At last, my car is redundant

I'm delighted to announce that my last, and perhaps most pressing, reason for having a car has finally been resolved, and I can look forward to not having one, unless it's just a toy rather than a mode of transport...

I noticed a while ago that I was often making shortish journeys (ie around town, or to the next town) by car instead of train, because my little wheeled tin box was the only place where I could listen to the radio in splendid isolation. And I know I'm not alone in this, but I have been known to extend my journey a bit to allow time for an interesting programme to finish, or a favourite song to fade out. Well, no more!

Yes, I've bought a little personal MP3 player! So now I can download podcasts of life enhancing things, like Radio 4 nuggets such as Start the Week or The Unbelievable Truth, or people talking nonsense I agree with about music on the Word Magazine podcast, or Introducing...with Tom Robinson from BBC6Music, and I can listen to these while I'm walking or using the train.

Esteemed reader, celebrate with me: I have joined the modern age, and I can tell you that a joyous aspect of this new life is that I actually want my foot-and-train journeys to take that little bit longer so my programmes can finish.

So there you go: after 10 years of ranting about changing people's transport behaviour I can reveal that the two most simple steps to leaving the car at home are these: online shopping; and a little MP3 player.

If only I had discovered this sooner!

AW.

A Flask For All Seasons

I'm on a Cross-Country train and have just been informed that "the lovely Janice...[long pause]...and the equally lovely Keith" are serving refreshments. In a startling case study of how progress can often be retrograde, Cross-Country recently removed their 'Retail Shops' - buffets to you and me - from their trains to make more room for seats. So now the 30-odd standing passengers have 6 more seats to squabble over, but the chances of getting a decent cup of coffee have been slashed for everyone. Janice and Keith must pick their times carefully, because between many stations there isn't time to push the trolley along the train, over or around the standing passengers. So even if the trolley had a built-in Italian coffee machine most passengers would never even get a whiff of it. I wonder if Cross-Country's accountants had factored in a dramatic fall in catering revenue when they made this particular decision....

Hence the return of the trusty insulated flask. For some time the flask seemed to have been demoted to a quirky accessory favoured only by fellwalkers and those slightly baffling commuters who dress like fellwalkers even when their most serious climb of the day will be steps on the station footbridge. Now, on this train, I can see at least three flasks without cricking my neck. Mine is, of course, the nearest, and I took great pleasure in filling it with freshly brewed espresso before setting off from home. No more acrid, dusty strainings at £1.60 a throw for me - I have the real thing, thank you kindly, Janice. Or Keith.

On your average British weather day (starting off cool and dry, becoming increasingly muggy in the afternoon and then with a biting wind starting up around 7pm*) the flask is actually the perfect accessory, although it is rarely utilised to its full potential. Fill it with strong coffee in the morning for a lively start to the day. Refill with a good source of tap water around lunchtime and that will see you through the afternoon with cool rehydration. Then, depending on your mood, a third fill of either a herbal tea or a decent red wine will make a long journey home much more bearable. Furthermore, if you do go for the alcoholic choice you will be ahead of the curve when it comes to these drink-free zones in public places. No booze-addled ASBO-phile would have the foresight to pack a flask, so when you spontaneously snatch an evening in the park when the sun happens to stop by, you will be all the more free to enjoy it. (Culinary tip of the day - a very dry Chardonnay is the perfect accompaniment to fish and chips.)

I keep reading that tap water is growing in popularity as a backlash against over-packaged, overpriced bottled waters with high ecological footprints and questionable ingredients takes hold. This might be true of home consumption - where access to a tap is a fair bet, but when travelling I have seen little evidence of this. There is a capitalist logic that shops and public transport franchises can make money from bottled water, but not from tap water. However I think a bigger obstacle is infrastructure. When asking for tap water at a station cafe I was served a cup of boiling water from the coffee machine, over ice to make it cold. The waitress assured me I didn't want to taste the water from the tap, and I am inclined to believe her. Despite the exemplary quality of our tap water most public buildings seem to have a 'stagnation and disgustification' facility that makes drinking water from the tap very unpleasant, if not actually unwise.

If we hold with the argument that one path to sustainability is to replace an unsustainable PRODUCT with a sustainable SERVICE, then what we need here is a revolution in drinking water infrastructure for public places. Modern government would call this a Flaskholder's Charter: all public places would have dispensing points for chilled, filtered tap water and boiling water, so one could fill one's flask at a moment's notice. And of course, most people would be

delighted to pay, say, 40p for a high quality refill, so there is money to be made.

My fellow passengers and I have just been advised that Janice and Keith intend to serve us "quickly and safely throughout our journey". Damn. Just when I was fancying a dangerously slow cuppa.....

AW.

* Not to be confused with a British summer, which largely consists of water falling out of the sky in inconvenient ways. This does not, in itself, preclude the use of flasks, and may even encourage it.

We're S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G.

I'm currently reading John Grant's Green Marketing Manifesto, and very interesting it is too. One nugget I've just picked up is that eating locally grown, unprocessed food just once per week cuts about 2 tonnes off your annual carbon footprint - ten times more than you can save by reducing the temperature on your washing machine.

I became a convert to local food about 12 years ago, when I moved into a house with a large enough garden to be able to grow a lot of my own produce. Aside from the self-satisfied glow of growing your own, the main difference about local food is that it tastes so much better. This is hardly surprising, when supermarket fresh produce is bred mainly for appearance and longevity in storage, not for taste.

I probably end up in one supermarket or another a couple of times per week (though not usually for fresh stuff). I think it's hypocritical to criticise the supermarkets for wishing to expand their businesses. I am offended by many of their common practices, both in squeezing the juice out of their suppliers and in confusing, bamboozling and perfuming the customer into buying unnecessary or wasteful products. But the more I think about it, the more I am baffled by the willingness of the customer to be enslaved. Large-scale shopping is, by any measure, incredibly inconvenient. For a start you're at quite a disadvantage if you don't have a car (some people really only have a car so they can go to the supermarket). Then you have to drag a recalcitrant trolley around the shop, and the order you load things in it is completely perverse: soft, fresh, perishable fruit and veg first; then bread; then big, bulky but light stuff such as toilet rolls somewhere over half way down; and finally all those heavy, solid objects like fruit juice cartons and wine bottles. Whoever invented that convention was certainly either deluded or sadistic. Eventually your over-laden, ocean-going tanker of a trolley finds its own way to a lengthy queue of its brethren. Then you have to empty the whole thing out onto the conveyor, only to load it up again at break-neck speed, probably in the wrong order. THEN you haul it out to the car, THEN you find ways to put it in the car without it falling all about the place on the way home and THEN you have to unload it all.

The majority of people do this time and time again, as a matter of course, about once a week, for their entire lives.

Blimey.

But just imagine what would happen if we decided to stop this crazy hamster-wheel. The "retail economy" would grind to a halt. Acres of tarmac would stand as empty as abandoned airfields. A handful of (perhaps electric) lorries would deliver things to your house at pre-arranged times. You would have time to sit and read the paper and have a cup of tea, take on your 7 month old child in a nail-biting game of noughts and crosses or - controversially - tend to your vegetable patch. Chaos would reign and the end of civilisation would be upon us.

So before you pledge yourself to the 'eating local once a week' challenge, just be sure you've weighed up the pros and cons.

Five words for the next generation

The music journalist David Hepworth wrote recently (Word Magazine, July 2009) that "a generation is coming to maturity [that has] grown up in the waning years of a boom during which cheap credit and irrational optimism combined to shower them with information and entertainment that has been either free of paid for by someone other than the end user." Hepworth remarked on an education professional whose students, of politics, philosophy and economics, "found their information needs could be met by five headlines from Yahoo."

Those students' views don't surprise me at all - less so having recently indulged in a binge of broadsheet reading around the time of the MPs' expenses/European elections/Labour leadership/Speaker unseating debacle. Hundreds of thousands of words were written over a couple of months, not to mention endless TV and radio airtime being swallowed up, yet if we're honest most of it was just rambling speculation. Much as students should, and must, study the ins and outs of their subject, you cannot fault their insight that analysis of news only becomes useful retrospectively. Most of what happens in any given moment is only worthy of a tickertape, or Twitter, summary.

With my sustainability hat on (in-built UV visor and life-raft, only £16.99 from my website) I couldn't help but notice David Hepworth's reference to to a generation raised on 'cheap credit and irrational optimism'. The phrase succinctly summarises most people's knowledge of the challenge of sustainability - not least as it is presented to them by the media and by policymakers. Fearful that the reality is too scary or politically uncomfortable, we habitually sweeten the medicine: for example, buying a new car is seen to be OK for the planet because the car's in-use CO2 emissions are lower than your previous one - glossing over the real problem of there being millions too many car journeys taking place than will ever be sustainable, environmentally or socially. Another example: supplying households with three, colour-coded wheelie bins each might stimulate more recycling but in terms of the overall amount of waste being generated, this wheelie bin acne is almost certainly making matters worse.

Yet both greener cars and more recycling make people feel better about their impact on the planet. These are cheap credits that breed irrational optimism.

I have lost count of the meetings, conferences and policy documents I've encountered where the importance of education has been stressed and re-stressed. 'The next generation will be faced with the really big sustainability challenges, so it is education that will ultimately deliver sustainable development.' Well, quite so; but not if we raise our young on irrational optimism and the illusion of a free lunch. I suspect we are softening the blow because we fear our children will turn around and blame us for the mess they find themselves in.

Yet there is another way to look at all this. In principle, living sustainability is cheaper, because it is about consuming fewer resources that cost money, and reducing pollution that is expensive to clean up. The main reason sustainable solutions are seen as expensive now - such as replacing car and aeroplane journeys with high-speed rail - is because we're designing them to sustain and perpetuate models of consumption, mobility and financial transaction that hindsight will show to be laughably outmoded. Where education should really come in is in nurturing a new generation of inventors and tangential thinkers who can teach humanity to tread much more lightly on the earth. The beauty queen's goal of 'world peace' will be essential to that future, so war-driven technology is an example of a longstanding habit that we shall have to break.

Each day, the news could be distilled into just five words: war, crime, money, scandal, sensationalism. The students who have noticed these five words repeating day after day are probably rather enlightened. Our suited old power-brokers clearly aren't, since they stay embroiled and enraptured by it all.

Perhaps the generation that doesn't want to pay for anything will actually invent ways of doing things for free.

AW.

When will there be a budget for the world?

I have just had to abandon listening to Alistair Darling's budget on the radio while I work, because to use popular parlance it was 'doing my head in'.

This is not a party political blogpost - but at this moment more than ever I have found myself thinking that our politicians are trying to gloss over the fact that they have absolutely no idea how to rescue the economy. By default I therefore assume that their 'expert advisors' have no idea either.

'Ecological budget'. 'Carbon budget'. These terms are gaining in use to refer to the idea that there are finite amounts of carbon that we can emit without pushing the planet's temperature over the edge; a finite extent to which we can ask the planet's ecosystems to support human activity; and the the idea that society could trade in these environmental commodities.

But surely there's a problem here. Are we not wrapping the environment up in the same language that our 'expert advisors' have developed to refer to the fiscal budget? And are we not witnessing a flagrant, panic-stricken plunge into greater and greater fiscal debt in order to try in vain to sustain an economic status quo? The idea that our decision-makers might adapt and adopt fiscal language for environmental capital, and then take on the same ideas of how to manage it. I can here the soundbites now...."This year we have decided to borrow from the planet 78% of the ecological capital we expect to have available in 15 years' time, so that we can sustain the rate of consumption our advisors suggest our voters quite fancy this year."

And the insanity and the fallacy of this argument will be lost among the political noise........

Grand Cleft Auto

I have just spent a few days working from the home of some good friends in the North Town area of Aldershot. By my friends' own admission it is not an area that seems, on the face of it, to enjoy a particularly fine environment: a lot of 1960s-70s era suburban sprawl across fairly flat terrain, enjoying neither the hubbub of the city nor the tranquillity of the countryside.

This makes the discovery I'm about to tell you about all the more startling. On Easter Sunday we set out on a walk to a pub in nearby Ash Vale. For the first two or three minutes you plod past some monolithic low-rise flats and through a small industrial estate and then....bang! You crash headlong into a most wonderful wetland corridor, a veritable artery of water, lush greenery and teeming wildlife, and the walk continues like that to Ash Vale and beyond, along the Basingstoke Canal.

I can show you where this is using the power of Google. Click this link

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=aldershot&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=15.111406,39.550781&ie=UTF8&ll=51.257108,-0.729947&spn=0.015604,0.038624&t=h&z=15&pw=2

Make sure you get the whole link, otherwise it won't work. The Basingstoke Canal runs east-west-ish through this map.

So what's so special? Well, for me it's the way this place seems to defy the rules that environmentalists like me have been laying down for what greenspaces, greenways, wildlife corridors and so on should be, in one fundamental way: noise. For most of the walk the roar of the A331 dual carriageway, the descent of aircraft into Gatwick airport, and the steady grumble of a smaller A-road, are the first set of sounds that you hear, and incessant they are too. Yet somehow they make the drama of the place all the more significant. Coming out of Aldershot North Town on the Blackwater Path, you walk alongside a small river meandering along the backs of suburban houses on one side, and a series of large ponds on the other than seem to attract as many anglers as they do midges. You pass a telltale brick sluice structure under the dual carriageway labelled 'flood relief culvert' and suddenly you realise that this is what living on the brink of a floodplain in England could actually be like - it can be great! 400 days out 405 you can pop out of your back garden onto the footpath for a walk, a cycle, a spot of fishing or birdwatching; then occasionally you seal up the backdoor, set up the camping gear in the bedroom and wait for the waters to subside. All it would take would be a bit of re-planning, a little engineering here and there, and all these nasty floodplains would quickly be seen for what they really are - glorious oases.

Moving on a little further, you walk right underneath the thundering dual carriageway, past a little boxed off bridge pier where some unfortunate has set up a home that comprises two mattresses and some empty beer cans, and then up some steps onto.....my God! An aqueduct carries the Basingstoke Canal across the dual carriageway. First of all you can't help but stand on this bridge, with 5 feet of calm, quiet water behind you and a 50 metre strip of tarmac insanity buzzing away below. It's like standing within the frame of a racetrack computer game. The noise is relentless and these abstract wheeled lumps of metal whizz in bizarre synchronous patterns in opposite directions guided by some mysterious force. What a time-traveller would think arriving at this point is beyond me. Yes, it's alien to the landscape, and it affronts the senses. Yet somehow the way this road carves through the place somehow puts the rest of it into context, into relief. Without the road this place would be 'nice'. With the road, it is pure drama.

The scene becomes more interesting as you walk a little further along the aqueduct, glancing back to notice a narrowboat making a half-hearted attempt to catch you up. It dawns on you that you can see for at least half a mile around, and that the whole canal is raised up on an embankment that crosses a broad swathe of marshland with lakes, tall trees and all manner of birds. The builders of the Basingstoke Canal must have actually constructed an embankment at least 20 metres tall and probably 40-50 metres wide at its base, to carry a waterway across a wetland! No doubt a much easier solution than trying to create channels within the boggy wetlands and then build locks to follow the contours. But unless you came to this spot, and saw that it had been done, you'd never have believed it.

Of course, the canal might be the highway of its age but it nevertheless operates at walking pace, or sometimes these days cycling pace, never at the blinding speed of the dual carriageway. But it is still a massive human intervention into this damp, wild landscape. And what I can't tell from here is how much the lakes and trees of the wetlands have themselves been reshaped by man. Is the whole thing a giant flood management/reclamation area? There are certainly a lot of criss-crossing paths where the anglers are idling their day, and in one of the lakes there is a weed-encrusted brick structure, so that has a story to tell too.

And in the end what really strikes you is, for all this embankment building, road slicing, aqueducting, and all this noise, you can still hear the birdsong going hell-for-leather, and see the geese skidding to a stop on the lake, and walk through the web of a spider that has set up camp in preparation for an al fresco feast of midges. Nature doesn't care about our silly earthmoving capers and our 80mph toys. It doesn't care that we etch our developmental conquests on the bedpost of the landscape. It does its own thing, in its own time. I think it might even be laughing at us.

AW.

No Alarms and No Surprises

Various locations, Scotland.

Today started, surprisingly, with the hotel fire alarm going off. Having gathered the things I really couldn't do without (trousers, wallet, glasses) I venture out into the corridor where the alarm was incredibly loud, where a member of staff shouted 'False Alarm!' at me and I retreated to my room. False? It certainly made the kind of noise you would expect from a real one.

The alarm went on for 20 minutes, while I washed, dressed, packed and drank tea. It was set off, apparently, by someone using an aerosol in Room 16. So! It's not a fire alarm, it's an antisocial product alarm. Splendid.

3 Caffe Nero branches later I headed out to a small and, I have to admit, entirely godforesaken town. I feel genuinely sorry for people who have to live in such places - though I don't suppose they'd welcome my pity and would probably write me off as a Champagne Socialist. But walking back through the shopping centre to the bus station (as you must in these places - the bus station is always stuck onto/inside/underneath a shopping centre) I noticed that the piped music was piping Radiohead's No Alarms and No Surprises - an apt song for the town if ever there was one, as well as some kind of personal jibe at this morning's wake-up call. And at least, if this is any consolation, the good people of that sad town turn out to be aware of their fate, and of Radiohead. Do they want to change the record? Do they have a choice? Can we ever pretend to sustainability while people are living in places they know are crap?

Back in a proper city now. God's probably already at the bar.....