The Greening of Gavin

Archives for November 2012

How Would You Rate Your Greenness?

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Self reflection is something we should all do often.  Otherwise, how would we be able to fully understand how far we have travelled on our sustainable living journey.
However, our sustainable living journey needs to have a reference, a spectrum or scale if you like, so that we can all gauge where we are on the journey.

This spectrum shown above is a good tool to help one understand where they personally are.

Personally, back in September 2006, I was firmly in the red area.  I was shocked into action from the red end of the spectrum through to the light green within the span of a few months, then finally over a longer time period to the dark green end.

Although I have experienced a real paradigm shift in behaviours, beliefs and personal reality, sometimes I loose that optimism which comes with green, and go to a much darker place.  Those who follow this blog regularly would have observed this in my writing from time to time.  It happens to us all I think, but then I snap out of it with some self reflection or meditation.

I believe that it isn’t until we measure something objectively, that we can truly improve upon our performance.

Anyway, that is where I think I am on the scale, where do you think you are?  You don’t have to share if you don’t want to, but it would be great if people self reflect a little, and draw a line in the sand so to speak.  While you are at it, have a think about behaviours you could be doing better or start to move towards the greener end of the scale.

Join in, the waters fine.  The more the merrier, I say.  What would be really interesting would be if we did this again in six months time.  Who is up for the challenge?

A Day At The Museum

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I have been working diligently on my Clay Oven eBook so I needed a break away from the screen.  Ben suggested that we visit the Museum, so off we went.

The Melbourne Museum is big.  So big, that we didn’t get to see all of it in the time we had allocated.

Firstly, the dinosaur exhibit.

We read all the information and looked at all the bones.  The displays were very well made, with information about the era each dinosaur lived in, what they ate, and how they lived.  We must have spent the first hour just reading all the information.

My thoughts and comments to my daughter Megan were that the timelines of the dinosaur age are just unfathomable when compared to the human timeline.  We have been around for the blink of an eye, and managed to stuff up the environment in only a couple of hundred years.  The dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years and didn’t manage to stuff anything up.  Kudos to the dinosaurs!

We then looked at how old the earth was.  It was old, like 4.5 billion years old.  It surprised Ben, but I had already learnt this when I was his age!

From a globe of red hot magma, to a planet with water and continents supporting life.  An amazing transformation, and somewhere amongst it all was life.  Precious in all its forms.

Then into the mammal exhibition.  Walking into a room full of preserved animals made me feel very sad.  To think that many of these beasts are nearly extinct, because of our disregard for our actions, with no thought of the consequences.  A barrel of fun to take to the museum, aren’t I?

I spent a lot of time here looking and looking, with moist eyes.  I didn’t let the kids see though, as I didn’t want to spoil their day out.

What did make me shed a tear was an exhibit at the entrance to this room.  It was the Human Population Growth Exhibit.  Here is a video of it.

It really made me think, because I have never seen it represented so graphically.  I stood there for a good ten minutes watching it over and over again.  Observe the years (AD) and the dots which represent a million people grow exponentially after 1900.  The good thing was that the exhibit had text below it that talked about overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change, and the impact upon the planet that we are causing.
You know, if someone from outer space was observing this, it would appear that we are a virus on the face of the earth, multiplying until we kill the host.  Quite shocking really, all driven by cheap energy and the surplus of food via the green revolution.  If we didn’t have access to oil or coal, our growth may have slowly increased to a steady state.  We may have lived lighter on the planet (or not).
Anyway, I explained this to Ben, but I think it went over his head.
We wandered through the human body display for a while, then into the forest.  The forest was full of insects, tortoises, frogs, and I am sure many other animals.  This really cheered me up, and was most peaceful.
So what did I learn from my trip to the museum?  Well, I learnt that if we don’t stop our system of economic growth soon, our civilization will be the one that alien archaeologists will be digging up in a few hundred thousand years (we may not be around any more), trying to figure out where we went wrong and how we were so short-sighted.  They would probably think that we were a monumentally stupid race, expanding and destroying until we, like a virus, killed our own habitat.
It makes me shudder.  Am I the only one who visits a museum and thinks like this during a visit? Sometimes I think all this truth and reality is doing my head in.

Cheese Tips on Little Green Cheese

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Just for all you curd nerds out there, I have published a post over on my cheese blog, Little Green Cheese.

It is about maintaining a consistent temperature with your cheese (aka wine cooler) fridge.  The question came from a reader, Sandra who was having trouble with her own cheese fridge.

Pop on over and have a read of the post titled “Cheese Fridge Tips“.

Gav