Generous Blog Entries

Your favourite ethical snack?

2010-05-27T09:00:43Z

Back in February, BBC News reported that Gordon Brown had reportedly weaning himself off his four-KitKats-a-day habit and was now eating nine bananas instead to get fit for the election.

We know now that it was a switch that didn’t quite pay off – election-wise, at least. But it got us to thinking: *what is your favourite ethical snack? *

(Of course, there has also been loads in the news about the evils of KitKat since then too – along with many chocolate products which use Palm Oil. See this Guardian article for the background and click here to register your disapproval via the GreenPeace campaign against Kitkat.)

We’d like to hear from you about your favourite ethical snack (The Ethical Consumer site might help you decide what are truly worthy of the tag.) I’m still partial to a Geobar myself! Leave your comments below and let’s build up a picture of the Generous community’s leanings.

Flickr photo source – thanks es_possible.

What A Difference A Day Makes (Another Small Idea)

2010-04-24T15:32:09Z

If everyone in the UK gave up meat for one day a week, the reduction in greenhouse gases would be like taking 5million cars off the roads. How come we don’t hear this kind of green-sky thinking from the mainstream political parties.

We could tell you that the UN says the farming and slaughtering of animals is one of the top three causes of major environmental problems confronting the world, from land degradation and climate change to air pollution and water shortages. And that animal farming accounts for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector. But it’d be more fun if you just watched this brilliant video instead. (And then go meat-free one day a week…)

So all the main parties in the UK election campaign tell us that our future energy needs can be met by a combination of fossil fuels, wind, wave and solar power and clean nuclear energy. And that if we all get our homes insulated, we’ll be burning less energy and finally halting climate change. But if insulation and micro-energy generation can be government subsidised to speed public uptake, why doesn’t government intervene in the market to accelerate moves to a less meat-based diet? If government can fund public education to convert people to healthier lifestyles, why not persuade the public to eat less meat. Healthier diet, healthier planet.

Click here for more.

And sign up for the meat-free dat action on the Generous site here.

If You Could Give Away Your Vote

2010-04-16T10:16:13Z

Supposing you could give away your vote. That your decision on where to mark your X was not about how much tax you want to pay. About who will create the best schools or protect the NHS. Not about the most trustworthy leader, how soon we pay down the national debt or deal with greedy bankers.

Supposing you could give away your vote.

Supposing you could give it to Blessings, in Tanzania, who doesn’t go to school because there are no separate girls toilets.

Or to Richard, in Uganda, raising his younger brothers alone, since losing his parents to AIDS.

Or to Mohammed, in Eritrea, who has to walk miles every morning to get water for his family.

Or to Aminul in Bangladesh, whose land is periodically submerged since the climate starting pushing up the tide.

Or Mary, in Ghana, whose wages are so low because rich countries subsidise their agriculture.

Supposing you could give your vote to Blessings or Aminul? To Richard or Mohammed?

To a member of your family you have never met, in a country you have never visited.

Who would the vote you give them be cast for?

Who would you vote for if you could see life through their eyes ?

One Vote 2010 is a campaign to get UK voters to put fighting poverty at the heart of the coming election.

This is Oxfam’s Election guide to tackling poverty

Here’s Christian Aid’s Election Manifesto for the poorest countries

Flickr photosource – thanks magnusfranklin

A Generous Election: What's The Small Idea?

2010-03-08T12:12:33Z

Generation or insulation? Time to get our houses in order.

The government’s recently announced micro-generation scheme is great news. Isn’t it? If you install small-scale renewable energy generating capability into your house there will be a guaranteed pay-back per kw on all the electricity you produce for 25 years – no matter if you use that energy yourself or sell it back to the Grid. (Read more about these ‘feed in tariffs’ here.)

‘If the government offered to pay you £1,000 a year for the next 25 years, in return for an up-front investment of £12,500, you’d snap it up in a second.’

Not everyone thinks this is good news. The biggest detractor is environmental campaigner George Monbiot.

’Buying a solar panel is now the best investment a householder can make … If you own a house and can afford the investment, you’d be crazy not to cash in … Had this money been spent instead on insulation or double glazing, it could have helped relieve fuel poverty at the same time as cutting emissions. But the feed-in tax is both wasteful and regressive. The government has now decided not to oblige people to improve the efficiency of their homes before they can claim a tariff: you’ll be paid to put a solar panel on your roof even if the roof contains no insulation.’

Strong stuff.

At the same time, Energy Secretary Ed Milliband has announced a green loans scheme which would help overcome the financial barriers and upfront costs people face when trying make their homes greener. The loans made would remain attached to the house where insulation, solar panels or other green technology was installed.

So what’s a Generous take on this? Well, there’s probably several (add your comments below) but here’s a small idea from me: let’s persuade the next government to introduce measures that stand to benefit everyone in the country at the same time as moving us towards our carbon emission reduction goals.

For my money this would be about grants/loans for insulation and energy efficiency and grants for renewable technology insulation, and arguably without the guaranteed pay-pack tariffs.* The really important thing would be that these grants/loans should only be made available in a certain order – in other words, you can’t have a loan/grant for renewable energy generating capability in your house until you’ve had all the right insulation done, with or without loans/grants. In other words, a household would have to show that it’s taken all the energy efficiency measures it can before being eligible for micro-generation help.

Insulation precedes micro-generation is what should be part of a Generous election manifesto.

Agree? Disagree?

Join the debate below.

* Because Generous is about trying to do the Generous thing I reckon that the schemes offering guaranteed per kW pay back on micro-generation should be shelved for the time being, taken out of the equation. Surely it should be enough that households increasingly won’t require as much energy providing to them down the wires from the Grid. Surely that’s a good thing?

Flickr photosource – thanks Aaron

Messy Generosity

2010-02-23T14:05:02Z

The first trip of the year back up to the allotment (I know, we’re slacking) brings the truth sharply back into focus: when it comes to living a Generous life with kids in tow, things get pretty late and pretty messy.

Let me explain. It just so happens that our allotment is right next door to the neatest, most timely plot of our set. (It’s quite possibly the neatest allotment anywhere in the whole world.) The guy who works it (he’s newly retired – an important note) does everything by the book and bang on time. Clinically so. He actually uses an old wooden metre rule – the sort you might remember from school – to measure out his planting distances. And he has special tools and schedules for every single allotment task.

Ours, by contrast, is a raggle-taggle plot. It’s not weed-infested. It’s not overgrown. And it’s very productive. But it’s just not ordered and timed in the way our neighbour’s is. Even more than that, because my partner and I end up snatching a couple of hours here and there to get some frenzied digging or planting done without proper handover and briefing notes, we often end up undoing the good work the other has done. I’ve even dug up asparagus before. A crime my partner would say warrants a life sentence.

Anyway, if allotments are Generous places – and I think, like another Generous blogger before me, that they are – then our neighbour’s generosity is not of the messy, often-late variety ours is. It’s neat and tidy.

And that brings me to the Mister Men. Our boys love the Mister Men. Especially the story of Mr Messy. Mr Messy runs into Mr Neat and Mr Tidy who well and truly sort him out – starting with his garden, then his house, and then, finally, him!

In the end Mr Messy doesn’t look like Mr Messy anymore. He’s been all neatened up. I’m not sure how I feel about this story. I’m not sure about Mr Messy having to conform to the tyranny of Mr Neat and Mr Tidy’s world. It’s an unspoken tyranny I sense wafting over from our neighbour’s allotment when the wind is in a certain (paranoid) direction.

But I know it’s never as black and white as that. Our allotment neighbour is probably just as Generous as we’re trying to be. Probably more so. It’s just that he practises a more orderly, punctual form of Generosity. Ours is simply more loose and messy.

The good news is that it takes all sorts. Which is why Roger Hargreaves’ Mister Men are so enduringly popular. Because his view of the world is that we come in all shapes and sizes.

(For more on the Mister Men from Radio 4 on Sunday 14 February 2010 click here.)

Just Connect

2010-02-08T12:43:03Z

I was given a book for Christmas entitled The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane. He tackles the question ‘Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain?’ by embarking on a series of beautifully described journeys, spending nights out on cliff-tops and remote beaches, deep in snowy woods and ancient meadows, as well as bathing in icy rivers and waterfalls.

During one of his reflections (while high on the ridges in the Lake District in the middle of the night) MacFarlane talks about our estrangement from the dark – through artificial lighting – as a great and serious loss. “Star-gazing gives us access to orders of events … which are beyond our capacity to imagine. It is unsurprising that dreams of humility and reverence have been directed towards the moon and stars for as long as human culture has recorded itself … the blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways there has been a prising away of life from place. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world … has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like.

“We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits … the feel of a hot, dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm; such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands on sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.

He quotes the mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat: “Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind, and the stars. They have all been neutralised: the rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes by so fast, and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell … but what a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet! Up there he is surrounded by silence.” Rebuffat wrote these words in 1956.

Because of the recent heavy snowfall, many of my colleagues simply worked from home. But when they did get back to the office many of them remarked that they were quietly going ‘stir-fry crazy’ sitting at home, responding to emails and telephone conference calls. There was something reassuring about being physically present with their colleagues (despite all their annoying habits), something about belonging, touching base. It struck me that apart from our lack of connectedness with the physical environment, which MacFarlane effectively articulates, we still desire physical community – and for those who live alone, some days work can sometimes be the only form of community they get. Generous, for me, is partly about having a sense of local place – and connecting with that place in a variety of ways, including welcoming others into our group. This might get risky.

I was leaving work one Friday evening two weeks ago and as I said good night to one of my colleagues, she asked me what I was doing for the weekend. I rambled on a bit and then remembered I was going out with some friends that night to a Poet’s Café event, which had an open mic session. Did I want to keep that quiet? I decided to spill the beans. She asked me if I was going to participate: I said I was. Did I have my own material: I said I did. (You have to think about this conversation happening in the context of a very IT/engineering, male-dominated, hierarchical culture – poetry is not cool!) In the end she turned up with her partner to the event. I had a very nice surprise when I walked into the venue and saw them both. (I think she enjoyed it as another work colleague caught up with me on the following Monday and mentioned the event and asked me if she could come to the next one!)

By all means, go for a walk in the rain in your local forest and just experience the elements (MacFarlane has certainly got me thinking – and walking). But what about the people you see at work every day – are there ways we can be more welcoming and inclusive?

You can read Andrew Motion’s Review of The Wild Places here

Flickr photosource – thanks Pink Sherbert

A matter of degrees

2010-01-29T12:02:32Z

Like most boys of their age, our older two – at six and four – have a lurid love of a pseudo-scientific tale I tell them. It’s a tale that, in turn, some other adult told me as a child. About how a frog won’t jump out of a saucepan of water as it’s heated up, but will instead stay put, to boil alive. Unable to perceive the subtle temperature increases, the frog takes ‘sitting in the hot tub’ to its ultimate end. Gross. But the boys love it.

‘Daddy, does its skin come off?’ ‘Does it change colour?’ ‘Does it explode?’ ‘Catch fire?’ The questions come thick and fast. Their imaginations run wild with the idea of this poor defenceless creature and its agonising death.

Now, as a Dad trying to be part of a Generous-minded family, this gross-out tale takes on more layers of meaning. Not that our boys are bothered about that! But let’s leave them for a few moments with the ghoulish physicality of the frog in hot water and turn instead to what else that story might possibly spark off.

Think, for example, about the recent cold snap we enjoyed here in the UK. As the thaw set in and temperatures rose to six degrees centigrade last weekend it felt positively balmy. Which of course is silly. Six degrees centigrade is still cold. But in comparison to the continually sub-zero register, things felt almost warm. It’s amazing how quickly we adapt and get used to things.

And then think about the way in which seemingly small changes in temperature globally will make a catastrophic difference to poor communities in low-lying regions. It’s why the two-degree centigrade rise is so sacrosanct and why Copenhagen proved so frustrating in not enshrining it as a global limit. Two degrees might not feel like much to us. But it could mean the difference between life and death to millions.

We may feel resilient and toughened up now after our cold snap. (Who needs gloves and coats for the rest of the winter?) The mistake, of course, is to only see things from our point of view. While we sledged and screeched on snowy slopes, an old couple died in their Northampton bungalow from hyperthermia (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6970522/Neglect-fears-after-elderly-couple-die-in-freezing-home.html).

So, back to the boys. Temperature change and its effects will always fascinate them – whether they’re frying slugs under magnifying glasses in the summer sun or imagining frogs boiling to death in saucepans. Our hope must be that as they grow more conscious of a world beyond their own, they will realise that subtle, almost imperceptible warming will have far more gruesome effects than even they can imagine right now. It’s a matter of degrees; a matter of life and death.