Stats update (with comments)

The latest figures are for 9 days from 21st to 30th July:
- General electricity 5.36kWh per day (average 6.65 this quarter vs 7.98 last quarter)
- Electricity for water heating 7.01kWh per day (average 7.33 this quarter vs 5.60 last quarter)
- Water consumption 301 litres per day (average 333 this quarter)

We were away on Saturday night so the figures are slightly skewed in our favour but they're still not bad. Our water use is holding steady at about 330L per day even without the tanks installed yet. The government's high-profile target is 140L per person per day. Our kids are young but even if you considered the three of them as equivalent to one person we'd still be 90L under the target.

I'm baffled as to how other households can use as much water as they do. We use our dishwasher, we wash our clothes (lots of them with the three kids), we water our fledgling vege plants, we are pretty lax about shower times. Our conservation efforts could largely be summed up like this:
- use the "water saver" options on the dishwasher and washing machine
- don't be obviously wasteful with washing hands or brushing teeth
- keep the water pressure low in the shower
- and the big one... don't flush the toilet for every little wee

Julie pointed out just recently that using less electricity can also contribute to reduced water consumption. (Though that's not true of wind, wave or solar photovoltaic systems, it is the case for the vast majority of electricity generated in Australia.) So I'll get on to electricity now.

Obviously we use more energy heating water in winter than we do in summer. That's why there's an obvious seasonal variation in the graphs I've previously shared. So although this quarter's figure of 7.33 is up against last quarter, it's significantly better than the 9.0 we consumed during the same quarter last year. And I reckon this winter is actually colder!

The water/electricity relationship goes both ways here: by using less hot water in the shower we're reducing our energy demand.

One last comment on these figures. With our continuing downwards trend in general electrical consumption, this is the first quarter in nearly two years of data where we're using less energy for lights, cooking, computers etc than we are for heating water.

The cat's away...

... and the mice are playing in the compost again.

The compost bin comeback

Found another surprise in the compost bin today... a pleasant one this time.

As happy as I am about my first thousand worms, they aren't eating a lot of kitchen scraps yet. I'm guessing that's partly because they're so (relatively) few in number and partly because they still have lots of other food to consume in their initial bedding material. Most of what I provided for them on Saturday is still there and our little bucket in the kitchen was full. Well the scraps had to go somewhere and it sure wasn't going to be landfill, so out to the compost bin I went.

Sometime in the past couple of weeks I had decided the compost pile was too dry. I started experimenting with a new formula: one bucket of kitchen scraps spread out, a layer of dried grass clippings and finally one kitchen bucket's worth of water on top. After making this contribution again this afternoon it seemed like I should aerate the pile a bit and make sure it's not going nasty in the middle.

Well! Far from being nasty, what I found in the middle of the pile looked suspiciously like the stuff I'd seen on the glossy front cover photograph of my neighbour's composting book. It was dark, moist, spongy, inhabited by tiny bugs and earthworms, and it gave off a noticeable amount of heat. No visible rodents, either.

Perhaps I should have left it alone, but I used my garden fork to try and mix things up. There's plenty of material still to be decomposed and I'm hoping that introducing some air and those additional nutrients into the core will help it rather than hinder. This coming weekend I'll turn the whole pile again and see what I find.

If that kind of result is repeatable, and the mice stay away, I may keep the bin going in addition to the worm farm.

Worms: not dead yet

Peeked under the layer of wet newspaper which is on top of the food in the upper tray and found a few adventurous worms munching away. They slithered away to the tray below in a hurry.

Lifting off the top tray to the full bedding tray below, the kids were delighted to see scores of worms all over the top. Startled to be exposed all of a sudden they practically sprinted for cover down their holes. Didn't know they could move quite that quick.

Seems to be pretty straightforward so far, except that I've got a whole lot of scraps in the kitchen - far more than these worms seem ready to eat. Will have to use the compost bin as well for a while I think.

I have worms

Funny thing: you buy a "Can-O-Worms" but the worms are sold separately. But anyway, as of yesterday I have one of the first and around a thousand of the second, and a hundred and ten fewer dollars in my bank account. That's eleven cents per worm.

The worm farm itself deserves a bit of a plug, I think. For starters it appears to be a really good design. It has legs, a fluid collection base with tap, three "working trays" and a lid. The theory is that when the top tray gets full the bottom tray will contain heaps of fertiliser and very few worms so you just empty the bottom one and then place it at the top. As you add food to the top the worms come up through the holes and begin creating more fertiliser there. Round and round it goes.

It is made of plastic, but it's made of 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. As with my decision to use concrete blocks as part of the base for my water tanks, I think it's an appropriate use of materials. It's hard to imagine something like this being made from anything other than plastic or metal - of which plastic seems like the less wasteful choice. We do have an enormous amount of existing plastic which would otherwise be headed for a landfill. And unlike many other plastic products this one's designed to perform a valuable function over a long period of time.

Moreover, it's made in Australia and there's very little packaging to be "disposed of" after the purchase. You can check out the model I bought here.

Worms are sold separately, as I mentioned. I grabbed a box of a thousand from the shelf right next to the Can-O-Worms. Good thing, too - it turns out that a thousand worms is the minimum recommended number for starting a worm farm. The worms aren't loose in the box, they're buried in a lump of moist, compost-y black stuff which you just place as-is into the worm farm. Once they've eaten through all the tasty parts of that they will, I understand, squirm up through the holes into the next tray in search of the food scraps I've laid out for them.

For the time being they seem content to stay in the bottom tray in their black stuff. Just to prove I'm not making all this up, here's a pic I snapped late this afternoon.

Bricks it is, then.

Besser blocks model 15.01, to be precise. 40cm long, 15cm wide, 20cm high. Six of them to a side on three sides, the fourth side being the edge of the concrete apron around the house. 18 per tank site, 36 blocks in all, delivered for $156.20. About the same price as the equivalent quantity of pine sleepers soaked in copper, chrome and arsenic.

They were delivered late yesterday and today I spent a few hours sculpting the trench in which the first six of them now sit. I say "sculpting" because below the turf in my back yard is a whole lot of very dense clay. Using my 150mm spade and a mini-mattock I carved out a surprisingly neat rectangular slot. The blocks went in with a little clay soil packed into the slight gaps along the long sides. The goal is to build a nice rigid wall that will hold a base of crusher dust firmly in place beneath a five tonne water tank. The clay is so solid I'll probably not use any additional concrete to bed the blocks as I had planned.



If it takes a few hours to get one side done, I have an awful lot of hard work remaining. It would have been so much easier just to pour two slabs of concrete - and probably cheaper given that I have a builder, an underground cable layer and a concreter as neighbours. Why the heck am I spending my weekends scratching about in the clay?

The primary environmental concern with concrete is the energy used in manufacturing cement. I read somewhere yesterday that 8% of the world's anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas emissions result directly from the production and use of cement. Scary, if it it's true. But concrete is such a practical building material I can understand its appeal: even mixing by hand I could have poured two slabs in an afternoon, and they would easily outlast the tanks they'd be supporting.

In the end I compromised. I needed something heavy, strong and durable for the border; needed to prevent termite damage to my home; wasn't keen on the copper-chrome-arsenic approach. Pre-formed concrete bricks are going to do the job nicely, are non-toxic, and would probably be re-usable in the future if I ever had reason to take them out of the ground. I think it's an acceptable use of resources.

As added bonuses, I've had my kids out "working" with me, I've performed some much-needed physical exercise, and so long as it turns out OK I'll have the satisfaction of knowing I did it with my own hands.

I declare the Weekend of the Worm

Some things were just meant to be. After my mice-infested compost disaster last weekend I've been exchanging comments with Crazy Mumma (her blog here) about the idea of using worms to process kitchen scraps instead of putting them outside where they become food for vermin instead of plants.

CM gave me a link to some instructions on building your own worm farm on the cheap, and now Colin (aka No Impact Man) has just posted his own DIY worm farm tips as well! There's absolutely no excuse left now.

This weekend I'm getting worms. I dare you to join me! (That means you, CM!)

Vaguely like eBay, but free!

I love it when I have an idea and then discover it's already a reality. Not only does it mean the idea was probably a decent one, but it means I can enjoy it without having to put in the effort of making it happen.

Case in point: Freecycle.

"The Freecycle Network™ is made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns... When you want to find a new home for something -- whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano, or an old door -- you simply send an e-mail offering it to members of the local Freecycle group. Or, maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself. Simply respond to a member's offer, and you just might get it."

This kind of voluntary community-based recycling via the internet is something I've been idly thinking about over the past couple of weeks. There's a group with 300+ members based in Strathpine (the suburb immediately to the west of where I live) so I've just sent an email off to join up. Hopefully I'll be able to reduce some of the clutter around my place by simply finding better homes for things, and avoid creating "waste" in the process.

Spark and Splash Stats for you to use

Spur of the moment thing here. I've been using the free online spreadsheet service at Google Docs for a number of things including tracking my electrical and water consumption. I find it simple and useful and it occurred to me that maybe it's worth sharing.

So I've created a template which you can either download as an Excel file or use online like I do. There are two parts to this.

One sheet lets you record your own meter readings. It shows you your average daily consumption over the period from the first to the last reading. With a little bit of copy and paste work you also get differential figures showing how your consumption changes from reading to reading.

The other sheet is designed to keep track over longer periods based on your utility bills. Enter the date of the bill and the average daily use over the period that bill covers, and you'll get a nice graph for your trouble. I've put two example entries in which you can delete and replace with your own data. As you add new data you'll need to tell the graph to incorporate that as well. It's not hard, but ping me in the comments if you want any help with that.

You need a (free) Google account to use this, and it works best in FireFox from what I can tell. Without any further ado... you can check it out here. You'll need to either export it as a file to your computer or copy it to your own Google account to use online before you're able to change any fields.

Comments and questions would be welcome.

Renovating for water-efficiency

We bought this place and moved in almost two years ago with the intention of staying for at least twenty. Location, size and price were the key criteria. Water and energy efficiency were not even on the list - if they were we might have chosen not to buy this one.

This post is a bit of a look at the physical attributes of our house in relation to water efficiency and the improvements we're in the process of installing.

The building is basically rectangular with the top edge in this image facing just slightly east of north. It's about 22m long with no eaves at the ends, and about 9m wide including the eaves along each side. Were it a complete rectangle it'd be almost exactly 200 square meters of catchment area.

The roof has a single centre line running the length of the building and falling away to the east and west. There are five downpipes for stormwater drainage - one at each of the corners along the long sides. It doesn't make sense to try and get the water to flow just to one end of the house so two tanks are needed if all the run-off is to be captured. Since I don't have room to install tanks half way up each side of the house, the only alternative is to put them at each end and install pipes to bring the water around the corners.

Siting the tanks was made more difficult by the 1m concrete apron which runs completely around the house. Early ideas involved a new concrete slab which partly overlapped the apron but my more recent preference towards using crushed rock for the base pushed them that meter away. That in turn had an impact on designs for the stormwater pipes which need to be high enough for people to walk safely underneath. In the end they'll be positioned as per the image: it's a compromise between the practical and aesthetic challenges of running the pipes as well as the limits on available space.

The tanks we chose are 5000L each, calculated to hold approximately one month's worth of rainfall in an "average" year. They're made of plastic with a ten year guarantee and I hope to extend their life as much as possible by shading them from direct sunlight. At 2.2m diameter they're only 1.6m tall in the centre and about 1.3m at the inlet. An internal first-flush diverter (it has a dedicated drainage outlet at the side of the tank) will reduce contamination from dust and debris and the inlet filter is designed to take the weight of a child without breaking.

Up until recently (when I was writing up a comment on another blog) I had envisaged using one tank solely for gardening and the other for washing clothes and flushing the toilet. But after realising that Julie's tank, half the size of mine and with comparable inflow expectations, would make available something like 160L/day just for the garden I had to reconsider that approach. Our block is flat so I'm now looking at installing a permanent hose between ground-level outlets on each tank: this will allow the two tanks to function as a single 10kL reservoir.

In order to supply the toilet (thankfully there is just one, dual-flush) and the washing machine the plan is to install a small electric pump and two new taps - one in the toilet, one in the laundry. We'll manually attach the hoses to those taps when there's water available in the tanks, and manually switch them over to the town water supply when the tanks are running low. Doing this should avoid any problems with backflow or pressure and makes a top-up valve unnecessary. Both rooms are on the western side roughly two-thirds up.

If the tanks do end up linked together it would probably make sense to install an external pump-powered tap at the northern end near the gardens. And a tap over the laundry sink might be smart as a way to access tank water for other internal uses like filling our gravity-fed water filter or even just mopping the floor.

So after all of that, our two remaining consumers of town water will be the kitchen with its dishwasher and the bath and shower. We'll still be drawing some water from the river systems but hopefully the rain that does fall on our heads will be put to some use instead of being channelled straight out to sea.

Finally I ought to mention cost. A combination of Brisbane City Council and Queensland Government rebates worth $1,850 are applicable to this little project. The only expense so far has been the tanks themselves at about $2,600. I have another thousand dollars set aside to pay for materials, a pump, an electrician and a plumber... though I'm not entirely confident that's going to be enough.

Composting tragedy: a cautionary tale

This is going to be a difficult post to write. It has the potential to be quite disturbing to some people - you probably wouldn't let your kids read this. But it contains an important lesson for anybody interested in composting as a waste reduction strategy.

I wrote yesterday about a couple of different options for suburban composting. I described briefly the open-bottomed black plastic bin which I've been using in my first foray into managed decomposition.

Prompted into effort through the act of blogging (as I tend to be), late this afternoon I set about tending to the pile: turning it, then adding some new material and a bit of water. It's probably not the "right" way to go about things but I'm new to this.

The easiest way to turn a pile that's in a bin like mine is to lift the bin off the top, put it down next to the pile and start putting the pile back into it so that what was on the top ends up on the bottom and vise versa. So far, my compost pile is a mixed bag in terms of original material and current condition. Some of it looks really rich and vital, some is dry or woody. Not surprisingly the earth right at the bottom tends to be dark, moist and rich-looking. Since I'm transferring the pile between the same two locations each time I turn it, I have a habit of digging the shovel in a bit and moving some of that rich soil/compost into the active bin.

Today, that underlying soil was a lot more alive than I'd reckoned on. My shovel's blade went straight into a nest full of young mice.

I had read about the risk of mice or rats being attracted to compost bins. Prior to today I'd not seen any here, but while I was turning the top parts of the pile over two or three had dashed out to safety. I'd felt disappointed but somewhat resigned, and suddenly the neighbour's cat's recent tendency to camp out in this corner of my yard made a lot of sense. With those few out of the way I hadn't for a moment considered there'd be more beneath the ground.

Startled by a nest of vermin, and with some awful injuries already inflicted, my immediate reaction was to end the matter as quickly as possible. I don't know whether it was the right thing to do, and I'm not going to use this post to try and argue it either way, but I hated doing it and have felt sickened by it ever since.

The point of posting about it is to remind you of the obvious: human "wastes" are a rodent's "dinner", and wherever you find people you will also find rats and mice. Recycling our kitchen refuse in a compost bin is a brilliant idea in terms of resource utilisation and efficiency but we're not the only ones interested in those nutrients.

Maybe one of those fancy compost bins I linked to in my earlier post is not such an extravagant idea after all.

Copper, chrome and arsenic - oh my!

After going back and forth for ages I decided that the tanks would be installed on a bed of crushed rock instead of concrete. Cost was a factor, as was my disinclination to contribute even a few more square meters to the concrete jungle of a modern city. (Future archaeologists probably won't view this as the "information age" the way we romantically project. I think it's more likely to be known as the concrete or plastic age. But I digress...)

One disadvantage of the crushed rock option is that unless is it securely restrained it has a tendency to spread out or erode from the edges. The way I've seen people counter this is to construct a border out of sturdy wooden sleepers to contain the rock.

What I hadn't considered until I was exploring my options at the hardware ubermarket this arvo is that in order to prevent the wood from decaying - that is, being eaten by insects, fungus and bacteria the way all non-living wood naturally is - it has to be soaked in a toxic cocktail of copper, chrome and arsenic. That way the things which try and eat the wood will become sick and die, or if they're smart simply be repelled.

Now I'm having to re-think.

Partly I'm concerned about the potential for toxic effects on my family and I. The jury is officially out on whether there is a measurable risk to human health from the use of "treated" wood such as this, but remember I'm building a water supply which I intend to use on surrounding vegetable gardens. It just doesn't seem like a smart thing to do.

The other part of my concern arises from the "waste equals food" philosophy espoused in the book Cradle to Cradle. This book has had a huge influence on me and now it doesn't seem right to take a perfectly good piece of timber and turn it into something which has a short useful life and then becomes toxic waste.

I may end up pouring concrete after all.

Stats update

I haven't exactly been inundated with requests for the latest figures on our electricity and water consumption, and to be honest I haven't been paying close attention since the Centameter went back to Mr S.

But this week Caitlin's class at school is embarking on a month-long project to monitor and hopefully reduce their household water consumption. That's a great prompt to get me out in the cold mornings again reading meters.

The last time I checked the figures was the 19th June, so it's been almost a month. I've been wondering recently whether our consumption would have returned to its previous levels without the daily focus on stats. What I found this morning was encouraging.



Over the past 26 days we averaged 7.01kWh of general electrical consumption. That's a slight decrease compared to the previous figures. Our electricity bill came in mid June and it shows an average over the entire past quarter of 7.98kWh per day so we've definitely improved there.

The stats for water heating are more complex. I was pretty happy with what I'd measured between the 8th of May and the 19th of June: an average of 6.63kWh per day, compared to 5.4 the previous (summer) quarter and 7.2 in the year-ago autumn quarter. But the bill from AGL shows that for the autumn quarter as a whole we actually got down to 5.6! That's a significant improvement.

However... in the past 26 days our hot water heating has accounted for 7.19kWh per day. This is probably to be expected with the persistently cold weather and a relaxing of water use discipline. And it's still well under the previous winter quarter's average of 9.0. Still plenty of winter to come though, so we'll see.

Speaking of water use discipline, our average daily water consumption during the past 26 days has been 379 litres. That's definitely up from the previous six week average of 324. Put it down to longer showers and an increase in the kids' bed-wetting. There's a bright side to the increase though: it gives Caitlin a better chance of seeing some improvement in the second half of her school project.

Tanks update

First, there's some disturbing tank news from Sydney. I don't approve of this kind of activity - it's a terrible waste of fossil fuel resources and this rate of destruction of mobile phone tower forests is simply not sustainable!

And do you suppose the electricity company will get a rebate for installing a tank at their substation?

Sorry, I shouldn't be amused by that kind of thing but it has a comical aspect I find hard to ignore. So anyway...

Am getting serious this weekend with my water tank installation. First step is to dig out the footing area for the tanks - some 12.5 square meters to a depth of about 150-200mm, and I'm doing it all by hand. Remember I'm an IT guy, not a builder, so this is a big project for me.

If I manage to get that excavated today I'll look at obtaining some treated wood for the borders and some sand and crusher dust for the base tomorrow. My gut feeling is that I'm being overly optimistic there. Will do my best though.

The best way to decay

I have a large backyard by local standards. Our property is 900sqm and the house etc would probably only cover around a third of that area. So there are plenty of trees and shrubs competing with a fair swathe of grass for the remaining space, all of which yield a fair amount of what some people call "garden waste".

Inside, we eat fresh fruit and vegetables on a daily basis and are producing a steady stream of "kitchen waste".

But of course it's not waste. It's a resource which I want to convert into natural fertiliser for enriching the soil and growing healthy food.

My neighbour generously provided me with one of those simple black plastic open-bottomed compost bins which he said was "surplus to requirements". For the last couple of months I've been feeding it with material from both the garden and the kitchen, turning it all over occasionally and adding a bit of water now and then. There's certainly something biological going on in there... the volume of material keeps shrinking and at times there have been different kinds of larvae and/or worms visible. But I'm not convinced that what's being produced is anywhere near as useful for fertilising my veges as I was hoping for.

The same neighbour also loaned me a book on composting which suggested that making compost effectively requires a lot of material to be combined in exactly the right proportions all in one go and then carefully tended. It was like baking a soufflé or something. And the fellow who gave the talk on BioChar a few weeks back implied a similar thing when he mentioned that "hot composts" are too hard to do right in a regular-sized back yard.

So what should somebody like me do? What about people with smaller yards, or mere balconies and courtyards? Well here are a few options:

BioChar bloke showed us pictures of a method of "cold composting" he was experimenting with, which involved digging a series of shallow pits which you would fill up one by one with whatever material came to hand before moving on to the next one. The theory is that by the time you filled up the last one the first would have decomposed to a degree which made its contents useful elsewhere in your garden and the cycle could continue from there. It still takes up a fair bit of space but doesn't require any financial investment to get started.

Part of the reason that "hot composts" require so much material and effort is that they need the bulk to produce and retain the heat, and they need frequent turning over to ensure proper aeration. There's a fancy compost bin on the market aimed at the suburban non-gardeners like me which uses a combination of insulation to trap heat and an innovative central air tube to try and get the benefits of hot composting without the effort. And it gets a very positive review (link to PDF) from a reputable Australian gardening club.

If you don't have a garden or a large family to produce enough waste to feed a large bin like that, then a worm farm could be the way to go. I was astonished to find that you can buy not only the farms themselves but also boxes of live worms from my local hardware megastore. These commercial kits are relatively cheap (compared to the fancy compost bin anyway) but I've seen instructions in various places for how you could build your own from relatively common bits and pieces.

Worms produce a different kind of fertiliser to compost, and you have to be a little careful with what you feed them (they really don't like onion or citrus, I hear) but if you're growing in pots on a balcony or in a courtyard it's pretty much an ideal solution.

I'm probably going to persist with my current compost bin for a little longer and see if I can't make anything useful of it. If not... I'm tempted by worms because they're cheap, effective, self-renewing and probably something the kids would enjoy. The fancy bin is attractive but I'm not sure if buying another new plastic thing is really the kind of solution I'm looking for.

Yellow thumb

This had to happen at some point. I think I've hurt my tomato plants.

I'm not sure whether I mentioned this in any previous posts, but the nice guy who delivered my new tanks spotted my tomato plants as he walked by them and commented appreciatively about their healthy condition. As a novice gardener I was immediately in awe of his expertise (he recognised the plant on sight!) and so I took his following comment quite seriously: "you just have to make sure they get enough sun otherwise the fruit won't ripen."

Oh! Not enough sun? Well I'd better move them then!

And so I relocated the pot from where these plants had grown from seed to their obviously healthy and vigourous condition, complete with the first tiny green fruit starting to appear, and plonked them firmly into a full-sun position. "There you go," I thought. "Drink up that warm sunlight."

Over the next fortnight I was encouraged to see lots of flowering and the setting of new fruit. But at the same time, things started appearing to be less than ideal overall. Some of the lower branches wilted slightly. Some of the leaves dropped off. And in the past few days, a distinct yellow tinge has appeared through maybe a third to a half of the plants.

I don't know what exactly might be the cause of this. It could be completely normal, for all I know. Or maybe the change in position was harmful. Maybe there's a lack of nutrients, or a less than ideal amount of moisture. But it's worrying.

In my continuing ignorance I have moved the pot back to its original position. I have topped up the pot with some of the nutrient-rich soil I have been excavating from the site where I'll be installing one of my water tanks. I watered that through and then added a layer of dry grass clippings on top as mulch to try and conserve the moisture and protect the soil from the cold, dry winds we've been experiencing recently.

Now I'm just crossing my fingers and watching to see what happens next.

Springback

There's a phenomenon in metal working called "springback". It's something you are probably already familiar with but may never have really thought about. Briefly, it's what a piece of metal might do when you attempt to bend it into a new shape: it will resist the change and spring back partly or completely towards the shape it started in. A guy I used to know worked as a fitter and turner, and he described how part of the skill of his job was to work out how much you had to bend something past where you wanted it to end up, so that it would spring back to the desired position.

It seems to me that similar effect can be seen in human behaviour.

There's a clear imperative upon us all to change our patterns of consumption and resource use. I've blogged about my efforts to conserve energy and water, to reduce waste and to cut down on GHG emissions in various ways. But I'm finding that after the initial pressure is applied to try and re-shape my behaviour there's a clear tendency to spring back towards the old ways again.

It affects different aspects of my behaviour to different degrees. I haven't checked the meters for a while but I think we're doing OK on the energy front. Water consumption will be up a little because with colder weather and plenty of stress from work and our new baby I'm being less disciplined about shower times. My car is now around a thousand kilometres behind my lease target (which is good for the environment and bad for my finances). But when it comes to Ice Break consumption... I'm failing big time.

I'm about as good a psychologist as I am a gardener (which means not very) but all this makes me wonder about the best ways to achieve the changes that we believe are needed to make human life a sustainable and positive component of life on Earth. Changing our behaviour is not really the goal: the responsible use of resources and the elimination of "waste" is the goal. Our behaviour tends to conform to the pressures placed on it. The challenge then is to work out how to maintain the pressure on our behaviour.

It's stretching the analogy a bit, but if I wanted a piece of springy metal to conform to a particular shape one of my options would be to brace it somehow. To trap it in a framework which didn't permit it to spring back to the shape it's naturally inclined to take. What's the equivalent in terms of human behaviour?

Perhaps instead of focusing on my behaviour and trying to convince others to behave like me, I should be putting the effort into changing the frameworks that guide people's behaviour - including my own. Those frameworks include social and personal values, education, policy, law and technology.


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Hmm... switching mode now from essay to free-thinking blog post as I ponder what I've just been writing.

It seems to me that the primary driver for personal behaviour must surely be personal values. If so, that would imply that my failure to change behaviour in personal matters (such as limiting my Ice Break consumption as I had committed to do) comes down to a question of my own values. That I value the experience of drinking coffee-flavoured milk more highly than the environmental benefits gained by reducing my consumption. And that would probably be because the benefits of drinking it are personal, immediate and known whereas the benefits of reducing consumption are dispersed, delayed and unknown.

I would guess that same comparison could be applied just about universally in regard to the ways we all choose to live our lives. To take it to the extreme, not many of us would voluntarily live a life of poverty and hard labour in order to better the lives of others. Those people who do live lives according to those kinds of principles tend to be venerated rather than emulated.

It all comes down to the question of why we do anything at all, I suppose. For me, at this point in time, the basic motivation is something along the lines of having the best life I can whilst simultaneously promoting the best lives possible for everybody else who lives now and who will live in the future. The attitude is more one of teamwork than of charity, but it's forever difficult to try and balance my quality of life with that of everybody else when both are essentially unquantifiable.

I seem to have settled on some core principles though, including one I mentioned earlier: "the responsible use of resources and the elimination of waste".

I'll leave it there for now. Something to ponder and possibly post about another time.