the ocean than the outflows of local revers. The ocean of the Holocene needed its whales to remain productive. In the twentieth century, men killed close to 3 million of them.

He also includes the idea of a 'Donut Economy' as part of his vision for the future. Population growth is a large contributor to the difficulties we are facing. He quotes a report I hope to read soon: The Economics of Biodiversity, which states that 50% of the impact we humans have on the living world is attributable to the richest 16% of the human population. I am curious to learn whether I am part of that 16%. Don't laugh - there are an incredible number of very poor people in the world and it is remarkably easy to be 'rich' by comparison if one lives in a developed country. The donut economy should be our compass for the future: the inside ring is a minimum standard of living to be enjoyed by all humans: clean water, health care, food, housing, gender equality and other basics for a decent life, called the 'social foundation'. The outer ring is is called the 'ecological ceiling' which is the limit of our human activities that the natural world can tolerate and still be in balance, still provide us a place to live. Some of these boundaries include climate change, air pollution, biodiversity loss, fresh water withdrawals, among others. Not all of these boundaries have been quantified, but several have already been breached and need to be brought back into line. Using the Donut Economy is seen as the best way to bring all nations into a state of population stability, to help them transition past the high death rates and resulting high birth rates.

One of my favourite parts of this book is about empowerment of women. It seems that 

Among all these social improvements, one in particular is found to significantly reduce family size - the empowerment of women. Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to health care and contraception, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The  reason for this is straightforward - empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, they choice is to have fewer children. The faster and more fully women are empowered, the quicker a nation will move through State 3 and on to state 4. 

I may have fallen in love with David Attenborough when I read those words. He goes on to describe various examples of empowerment. As it happens I am also in the midst of reading The Moment of Lift: how empowering women changes the world, by Melinda Gates. It hasn't thus far told me a great deal I didn't already know or suspect, but it's an interesting read all the same. At this point I might venture the opinion that it is more about social psychology than philanthropy.

So, I hope I've convinced you to read A Life on Our Planet. Do you think you might?

Kitchen Issues

For years, every Thanksgiving, I have bought new containers of baking powder and of baking soda (AKA bicarbonate of soda) to be sure my holiday baking turns out well. (Also ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, but that is a different post). Not that I don't still have other containers of baking powder /soda in the cupboard, I just don't trust them - in date or out of date, they aren't always reliable.

One of the last times I did this I got rather fed up. I know that baking soda can also be used as a cleaner on bathroom fixtures, being a bit abrasive. It is also useful for absorbing unwanted smells in places like the refrigerator. But those bases are already covered with other out of date containers. Also, I was wondering if there was anything I could do with out of date baking powder. Turns out it's also slightly abrasive, so could in theory be used as a cleaner.

Another question I had was how to tell if they might still be good for their original baking purposes. So I looked it up. 

For baking soda, put about a quarter teaspoon of the baking soda into about 3 tablespoons of vinegar. It should fizz quite a bit as soon as it hits the vinegar (so choose a bowl large enough to contain this reaction). If it doesn't fizz or does so slowly, it probably won't act as the rising agent you want.

For baking powder, do much the same, only with a half a cup of hot water instead of vinegar. Apparently baking powder reacts twice in your baking: once when it meets the liquid and again when the mixture is heated. That was new news to me, for sure.

Another thing I learned was that unopened baking powder is more likely to still be active as it is exposure to damp that causes it to lose its lift.  Unopened baking soda lasts almost indefinitely and one source suggested that opened baking soda could last as long as about three years; other sources say indefinitely...so knowing how to test it is important.

I already knew that a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar would make the equivalent of baking powder. The equivalent of a teaspoon of baking powder is made by mixing one-half teaspoon of cream of tartar with one-quarter teaspoon of baking soda. This adds up to three-quarters of a teaspoon of powder, not a whole teaspoon, which suggests that the homemade mixture may well be stronger than store bought. 

Finally, given that baking soda has quite a long shelf life so long as it is kept dry and cool, I wondered about the shelf life of cream of tartar. Given dry and cool conditions it apparently also lasts indefinitely. 

All this has made me decide to a) test my opened baking powder and if it bubbles, use it up sooner rather than later; b) buy more cream of tartar; c) make sure I only ever have one opened container of any of these items at a time regardless of any use-by dates; d) have a go at making my own baking powder. If I make small amounts when needed and keep the baking soda and cream of tartar dry, I might save a bit of money and prevent some needless waste.

Do you ever research questions like this?

Jars

I have a whole other post drafted about hoarding collecting of things most people would throw away. I hope to develop in to show why this is not crazy, but useful.

For the moment I will show you the jars I've collected, with the help of Vivien, I might add. The reason I started saving small bottles was because of the fruit alcohols I make for Christmas presents. It turns out that few bottles look right other than small (187 ml or thereabouts) wine bottles or slightly larger ones with nice shapes. A salad dressing bottle seems only destined to hold salad dressing or a lemon juice bottle only lemon juice. Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on my part.

Keepers.

However, wine bottles are great for freezing rose hip syrup. And then Bill took up making homemade wine. I was pleased to see him find a new hobby. So far there have been few results I call really drinkable, but every now and then he comes up with something really nice, like elderberry and damson wine. We tend to keep bottles with a punt (a dip in the bottom) for dealing with sediments for his wine making. Flat bottomed bottles are for rose hip syrup.

When Buy-the-Kilo opened up at the metro station near us, she sold her products either in expensive (to my mind) new jars and bottles (£2/£3 each) or she took community donations of jars which she cleaned and sold on for 50p each. Mostly she encouraged people to bring their own containers. I am amazed I've not written here about her marvelous shop, but then I've not written much here of late at all. It deserves its own post, I think. Anyhow, I saved jars to take to her.

For Jackie / re-cycling

Then when I began wanting to make jams I needed the type of jar with a dimple on the top. (Jam making in Britain is a whole different process to most food preservation in the US. I won't pretend to have the expertise to explain why this works). I wanted smallish ones, so that I could spread the varieties out and interesting shapes were nice, too. Since we'd recycled most of our marmalade jars from the past and honey jars don't have dimples, I needed help with this. Vivien also went through a jam making stage but she kindly shared a few of her jam jars. When I got really desperate I went down to Buy-the-Kilo and bought jars from her for 50p each. She had some nice square ones on offer.

Having been on holiday to Vienna with Jane and Chris, Bill's sister and brother-in-law, we discovered not only that Chris liked stewed apples but we did as well. So I began saving coffee and other large jars for freezing stewed apples to eat with our porridge or cereal. These coffee jars were also useful for filling up with dried fruits or popcorn at Buy-the-Kilo.

More keepers.

We got all these jars out of the loft or under the stairs because I understood that Jackie, at Buy-the-Kilo, was running out of her community donated jars and bottles and I had placed an order with her. Our original plan was to take these jars down to her when Bill picked up our order. Then she changed her mind about this and was using her full price bottles. All her dry products she was putting in paper bags and charging 10p each, what they cost her. It may be that people are nervous about used jars or she doesn't now have time to be re-cleaning them all.

Of course, jars can be used to store food, much like the plastic containers we're all used to. The freezer has lots of glass jars in there with various contents. The same as with plastic containers, they need to be under-filled to give room for expansion when the contents freeze. With plastic containers the lid will pop off while glass may shatter. 

My button collection is stored in jars, sorted by colour group. That deserves a photo by itself when I get a moment. How can just staying at home feel so busy?

In the end, I picked out all the jars I thought I might want for jams, stewed apples and purchasing post-pandemic at Buy-the-Kilo and we recycled the rest. I didn't have to heart to ask Bill to haul them all back up into the loft. Hope I don't find I needed those after all!

Another Post-Christmas Post

Does anyone else try to save Christmas wrapping paper to re-use? I don't exactly resent buying wrapping paper, the part I hate is that it is a single-use item. Most of us have lived in a time of such abundance that we fail to recognise the environmental cost of manufacture, we only look at the financial cost of the item. 

Toying with the idea of fancy shaped gift tags...

So much of today's Christmas paper incorporates plastic and glitter (which is minute bits of plastic) and this prevents it from being re-cyclable. So on top of the natural materials, like trees and petroleum by-product, the dyes and the energy required to heat, cut and otherwise fuel the mechanisation of production, if the paper isn't able to be re-cycled into more paper or toilet paper or something, it goes to landfill, where the plastics take hundreds of years to decompose. All that for a single, brief, decorative function. It seems a ridiculous waste to me.

So I provide large bags and ask Bill's kids to place any paper or ribbons they don't wish to keep in them. I know at least one of them (I'm not naming names) takes great delight in crushing the paper into as small a ball as possible. This person is a lovely individual, but their lifestyle is an environmental nightmare. One good thing is that if the paper can be crushed and remains crushed, at least it is probably re-cyclable as plastic won't stay crushed.

I've used brown paper wrapping and fancy re-useable bows for years now. Also, bottle and other shaped paper bags seem to circulate a lot around here. I tend to punch a hole in the bags between the handles and pull a ribbon through to tie the top shut. If the item is too big to allow this, I put tissue paper in the top to hide the item. You won't be surprised to find a save any tissue paper that comes my way. 

This is the second year that we've had food hampers as a major gift exchange. If we are lucky, we get a hamper back at some point. Sarah gave Bill her Christmas hamper re-filled with items for his 70th birthday, which I thought was clever. When we buy these things they come with enormous sheets of clear plastic, another silly single use piece of garbage. I managed to rescue one this year for re-use. Our sheer curtains (cream-coloured) in the front room are due for replacement. Fabric exposed to sunlight over time will break down. The old curtain is enormous and I'm hoping to use that to wrap future hampers, perhaps with any rips repaired with Christmas-coloured mending or patches. We'll see how that goes.

This year when I processed my bags of wrapping paper in several stages. The largest pieces were ironed on a low heat and wrapped around a tube. Decent pieces that were too small to be likely useful got cut up into A4 (letter-size) sheets or A5 (half a letter-size) sheets. The former for making into notebooks, the latter for scribbling notes, grocery lists or possibly smaller notebooks. The odd shaped smaller pieces were stapled together in bunches and put into a kitchen drawer for the same. 

The ragged bits of paper went into the paper recycling; the plastic stuff into the trash. I was pleased to see only two small waste baskets full of trash out of four very large bags. 

An idea I've just run across in collecting ideas for our WI craft group, is Swedish hearts. They can be made from many things but I thought Christmas patterned paper might make cute tree decorations. I'll show them to you if I do make some....OK, that sounded a bit lame to me, so I took the time to do this. It's a bit fiddly but completely do-able. I used this lady's instructions but didn't find her template and my hand drawn one wasn't proportionally (at least I think that was the problem).  This free template has four 'tines' instead of three, which was no problem at all, but it is a bit larger than I might want for ornaments; that said, larger is probably easier for learning. Apparently, you can also make Swedish stars, but I will leave that for another day.