10 Practical Ways You can Save the Planet

People power has brought in seat belts in cars. It has changed attitudes to drink driving. It has stopped smoking in public places. Each individual action is important & together we do have huge power. It's the Butterfly Effect.🦋

Unless everyone does something the Climate Emergency will get worse. It's no good trying to pass responsibility on to someone else. YOU have to ACT. You have to take responsibility for what you are doing or not doing. LEAD by example.

This is my simple list of what everyone can do.

 

Practical Ways to save the Planet in the face of the Climate Emergency

1. Leave the fossil fuel Car at home. If you must drive, reduce air pollution by driving an Electric car.

2. Rethink how you travel for shorter journeys – get a Bus. Boost your physical & mental health Cycle or Walk.

3. Reduce aviation growth. Fly less - Train not Plane.

4. Reduce Energy use & save money. Change your lightbulbs. Turn down heating thermostats.

5. Insulate your home.

6. Eat less Meat & Dairy to also reduce the risk of health problems.

7. Reduce, Reuse, Repair & Recycle.

8. Help to make your Garden or Local area wildlife & pollinator friendly. Grow your own food.

9. Lobby politicians – they need to know how much you care.

10. Donate to support the climate.

 

And AVOID PLASTIC.

Just think what we could achieve. There is no Plan B. There is no Planet B.

 

Your Choice.   

 

 

Climate Emergency & Individual Action

 At least 13 years ago my husband, now departed, foretold the consequences of our unsustainable way of life & destruction of the planet. He was a "glass half empty" person & thought that our selfish lifestyles would result in consequences so grave that there would be public unrest & rioting in the streets. He wanted us to consider what we would do if he was right. He thought we should be prepared to commit suicide in extremis.

I was not that negative.

At the time I was working with a man who was possibly a genius. (Also a manic depressive). But he knew far more than me about climate change & had the skills to design & build a "passive haus" & develop  technology to deal with no fossil fuels.

Now I know far more having been closely involved with NGO's like Greenpeace, Client Earth, Population Matters, Plantlife & Shelter Box......Now I really fear for the future of my 16 year old grandchildren. They are going to inherit the depleted world we have created since man started to till the earth & went on to create the Industrial Revolution.

There is nothing more important than this. Although we are intelligent & inventive & probably have the skills to put right a lot of the havoc we have created, there is very little time. 

There isn't time for "talking shops" & posturing. There isn't time for signing pledges & not fulfilling them. There isn't time to carry on with "business as usual" for a bit. 

This is a question of survival - for every living thing on this planet. 

Once we are gone, unless we are daft enough to bomb ourselves out of existance & contaminate the whole world, the wonderful world ecosystem will regenerate itself. 

Then, just possibly, this beautiful world will evolve & survive. Without the contaminating hand of greedy, self serving, money obsessed humans.

https://www.facebook.com/greenpeaceuk/videos/418528783160273

Broken Supply Chain - To Panic or not to Panic!

Anyone who has ever done building work knows that it never goes entirely smoothly. There are always unexpected problems to deal with. It's all a question of degree - real schedule & heart stopping surprises, down to minor inconveniences. It's all a question of how you deal with the unexpected. Are you a lateral thinker, are you positive, do you look for solutions, are you prepared to compromise?

If you aren't, don't even get started, because the stress will get to you.

My timing is dreadful. This is not a good time to be doing a big renovation & extension. The building trade is in crisis. The supply chain is broken. Materials are in short supply & have increased hugely in price. It doesn't matter what you need, there are long lead times & suppliers are fraught. Getting hold of people is a nightmare, despite the fact that this is 21st century communication. I'm tired of phone menus & music, voicemail, being cut off, non response to emails, people not doing their job.

Not everyone. Some do their darndest to help you through the issues - Bless them all. But they are in the minority.

So last week was a shocker:-

• The order for the ultra modern metal cladding for my extension, which should have been confirmed at the beginning of September wasn't. So now the company can't do it until Feb / March 2022.
• The bifold doors & windows, also for the extension, which I ordered a couple of months ago & should have been ready within a few weeks, are not even on the horizon. The lead time suddenly stretched to 16 weeks - February 2022. They must have known that before now!
• The company who are supposed to be fitting my sliding sash windows this week are not answering the phone or responding to answerphone messages. The plastering can't be finished until the windows are done.
  
• I've been waiting on accurate measurements so I can design my kitchen for months.

There is progress. The foundations are being built & the extension itself should be quick to build. It just won't have any cladding, doors, or windows. The flooring I ordered is coming this week, so the bathroom can be installed. The garden & groundworks are a sea of mud & rubble, but have been cleared. The shed I have ordered is coming this week - really looking forward to that. (Just need to find someone to erect it). The company I found to strip all the internal doors is collecting them this week. I really want to re-use them. They are original & solid wood, but are thick, sticky, smoke grimed paint.

Literally every single thing from the floor up to the loft, in both the renovation & the extension involves choices & costings. The only way to deal with it all is to be organised & ahead of the curve. I'm trying to plan the kitchen - need to get to grips with the sorftware. Ditto wardrobe planning software. I have a notebook & pen beside my bed so I can write down the things that spring into my brain in the middle of the night. How obsessive is that!

But - and it's a big but. This is only a house. It isn't COP 26. I don't live in a war or famine zone. There are more important things than my home.

 

Renovation & Building

 Stripping out - Thick lime plaster walls, lath & plaster ceilings & internal walls. 

Filthy, noisy, dusty work.

Mountains of rubbish - Several huge skips.

Demolishing - the sun room & old outside loo & larder - Spot the difference.

Front & back garden - 4 trees removed & huge shrubs drastically pruned. Stump grinder for massive Lime tree.

Mini digger scraping off all the weeds. Suddenly the garden is much bigger.

Help - I need a landscape gardener to tell me what to do!

Boarding Out -All the internal outside walls are well insulated under the plasterboard.

Bricking in - the old side door. A new one will go where the window is.

New Foundations - Literally & metaphorically.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Message from the past - Done in 1950, something to do with papering the room.

It's definitely all been a learning curve. Always interesting, sometimes exciting, sometimes frustrating & occasionally quite depressing. But the people I have working for me are amazing & hard working. I'm really grateful for their practical experience & knowledge. 

Who knows when it will be finished though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ageing, Pain & Disability

My father & mother in law went through their lives until they were in their 90's relatively pain free & healthy. My father said he had never had a headache. My father in law never seemed to be ill in all the years I knew him. My mother always seemed old to me & in a lot of pain. The older I get the more I think that Genetics has a lot to do with health - I am my mother reincarnated. Fortunately I don't think my daughter will follow my genetics, she has my mother in law's body.

38% of adults in the UK were in daily chronic pain in 2020. Over 8 million people in the UK said they have chronic pain 19.5 million people in the UK were in pain at least once a day. Chronic Pain affects 1 in 3 young adults

https://www.formulatehealth.com/blog/chronic-pain-statistics-uk-2020

 

You would think that statistics like that would mean that there would be lots of research into pain & effective treatments. Versus Arthritis has produced a new report on Chronic Pain this year (2021). The recommendations starting on Page 93 make interesting reading to someone like me, because there is little similarity to our lived experience.

https://www.versusarthritis.org/media/23782/chronic-pain-report-june2021-print-friendly.pdf

Chronic pain is largely unseen, unless like me you have "flare ups". Normally I look normal. During the current episode I have barely been able to walk, stand, sit, lie down, carry anything or dress myself. When it's that bad I look like the elderly woman I am. The pain & lack of sleep is exhausting. You are isolated in a cocoon of disability & pain especially if you live alone. Nothing seems to work.

Doctors prescribe drugs of varying efficacy to treat the symptoms. Alternative therapists can help a lot, but in my experience temporarily. That is a lifeline though. Exercise, distraction technique, pacing & a positive attitude helps a lot. Each chronic pain sufferer has to find what works best for them.

But we all need the medical community to adopt the recommendations for treatment plans sooner rather than later, because living with pain is no fun, however positive you try to be.

Neighbourliness

We live on a crowded island. We don't have a big landmass like France (126% more landmass) or Germany (47% more landmass). That means that although we value home ownership, again in contrast to our European neighbours, we don't generally end up with a big plot of land all round. 51% of Germans owned their homes, 65% of the French did & 63% -73% Brits did in the same period.

This space poverty is particularly true in Urban areas. So it is important that we "live & let live". That we are generous spirited. Covid has shown that we can keep an eye out for our neighbours & often help where we can.

I have only once had a problem with neighbours in the whole 55 years that I have lived in my own home. That was 3 houses ago. The man was very wealthy & very obnoxious. I was actually afraid of him & that is not something that usually affects me. He was simply a bully. However Karma worked against him & he lost a lot of money & had to sell up.

Renovating my house has been a revelation. Most of my neighbours to be have been extremely welcoming, friendly & tolerant of the noise, disruption, dust & mess created by the work - I am so grateful. I am just surprised at the occasional level of intrusiveness & unnecessary difficulty that can be caused. 

The neighbour who stopped work on the felling of my lime tree because she erroneously said there was a  TPO on the tree, caused the whole team of tree surgeons to stop work. There was a lengthy delay while we tried to confirm that we were right & she was wrong. I was extremely worried. Frankly it was self interested & malicious. She just didn't want to be able to see my house from the back of her house.

Then a neighbour informed my builder that she had checked our planning permission & wanted him to know that she knew that the depth of the extension had been reduced by the planners. She would be checking to see that he complied. The reduction is 15cms - 6" in old money! Of course we will comply. Why would we want the hassle of having to remove anything wrongly constructed? What I really object to is the implication that I and my builder are dishonest & untrustworthy. 

 

 

It isn't the first time that we have been made to feel that we would not comply with "building regulations" or any relevant legislation. It isn't pleasant. To be honest it leaves a bad taste. 

I just need to focus on the much bigger proportion of really nice neighbours.

Land Ownership

In theory I own a house & the land it stands on. I've been an unmortgaged home owner for decades. That same plot of land will have been owned by a succession of people way back. If you go back far enough I imagine it was countryside. After I've gone it will belong to someone else.

I don't feel I actually own it. I'm just the temporary guardian of the land & the house that sits on it. I should maintain it in the best possible state.

I watched a really good documentary about the climate emergency showing communities in the Southern Hemisphere who had actually had their islands swallowed up by rising sea levels. They had thought their homes were permanent. They discovered that they are not, because of our lack of stewardship of the planet we live on.

People all over the world are losing their homes for all sorts of reasons. Some are climate related, some are because of man's misconceived belief that we own the countries we live in. That belief starts wars. Population migrations have already reached pandemic proportions. Countries are becoming protectionist. They fail to see that every human being has the right to a home, safety, food & the necessities of life.

People will flee from flood, fire, rising seas, war, famine, poverty & all the terrors which beset the world today. We have to recognise that we cannot be protectionist. We cannot sit in our homes in a relatively secure country & pull up the drawbridge to keep refugees out. It matters little whether they are fleeing persecution, devastation or poverty. They have the same rights that we do. 

The simple fact is that all human beings everywhere have the right to expect other human beings to help them in any way they can. I'm not a Christian, but the "Good Samaritan" story epitomises all religious & moral belief.

I recognise that this will play havoc with our own little lives. It will devastate the world economy & big business. But if we don't truly understand this there will not just be civil unrest. The world will suffer a huge upheaval. Again I'm not a Christian. But maybe that's what Armageddon was warning us about.

We have heard he message. We have to come together to find solutions.