Renewing my energy

Just a quick one. I haven't mentioned yet that I attended a forum this past week at City Hall, where I heard talks by Andrew McNamara, Judy Wicks (www.whitedog.com), Gilbert Rochecouste (www.villagewell.org) and Robert Pekin (www.foodconnect.com.au), and saw a new peak oil documentary produced locally (aquilaproductions.com.au).

It was wonderfully inspiring, if a little sobering... not so much a pep rally as a recruitment drive in a war effort. Hmm.

So I have a renewed sense of urgency which has already prompted me to consider a carectomy, cut way back on my meat and dairy consumption (even on Ice Break) and have another stab at the backyard gardening. I also wrote letters (emails) to various people at the state, city and local community levels expressing my concern regarding the issues and my desire to be part of the solutions.

Would have been at Northey St Community Garden this morning if it weren't for the badly interrupted sleep #2 and #3 gave us last night. Instead I'm going to look at designs for chicken tractors.

Some time soon I'm going to review and update my action plan.

Notes from Caboolture Sustainable Living Fair

Well that was interesting. CREEC wasn't hard to find, and I was pleased to see it's quite close to the Burpengary train station. I might find myself heading that way for a bike/train outing every now and then to participate in some of their events. It was about 22km from my place by car.

I went along to this fair with a few priorities in mind:
1. Find out more about growing food in the back yard and/or community gardens
2. Ask about distribution schemes for locally-grown produce
3. Try to make contact with people who live nearby and are focused on sustainable living
4. Maybe clarify the Greens' position on alternative nuclear energy technologies (there are some which don't produce waste that lasts for thousands of years and are almost useless for making weapons... but you don't hear about them much)

Amazingly enough, I scored four out of four.

I met some very nice and enthusiastic people from Permaculture Caboolture (not sure whether they're technically a club, society or what) who have heaps of information to share about growing food and who know heaps of other people to link up with to promote food gardening at home or in community gardens or in school programs. I'll be following up on a number of the suggestions I received and will be sure to note them here online.

There's apparently a meeting somewhere in Brisbane this coming week regarding a program which teaches organic gardening and food preparation to primary school children as part of their routine curriculum. Will make an effort to get along and check that out.

Regarding local food distribution, there's an organic farm at Beerwah which sells "subscriptions": each week you give them $60 and they give you a big box of assorted veges. The Permaculture Caboolture people are hoping to start a monthly organic farmers market at CREEC starting on the 14th July. And another bloke is talking about establishing a community garden program at Petrie, which would also link up with the regular markets which are held out that way.

And I did enjoy a chat with a guy on the Australian Greens stand about the theoretical possibility of safe, clean nuclear energy production using technologies which are quite unlike the uranium fuel cycle that everybody associates with the term "nuclear". I was very pleased with the open-minded and sensible reaction - he'd even heard of thorium before I mentioned it.

A few other quick observations to wrap up:

• A lot of paper brochures being given away - how ironic.
  
• Good representation from Caboolture Shire Council, but with an unsurprising emphasis on economic considerations and "waste management" as opposed to true sustainability.
  
• I was surprised to see fast food and pre-packaged drinks on sale. (Thumbs up to the organic sausage sizzle though for good taste and the single paper napkin.)
• Local businessman pushing a carbon sink program: $40 for 17 trees, 100 year expected lifespan. It's probably a good thing.
• Greens guy reckons that ethanol being produced for fuel in Qld is derived from the waste material left over from sugar production as opposed to the sugarcane juice itself. I need to do some more research: that might tip the overall energy balance in favour of that particular scheme... but you can bet your Porsche that it's not scalable to the point where it replaces even a small fraction of the state's fuel requirements.
  

Time for a Break

(To anybody who thinks I'm going to slow down on the blogging - ha! No way, check out the length of this post!)

You know about my long hot showers. You know about my three-thousand-litres-of-fuel-a-year car. And now it's time for me to 'fess up to another unsustainable aspect of my life...

"My name is Terry, and I'm an Ice Break-oholic."

My Ice Break addiction started in about 1995. Michelle was living adjacent to a cluster of small shops which included a Brumby's bakery and a Night Owl convenience store. We'd long known about the delights of fresh Brumby's blueberry muffins with a coffee as breakfast on a clear Brisbane morning. But this fateful day I was in the mood for a coffee-flavoured milk drink instead of a hot beverage, and an odd-looking brown plastic bottle caught my eye from the shelf adjacent to the usual tetra pack flavoured milk varieties.

Real filtered coffee in a cold milk drink instead of the usual powdered stuff? Yeah, I'd give that a try.

It's hard to say for sure, but since that day I have probably consumed something like five thousand bottles of the stuff. It could easily be more. With the smallest package size being 500ml, we're talking about at least two and a half thousand litres of milk. And well over ten thousand dollars.

Well hey, how I choose to spend my money is mostly my own business. But in the context of sustainable consumption there are some serious problems here. Let's start with the obvious ones.

Firstly there's the milk. Between 500ml and a litre (occasionally, but not often more) of milk each day is probably a lot more than the average. It's generally considered healthy to have some dairy foods in your diet for the sake of calcium, and in fact those of us with European ancestry may owe our existence to the genetic mutation which first allowed people to digest the nutrition in cow's milk. But cows are not native to Australia. Cattle cause substantial damage to our native landscape, and the dairy industry is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

The second problem is the packaging. Five thousand plastic bottles, all of them produced from oil, all of them requiring energy for production and again for recycling.

Then there's the transport. It's a fresh milk product, which means it has a very short lifetime in which to travel from the milking shed to my lips. Inevitably this means oil-consuming road transport. Not to mention the coffee, which was itself probably sourced from overseas. (I don't know, I'm just guessing about that.)

Fresh milk also requires constant refridgeration - again using significant amounts of energy which were largely provided by burning coal.

And if that doesn't sound like an inefficient, unsustainable practice... I hang my head in shame to recall the period during which I would drive my car (yes, the six-cylinder one) the kilometer or so down the road to the local shop - every morning! - to purchase the sweet, slightly-caffeinated elixir of life without which my day could start only one way: badly.

Thankfully, that particular practice has been stopped. Shortly after I realised the insanity of what I was doing, I enjoyed a week or so where I would put Josh in the seat on the back of my bike and pedal off to the shop with Caitlin beside me each morning to buy a 750ml bottle which would be my ration for the day. As a family time it was great.

But once I'd started this train of thought I discovered the rails went a lot further than I'd realised. All these bottles... such waste... and so I started planning a little ahead and buying the two litre variety from the supermarket (without making any special trips to do so) and restricting my consumption to the same 750ml per day maximum. The larger bottles are more efficient in several respects including the amount of plastic used, the amount of transport fuel required (they stack more densely than the smaller cylindrical bottles) and of course their impact on my wallet!

Still, by the measuring stick of sustainability, it's much too much. I've tried going cold-turkey a few times in the past. Think I lasted a week once. It wasn't pretty. But I have to do something.

So... (Terry takes a deep breath)... here's my next step: starting tomorrow I'm going to reduce my typical Ice Break consumption by half. Unless I'm out of town, a single 375ml glass per day is my quota. When away from home a single 500ml bottle per day is all that's allowed.

Michelle will be sure to let me know if she sees me failing to adhere to this, and if she does I'll do the right thing and admit it online. That's unless withdrawal symptoms send me totally nuts first.

And just so you know I'm not the most extreme coffee-renouncing sustainability freak on the planet, check out this heart-wrenching post from the wife of the most extreme coffee-renouncing sustainability freak, "No Impact Man" Colin Beavan.

What do you want for dinner?

A simple question. It's been directed at me probably a couple of thousand times. That we can actually have trouble making a selection from the many choices on offer is a sign of how incredibly rich our lives are in comparison to the vast majority of human experience, in the past and the present day. I pray I'm never faced with my children asking, "Is there any food to eat tonight?"

Of course there's an abundance of food available to me this evening. But my choice is becoming even more difficult when I start to consider sustainability.

What do I want?

Something tasty and nutritious of course, and relatively easy to prepare in the next three hours or so. It should ideally be made from locally-grown ingredients which were produced using a minimum of irrigation and of fossil fuel input for fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery fuel and electrical generation for processing. Packaging - such as plastic wraps - should be avoided. Vegetables are preferable to meat. Poultry is better than beef, lamb or pork. And the meal preparation itself needs to use a minimum of energy for cooking.

I'm taking early steps towards growing some veges in the back yard and a chook pen isn't out of the question. But tonight... I'd better go check out what's in the freezer.

Water

Australia is suffering a devastating drought. We have no idea whether it's a temporary abnormality or a new weather pattern caused by global warming which is going to stick with us for the long term.

Brisbane's water storages have dropped to under 20% capacity. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on water infrastructure in this region alone, including new dams, pipelines, desalination and reclamation (recycling). It's appalling that our response to a drought which may be caused by global warming is a massive project which first burns oil to power the construction machinery and then coal to power the desal plant and all the pumps. It may in fact be our only option to survive the present conditions but still...

The nation's major food producing region (the Murray-Darling basin) has just been informed that in the absence of significant rain in the next couple of months there will be no water available for irrigation later in the year. If this eventuates, future recovery would take years as long-established trees and vines are likely to die.

All these water woes aren't restricted to humans though. Environmentalists have been telling us for years that our abuse of water destroys ecosystems upon which we all depend. Now the pressure on the environment is coming from both sides: what little rain there is is being consumed by us, with basically nothing left.