I was on board the moment I heard about it. I’m totally fed with shopping in supermarkets, and have gone long periods avoiding them as much as possible. It’s really hard when you live in a city, in a flat with no garden, five minutes walk from the nearest supermarket.

It’s really hard to stick to ethical choices with your food shopping – you are wandering around lifting up a lethargic hungover arm, grabbing a bunch of bananas without knowing the cause and affect of your purchase. It’s a total disconnect from reality.

It got me thinking though – why not more of this? Food cooperatives can be a community endeavour, allowing a group of people to buy good food at a really good price, as well as encouraging ethical suppliers.

If Big Society was a real thing, I think food cooperatives would be quite high at the top of the list I’d put forward. I wander what the options would be to incentivise people to set up a food cooperative? Match funding towards essentials - like food storage facilities? Or even free basic business management courses for those setting up a coop.

Useful link here on setting up a food cooperative.

It could be argued that midnight on a Monday is not the time to be having this revelation. Some things have been happening lately which have reminded me of how strongly I felt about saving the planet a few years ago. So why the hell am I not doing it now?

I’ve decided to take a series of actions over the next 6 months to move towards a more environmentally friendly life.

Action one: restart blog.  This means I can keep check of the stuff I’m doing, plus I can tick off action one as done. Everybody loves a completer/finisher.

 I can understand the rational behind adopting nuclear power – low carbon etc, but let us not gloss over the issues!

The govt. are citing France as an example of best practice, yet do not highlight the fact that France wastes far less energy than we do in the first place. Perhaps addressing the issues of energy efficiency would be more cost effective, and productive seeing as Britons currently waste one third of energy produced in this country. Also bear in mind that France has a lot more space for nuclear than we do, and a lot less people per square mile.

Secondly, many of the new reactors would not be online for at least two decades! That is after we have developed a shortfall in energy.

Now my third point is a little double-edged. The safety of radioactive products and the longevity of radioactive waste has to be highlighted, yet at the same time how can you learn this unless you allow for funding and research to be carried out into making nuclear power.

Yes, allowing development all over flood plains (the clue is in the name) led to a huge impact on thousands of UK citizens over the summer, but extreme rainfall is really out of our hands. There is really nothing we can do to prevent widespread flooding. Aside from a mass migration to higher ground, everyone is just going to have to move their plug sockets a bit further up the wall. Clean drains would also help.

We should just be thankful this isn’t Bangladesh. I bet people over there have bigger things to worry about than insurance premiums.

I’ve started a new job, which covers the whole of South East England, so have been very busy.
Also will be out of action for a few weeks more, but when i come back, i’ll have a lot to say, especially now i’m witness to the seedy underbelly of environmentalism. Or something.

This is on top of the already vast number of people previously relocated during the construction phase, who have lost a way of life and are now more dependent on the state for help than ever.

Environmentally, not only is mass migration of humans bad news in the short term, it also has huge long term consequences. Was the dam really worth all this?

However what i do dispute is the need to kill them all! This entirely unneccesary thing happens for a number of reasons.

Shark fins – highly prized for food, medicine etc. As of recently Holland and Barratt still carried herbal remedies which contained cartillage from shark fins, fished from an unsustainable, and some have said possibly illegal source. Of course i wouldn’t say that though. I appreciate that some island communities can use this practice as a sustainable means of income, but large scale culling is creating a huge problem for ocean biodiversity.

Secondly, sharks are killed because they interfere with our lives. Did you know that in South Africa, sharks are lured away from popular tourist beaches by towing bait to more remote locations? Once the sharks reach the bait they are caught and killed. Of course this becomes a vicious cycle, as more and more sharks are attracted to the area.

Yes, some sharks can kill humans, but only when they mistake you for a nice seal or some such. There may still be undiscovered species of sharks swimming around down there, due to a real lack of research.

Cute and cuddly species such as dolphins and sea turtles get all the good press, and therefore all the good funding. If you were a jobbing marine biologist looking for some work, would you pitch an idea that was more likely to get long term funding, or an idea that had very little chance? Exactly.

I’m not suggesting that you go and hug a shark, but i would like you to see them for the amazing role they play in regulating ocean ecosystems. Remember, they also keep nastier creatures than themselves at bay.

If all the sharks in the world disappear, we could be in a whole lot of trouble!

It’s been really infuriating, especially as so much has happened that i want to talk about!

1. Live Earth – what a shocking waste of time and money

2. Flooding – i know Worcestershire very well indeed, so the ‘unprecedented’ flooding was more than a little upsetting. However, it is not down to this ridiculous ‘global warming’ idea. If it’s anything like that, it’s going to be climate change. There has been flooding this bad before, it just hasn’t seemed as important because a)there were less houses back then to be flooded, and b) there was less media coverage and fewer instrumental records of the flooding back then, and finally c) our sewerage system is pretty damn old, and can’t cope with what we put through it these days, and certainly can’t cope with increased surface run-off during heavy rainfall (‘flash flooding’).

Ok, rant over………for now!

Wound crust (4)

Yum.