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Global, Urban, Sustainable Life!

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The Great Green Wall of Africa

June 18th 2010 01:54

The Global Environment Facility plans to donate 119 million dollars to a project which hopes to halt the Sahara Desert in its continuous expansion. The proposed green belt of trees would be nine miles wide and over 4,000 miles long!

The trees would be drought-adapted species, native to the regions they were being planted in, and would potentially cross 11 countries in the bid to prevent erosion, deforestation, and desertification.

A seemingly astronomical feat - more than 36,000 miles worth of land to be planted with trees. Hopefully, that would make a proportionally astronomical difference to the continent. Reportedly, the Sahara is turning 1.5 million hectares into barren land every year.

Sand Dunes in the Sahara Desert

Planting these trees could help to stop the dust bowls that are sweeping the area, rejuvenate nearby soils for farming, and increase groundwater supplies. And if the trees had some edible seeds and fruit...

Obviously, this is great news for Africa, but the impact of that many thousands of trees would hopefully be soothing to our planet's ever growing fever as well.

For more information, check out: The Great Green Wall

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Successful Veg Boxing

June 9th 2010 05:03

After two years of veg boxing, you sometimes forget the difficulties that presented themselves at first. Now that I'm trying to introduce my family to the system, I'm starting to remember just how awful the first month was - the excitement when the box arrived, followed by confusion when I didn't know what all the vegetables were, then horror when I discovered I didn't know how to cook them/didn't like them, then depression when I threw away moldy vegetables at the end of the week.

Its a vicious cycle that's really hard to break out of, since if you have any leftovers at the end of the week, there's really no way of using up the next week's food on time.

Produce Boxes Can Be Intimidating, but They're Worth the Effort!

Here are a few tips I've discovered along the way to make life a bit easier:

1. Arrange for delivery on a day when you have time to go through it. For me, this meant Friday deliveries. You should have enough time to write down all the vegetables and fruits you received, and plan out which you'll use on each day. Trust me, having a plan really helps.

2. Plan to eat the vegetables you don't know how to cook/don't like later on in the week, so that you have time to look up recipes, or ask for advice from a friend or family member.

3. Make sure you check how ripe fruits and vegetables are. Sometimes there will be things that are perfectly ripe on the delivery day, or won't be ripe for a while - plan accordingly!

4. Whenever you find a recipe that you like, save it somewhere! This may sound obvious, but since the vegetables are seasonal, you might not need the recipe for an entire year, so make sure you don't lose it!

5. Join a newsletter, like VegBox Recipes. You'll get email from them with recipes that are seasonal, and meant to match the items in your box. When you're low on time, this can really help.

6. When you have leftovers (this will happen a lot at first) plan to have friends or family over for dinner. Make it a potluck, then prepare loads of veggies, and ask other people to bring bread, dessert, etc. It's a great way of using produce that might otherwise be composted.

7. Another great way of using leftover vegetables at the end of the week is to freeze them. Make a large portion of whatever you're eating, and freeze it. Battered foods (Okonomiyaki, Cabbage Bhaji's, etc.) freeze best uncooked, while baked foods do well before or after cooking. This will take some experimentation.

8. Have a few great fall-back plans. Potato Pancakes, Tomato Soup, Cabbage gyoza - these are great alternatives when you just don't have the time, energy, money, or ingredients to make whatever you had planned. do not succumb to the world of pasta with pesto. If you need to have something fast, just make a smaller portion, and have a side dish of some veggies. Your box will give you enough to eat vegetables at lunch and dinner everyday, and that's what will be expected of you!

9. Fruit is tricky - often its unripe or overripe, or just gets boring after a few months of apples and bananas. Try experimenting with cooking them up - jams and preserves are great, muffins are fast and delicious, and banana breads, cakes etc. are a tasty and handy way to use up excess fruits.

10. Be excited! If you aren't excited when your box arrives, then something is wrong! You won't put in the effort if you aren't enjoying yourself, so try to make it fun. Share your box with friends, flatmates, neighbors, whatever. If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of fruits and veg you're getting, try cutting down to a smaller size - even if its smaller than is recommended for you.

Getting a veg box should be fun, even if it is a bit of hard work. But don't worry; after a few months, you'll settle into the rhythm, and never look back!

Get yourself a good cookbook, a good frame of mind, and start cooking!

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Level Upping in the Eco World

June 8th 2010 03:39

It seems that no matter how hard you try, you hit a plateau. Whether you're just getting started on an eco-friendly lifestyle, or have been living in a yurt for twenty years, there comes a time when upwards momentum gets tough.

You start out with optimism, fortitude, and maybe a bit of money. You make the basic changes - eating organic, buying local, taking public transport or walking to work/school, turning off appliances when you've finished with them, etc.

Then, you hit the middle. Still, its all fairly straightforward, once you see what has to be done - only buying fairtrade, organic or second hand clothes, buying only handmade or locally sourced items, buying all your energy from a green supplier, etc.

Then come the changes that hit home. The ones that really start to alter your everyday life - the giving up of cosmetics, deodorants, refrigerators, houses...woah, woah hold it right there.

Each level I've described (and all the ones preceding and following them) seems difficult at the time. Each one seems easy in retrospect. Each one is a cycle of discovering one thing that you have to change, then finding another, and another and another...

Each stage can last for days, months, or years, depending on how much research you do, and who you're surrounded by. And that's the crux of the issue: who you're surrounded by.

I arrived in Edinburgh a little bit before that first stage I mentioned. I cared about the environment; I recycled, composted, and walked instead of taking a bus. But I had always been the green one. I had never known anyone who was more of an environmentalist than myself. So I had no one to learn from.

Then, I met my partner, who (along with my professors) explained to me about organic food - which I thought was just for health benefits - being better for the environment. Right, I changed that.

Then, my partner introduced me to Fairtrade, which I had never heard of, and suddenly I was spiraling off into that second stage.

About a year and half later, I had just come to Japan, and was getting settled into my routine here, and was fully used to the commitments of the second level. Then, I started thinking about my friends in Edinburgh who were sending me photos of grey water catchment systems they had rigged out of their sink pipes, and of their hand spun yarn which they knitted into sweaters.

I discovered that one of my best friends hadn't showered in years, and I started researching eco-hygiene. Who knew such a thing could exist?

But it all comes down to who you meet, or who you read about online...

Surround yourself by people who are even more environmental nuts than you, and don't try to compete with them, but learn from them. Watch the changes they make in their lives, and see which ones you can take onboard, and which you'd reject.

See their mistakes, and their successes, and you'll gain inspiration for your own!

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Water and More Water

June 8th 2010 03:20

I confess, water use has always been a tough habit for me to break - I've never lived anywhere with a long drought, and so it just never made much difference to me. Of course, I knew you had to conserve it, and not use more than you needed, but it didn't really hit home until I started having to pay for it.

In Edinburgh, students are exempt from council taxes and water bills. Which was fantastic! Of course, here in Japan, that's not how it works, and suddenly my water usage was a bit of a problem. I never realized how much water I inadvertently used, even when trying to be careful

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Green Gifts for Cynics

June 7th 2010 02:12

Yesterday I went to the Eco-Life Fair in Yoyogi Koen which, aside from the hands-on charcoal filtration experiments, left me all too uninspired. I'm leaving Japan soon, and had really been hoping that there would be stalls full of experimental new Japanese Eco-gadgets, or at least some green knick-knacks that I could take home with me. Alas, I was let down.

In my never-ending quest to green my life and the world around me, its becoming increasingly obvious that my family is just not interested. Sure, they recycle, turn off lights and keep the heat down low, but outside of that, they just don't have the impetus. And if I can't get my family to become green, how can I hope to impact the rest of the world

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Milk and Moving in Japan

May 27th 2010 06:19

First let's talk milk. When an American comes to Japan, they're wowed by all the weird foods, bizarre ad campaigns, and stares they receive from passersby. When you get past all that, you just want to sit down with a cup of milk and a cookie to relax. But it can be more difficult than you expect!

Most milk in Japan is UHT, or as they call it: Extended Shelf Life. Once you know this, you can avoid it pretty easily, by just checking the labels. Anything with UHT, ESL, or 130C (or more) written on it is going to be disgusting, ultra heated milk. Don't drink it

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RI to Go Green!

May 25th 2010 02:45

For those of you outside the state, the promise of off-shore wind farming in Rhode Island might be somewhat surprising, especially considering how much publicity has gone to Cape Wind in recent years (decades).

The project, which would be a pilot for a much larger wind farm in Federal waters off the RI coast, has been in the mix for months now, but was stalled after the state's Public Utilities Commission refused to grant its proposal, stating that costs were unreasonably high for the energy provided

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A No Poo Household

May 19th 2010 02:03

How long do you go between 'Pooing?

One of the newer trends to lower your overall impact on the planet is to kick the habit all together. I first heard about it as a Freshman at University, when I met people who had tried (both successfully and unsuccessfully) to give up shampooing, and some who had given up bathing all together

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Eco-Options for Eating Out

May 18th 2010 07:29

Sometimes our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. For people like my mother, that's most, or all, of the time. Whenever we go out to eat, she ends up with a plastic take-out container. I've saved and washed them and reminded her to bring them with her, left clean ones in her car so she'd have no excuse, and pestered her incessantly about it (somewhat similar to what I did with re-usable grocery bags, in fact). Still, she always manages to forget about them, and claims she can't be bothered because they're too large anyway.

A solution at last! Yesterday, I was out shopping for a re-usable, bento fork-spoon-chopstick combination - so that my bento routine won't become obsolete in Edinburgh when faced with salad and pasta - when I finally found it: an Eco-Doggy Bag

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The Oil Spill Gets Hairy

May 12th 2010 02:19

I'm sure the idea of sending hair and fur to the Gulf coast to help contain the oil spill is no longer news to you. But today, I mailed my contribution in!

I was hesitating, busily weighing out the pros and cons of mailing hair for such a long distance, trying to decide if the oil cleaned up would balance out the oil used to get it there. (yes, it does, for me

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June 2010

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April 2010