10 dinner parties to make you rethink eating as a group.

You may think dinner parties are things that only happened in eighties movies but you would be wrong. Last week, I overheard a woman with a three week old baby planning a dinner party for the following weekend. That’s some serious dedication to the form and we’ve all got some catching up to do.

Plus, of course, there are few things quite as glorious as sitting around a table with good friends, eating good food and drinking good wine and having those wonderful “Never Want This To End” moments. There should be more of those, so try to squeeze a couple of these dinner parties in before the end of your summer.

The Forager Dinner Party

There’s food growing all over that mystical environment place ready for the taking and completely free of charge. So use it. If you know there is a ready stash of forageable food nearby, pick three or four things, such as sorrel, nettles, berries and mushrooms, and base your dishes around them. If you’re feeling brave, ask your guests to bring something they found on the way over to yours and cook on the fly.

Locavore
 Dinner Party

Make your house the epicenter of your foodie world by only buying produce from within a 100 mile radius to whip up delicious dinner treats for your buddies. You know the drill: farmers markets, veg boxes, co-ops, home grown and so on. Really this is just your standard cooking with slightly altered shopping habits, except we’re all very right on round here so probably the shopping habits aren’t even changed that much. So, uh, file under Totally Normal Dinner Party.

The Family-Style Eating Dinner Party

You can do this one of two ways. Either make everyone eat food cooked for slightly too long in a pressure cooker while a middle aged Jewish woman shouts at you for not doing your homework. Or dish up huge bowls of hearty salads and platters of meats and cheeses, or serve a heavy, heady stew in a huge enamel pot, and let everyone dig in. Slabs of crusty bread are crucial, regardless of the main dish you serve. Tear it apart with your hands and share the chunks all around.

The Austerity Dinner Party

It’s tough times all round, so who can afford to throw a full-on swanky dinner party? More to the point, who can be bothered cooking when there’s gin to be drinking? Cheap c’est chic! Go all out with lentils, pulses, rices and root veg. You can do incredible things with red lentils, butternut squash, kale and garam masala, and a French onion soup with homemade bread is basically the best thing humans have ever invented. Ever. Except for maybe gin.

The State of the Nation Dinner Party

See above, except 1% of your guests eat foie gras while wearing top hats and tails and laughing a very tight laugh.

The Craparet Dinner Party

You know that thing where you watch an amazing show, like the circus where unfeasibly sexy and bendy people make you feel inadequate, or a friend gives you tickets to something and it turns out to be these guys, or this, and that inadequacy conspires with inspiration and you vow to become the best goddam drum-playing trapeze artist the world has ever seen. EVER! Except you don’t, of course, you remain slightly adept at a marginal skill. Accept that you will never perform in the cabaret of your dreams and instead join the craparet.

Ask each dinner party guest to perform a short act in the spirit of crap entertainment; a shoddy magic trick perhaps, or a half-baked burlesque routine. A song sung out of key. Feed your guests backstreet cabaret fare: little triangle sandwiches or burgers, fish cakes, spring rolls, cocktail sausages, bowls of nuts, olives or pretzels, and considerably sized buckets of red wine.

The Independence Day Party

Over here in Brit-land we don’t do Independence Day because we basically invented the whole world. But on any given month, there is a country somewhere in the world having their own Independence Day celebration. Do it like they do in Finland, Jamaica or Mexico, and if things get really bad with the economy, use your new found cultural know-how to declare your house an independent state.

The Food Crawl Dinner Party

Why lumber one person with all the hard work? Allot starter, main and dessert to a different guest and travel from house to house in between courses, exploring each households take on a theme: vegan, vegetarian, conscious meaties, local, or just delicious food and booze.

The Republican Party

Come as yourself, but take on a particular belief, policy or idiosyncrasy from the never ending pool of bizzaro-juice that is the Republican Party. Confuse consent and non-consent. Confuse North and South Korea. Insist the person sitting on your right spends the evening carrying a fetus to term.

After dinner (Republican dinner? It doesn’t matter, as long as the women cook), guess what everyone else was acting out. The winner gets to act/not act on a matter that is none of their business/desperately urgent.

The What Curiosity Found Dinner Party

Or What Curiosity found. Either/or. Present your findings once you’ve eaten. Powerpoint and pointy lasers welcome. After-dinner speakers are the absolute bee’s knees. Yes they are!

Image: Angry JulieMonday, Carly & Art, NatalieMaynor, kevin dooley, Gabriella Corrado, garryknight, emmadiscovery

The post The 10 Dinner Parties You Should Throw Before Summer is Over appeared first on EcoSalon.

Stop offending us.

We’re all different, right? Right! So it’s no surprise that there are lots of different reactions to climate change. But here’s a new one: offense. Imagine saying it. “I’m offended by climate change.” What does that even mean? Imagine being offended by science. That’s like being offended by chairs, or zippers or sticking plasters. Oh well, there’s no legislating for idiots. The only thing you can really do is laugh. So have a giggle: here are four people who are so offended by the facts of science, and a little helping hand from two people who are not.

Senator Jeff Sessions is offended by climate change.

Senator Barbara Boxer: “…97 to 98 percent of the scientists do not agree with the one to two percent that you’re citing. You know, it’s fine, there’s still probably one to two percent of scientists who don’t believe that lung cancer is associated with smoking.”

Senator Jeff Sessions: “Madam Chairman, I am offended by that.”

John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, is offended by climate change.

“It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM.
Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data back in the late 1990’s to create an allusion of rapid global warming.”

Rush Limbaugh is offended by everything, including climate change.

“The militant environmental movement since the early nineties is simply the new repository for displaced communists after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union went bye-bye. Anti-capitalist, it’s all they are, just like the feminists, just another anti-capitalist movement, pro-socialist, pro-Marxist, pro-big government, that’s all they are.”

Senator James Inhofe is offended by climate change.

“God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

Stephen Fry is not offended by climate change.

“It’s now very common to hear people say, “I’m rather offended by that,” as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I’m offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what?”

Charlie Brooker is not offended by climate change.

“I hate offended people. They come in two flavours – huffy and whiny – and it’s hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important, narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. Combined, they’re the very worst people on the planet – 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it’s true (it isn’t), but because it’ll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives.”

Image: NASA

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Want to save the world? Stop arguing.

I’d been in the job for two months when the first one arrived. An email from a stranger. He had read my column in the local paper about local environmental issues and he was angry. I was on a gravy-train, he said (clearly he hadn’t looked at my payslips). I was intent on bringing this country to its knees, he said. Look outside, he said. It’s raining! In June! It’s cold!

Naively, I wrote back. Hadn’t anyone told him I was going to save the world? And anyway, I had science and logic at my disposal. That would soon show him! Except of course it didn’t. He wrote back, this time more rude and aggressive than before, and I defended my corner, and so it continued.

Over the next few years, he emailed me every month or so, or left messages under my online articles. Sometimes he was abusive, sometimes good humored, always they were patronizing. I was young, I was female; how could I possibly know anything of the world or science? We argued a lot and I spent many furious hours replying to him. I was convinced that if I was going to save the world, it mattered what every single person thought. It really did. Besides, a good, well-constructed argument with someone who knows how to argue back is a glorious thing.

But the more I argued, the more I saw a pattern. An incandescent-bulb of tedious discourse, winding round and round and burning huge amounts of energy for such little reward. It wasn’t a playful back-and-forth brain exercise. It was war and it was stalemate. No one was moving anywhere and the growing animosity on both sides was starting to wear. Who were those stupid deniers and their casual disregard for life on Earth? Who are those do-gooding greenies and their pious asceticism?

The rhetoric on “belief” and “converting” made me uncomfortable. This wasn’t about faith, it was about facts. And suddenly lines were being drawn. AGWers on the left, anti-AGWers on the right. During one public debate, a local politician spat venomously that my views on climate change made me a filthy socialist to be spurned and ignored, yet his party expounded policies for the rigid protection for the countryside. People wrote to the local paper complaining about the refuse problem in our city, and then wrote to me to say that forcing people to recycle was a breach of their human rights.

Around the dinner table people would tell me that wind turbines were an affront and solar a con because of the subsidies, but that the government should pour money into nuclear.
I was exhausted and confused. If everyone wanted the same outcome – protected wildlife, a clean world, energy security – then what were we arguing about? Why did climate change even matter?

Six years after I started that job there was the small but growing possibility that I wasn’t going to save the world. Plus there were other things I wanted to do: study for a masters degree, start a family, move to the country, maybe move to another country, maybe do a PhD. But I was stuck arguing over the finer points of how best to recycle the little cardboard tube inside a toilet roll and trying to explain that a wind turbine was not the same as communism. I had changed but the arguments hadn’t. The world had barely moved on but everyone still wanted the same conclusion.

I caught a radio program about a man who stopped talking for 15 years. When asked why, he said one day he had a cold and lost his voice so couldn’t speak. He was surprised at how much he learned just by listening and decided that he was going to keep listening until he knew everything he needed to know. Just listen. A revolutionary idea.

Then I was idly flicking through a book that someone had given me about conflict. One page caught my eye, about how we habitually deny other peoples’ feelings.

“I’m hungry,”says person A.

“But you’ve just eaten,” says the person B.

“I’m cold,” says person A.

“But it’s warm in here,” says person B.

Person A is still cold or still hungry. There’s no resolution to that, it’s a cycle that’s leading nowhere. Just listen, the book suggested. A revolutionary idea.

The angry emailer emailed again. I suggested a phone call and we chatted. He was intelligent and pleasant and we agreed that something would have to replace oil, although we both thought that for different reasons and we disagreed about a lot of other things. We even laughed, and recently he emailed to ask after my well-being and whether there was any pitter-patter of tiny green feet yet.
Then last week a friend tried, for the millionth time, to pick an argument with me about climate change. I found myself saying “Do you know what? I don’t have to argue about climate change anymore. It’s decided. The people who know, know, the people who don’t, don’t. That’s the end of the story. Believe what you like, it’s of no interest to me. There’s nothing to gain in me having this conversation with you.”

My friend considered this for a moment and nodded. Then she started talking. She told me how overfishing makes her furious, how the destruction of the forests leaves her in a rage. We left the conversation in agreement: action needed to be taken.
All of a sudden I didn’t feel like I needed an eco-psychologist any more, but like this.

Now I can start saving the world.

Image: Geisha Boy

The post How I Learned To Stop Arguing About The Environment And Enjoy Life appeared first on EcoSalon.

Renting? We’ve got 5 ways to help you decorate without pounding a single nail or changing a wall color.

There are many terrible problems with the global economic crisis, not least that the fragile grasp we’ve been precariously maintaining on a flawed system is rapidly weakening and the whole thing is threatening to collapse and when the entire system goes down there is only three days worth of food in the shops and two days worth of fuel at the pumps and we’re gleefully piling headlong into a zombie apocalypse but with bankers instead of zombies and we’re going to need some tins of food and guns…do you own a gun? I don’t own a gun. There’s a can of chickpeas in the cupboard though.

Worse than all of that, however, is the whole mess means nice middle class people like my good self are suddenly unable to buy the house of their dreams. So I’m sitting here in my perfectly pleasant rental complaining about feeling like a student and talking about Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreements because it makes me feel a tiny bit closer to those dreary conversations over a nice Malbec about mortgage rates and isn’t something shocking and something else is a scandal and oh by the way look at our lovely new dado rail.

Owing to a glut of shallowness, the big problem I find with renting is it’s hard to make a house that someone else owns feel like home. I mean, really like home. We can’t decorate (I’ve lived with magnolia walls for so long now that I genuinely believe it is the only color paint available). We can’t knock out the horrific 70s stone fireplace. We can’t even arrange the kitchen so it makes sense (Why is the fridge in a whole other room? Why is there no space by the sink to put washing up? Why is there no work surface next to the stove?)

Still, if there’s one thing ahem-ahem years of renting has taught me, it’s that you can stamp your stamp on a place without drilling holes, knocking down walls or refitting the bathroom. Try these for size:

Peelable wall stickers

Vinyl wall stickers can distract from the fact that your walls are so bland it’s almost like they don’t exist. Actually, walls that only look like they exist might be quite cool in a secret-lair-hiding-behind-them way. Although I guess your neighbors would have something to say about their place being turned into a secret lair, so you’ll have to go with the decals. PVC-free and totally recyclable, they can also be peeled off when you move and transferred to your new pad.

Plants

It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s oh so eco-friendly. A good bunch of plant friends scattered liberally around your house really can turn a pile of bricks into a welcoming home. Little Kokedama string gardens make a beautiful little design feature, or ridiculously outsized plants, like towering umbrella trees, distract from the bland wonderland of blank, off-white walls.
Alternatively, just find some plants you like, stick them on a shelf and talk to them every now and then.

Storage

You can’t put shelves up and you’re sick to death of bloody IKEA Billy bookcases. The only solution: get yourself to a yard sale and go on a rampage. Pick up battered vintage suitcases and use them to store clothes, stationary or miscellaneous stuff, like this or this, and old glasses or vases can be used to hold kitchen utensils or make-up. If you’ve got a fruit and veggie wholesaler nearby, old wooden apple crates are your storage-based best friend.

Flea Market Furniture

Jo-ann Fortune from vintagebrighton.com says: “If you’re on a budget and have only a small amount of space to play with, look out for mid-century pieces. Built for the smaller living spaces that were becoming more common in 1950s and 60s, mass production techniques made quality materials and innovative design affordable and second-hand pieces remain so. Look for sleek sideboards with sliding doors, extendable tables and stackable chairs, all of which combine the form and function for which mid-century design is celebrated.”

Photos

Nothing says home like that really awkward photo of you in your graduation gown or the picture of your family in complimenting wardrobe colors. Spurn those and get that stuff printed on actual photo paper with actual ink. Use a temporary glue spray to affix them to your wall montage style, or arrange them in one big frame and hope the landlord doesn’t notice one teeny tiny nail hole when you’ve gone.

Love It
Ultimately, home isn’t about a dual aspect lounge or a hand-made Italian kitchen (although we wouldn’t say no), it’s about how you feel. Take time to fall in love with your rental as the place you live right now, as one more rung on your ladder. No matter how frustrating, you’ll probably look back with fondness on the weird tap that needs jiggling to turn off properly or the socket that trips a fuse if you plug your cell phone and laptop in at the same time, so don’t wait, look on them with fondness now.

Most importantly, invite people over as soon as possible. Cook foodie-focused dinners, picnic on the living room floor, lean out of the window drinking wine and watch people walk past. Build a stock of happy memories to revisit and realize it’s not that home but the people inside the home that really make it a great place to be.

Top image: Apartment Therapy, Angrylambie1

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Three mothers tell their own tale of how abortion changed their lives…for the better.

Lucy was 18 when she had an abortion.

“It was the ‘bad’ kind,” she says. “The kind you have because you just don’t want to have children, or because you were irresponsible. You know, the slutty kind.” She got on with her life and thought about it every now and then, occasionally wondering if she had made the right decision. Last July, Lucy, who now lives in Norfolk and is 31, gave birth to a little a boy, Ezra. In becoming a mother, she says, she finally laid to rest those sporadic demons. “Since having my son, having gone through that process of pregnancy and childbirth and child care, I have never been so absolutely certain that what I did all those years ago was right.”

Lucy is not alone. Despite a rising anti-choice sentiment across the UK, where this story is being reported, there are a number of women for whom parenthood only strengthens their resolve that access to abortion must be safe, legal and guilt-free.

Emily lives in Devon with her partner and two daughters, aged three and one. She has a third daughter, Ivy, whom she painfully chose to abort at 23 weeks when she was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The prognosis was poor. Assuming Ivy survived birth, she would have had open heart surgery in the first week of life. Assuming she survived that, she would have needed surgery again at six months, and if she survived that, then again at three, and so on.

Emily says: “Ivy was a baby. She was perfect in every way, down to her tiny fingernails and her eyelashes. She had my partner’s feet in miniature. When she was born, she tried to breathe. We held her till she went still and told her we loved her, and that we would make the most of this life and never forget her. That was my choice.”

Nadine Dorries debates plans to bar abortion providers from giving advice to pregnant women

Not long after Emily returned to work after losing her daughter, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who has repeatedly tried to limit access to abortion services during her time as a politician, tabled an amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act that would strip abortion providers of the right to counsel women. The loosely worded bill threatened to land the role of counselor in the hands of religious or anti-choice groups.

Emily says: “I was driving home listening to the radio and was so furious I had to pull over and cry angry tears. I could not believe that there were people out there who dared to feel they had the right to take that choice out of anyone’s hands. ”

Thirty-year-old Julie had a very strict Catholic upbringing. These days she is an atheist, pro-choice, and married with a son (8 months) and a daughter (3). When she was at university she got pregnant by accident and miscarried at six weeks. During the two weeks she knew about the pregnancy she was terrified of having the baby but also realized very quickly that she was unable to have an abortion.

She says: “I felt like I would be killing a baby, and I just couldn’t consider it as an option. But I believe that a mother’s job is to do what’s best for her family, especially the child she’s carrying, sometimes the best thing is a termination and the mother should have that option.”

Abortion services are under attack in the UK like never before. The conservative majority of the coalition government are pushing through Nadine Dorries’ amendment regardless of it being defeated in parliament, and aggressive American anti-choice group 40 Days for Life have shipped their brand of campaigning to a new shore and began picketing abortion clinics at the beginning of Lent, filming women going in and out and handing out wildly inaccurate information.

While those who genuinely believe abortion is murder and those who believe it is unfortunate but sometimes necessary are never going to agree, the popular discourse on abortion misses the fact that the stories carry on long after a woman leaves the clinic, and that terminating a pregnancy can be a foundation stone for building stronger, happier, more together lives.

Emily refuses to dress her experiences up in any coy language.

“I did kill my baby,” she says. “I chose to have Ivy at 23 weeks and to watch her die in my arms because for me, that was preferable to continuing with the pregnancy. She would have had a life, just not the life I wanted for her, or for me, or for my partner, or at that time, for the possible future brothers or sisters she might have.”

And if she had chosen to continue with the pregnancy, chances are she would have lost a baby or a child at a later date than she did, something she considers to be considerably harder than losing a baby pre-birth. She doubts very much she and her partner would still be together, or that they would be living in their dream house in the idyllic Devon countryside, or that they would have the two daughters they have now.

“It’s too crazy to think about,” she says. “I’d not be me. I say that was the hardest choice I ever had to make but really, in the moment, it was one of the easiest. I knew as soon as we had the full facts that there was no way that I would put my baby through the treatment. I’ve never doubted that we made the right choice, not for a second. And that is the truth.”

Lucy says she had always considered her abortion a selfish act. At the time, she was rarely able to make it through the day without having an alcoholic drink, she was using drugs regularly and was “indescribably miserable and confused.” When she found out she was pregnant, she went to the pub, drank a double vodka, smoked half a pack of cigarettes and stayed out all night taking speed. In retrospect she thinks that perhaps she wasn’t so selfish after all. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stop drinking or using drugs throughout the pregnancy.

“So I had a choice,” she says. “I could bring a child in to the world – a very unwanted child – who would start life physically damaged because of my inability to care for it in the womb, and would move through life emotionally damaged because of my inability to care for it when it arrived. Or I could choose something else, to end the pregnancy, get myself straight, go to university, get a masters degree, fall in love, buy a house, have a child who is so adored that some days I feel like the love flows out of me in giant waves. If I had continued with that pregnancy when I was 18 it would have destroyed many lives.”

Julie’s first pregnancy was exactly the opposite experience. Even though she didn’t want a child, she was unable to drink or smoke, do anything that might harm the fetus in anyway and still holds with her a guilt that she miscarried because she didn’t want to keep it. When she fell pregnant with what would become her eldest child she obsessively researched the phases of gestation and fell in love “with a child, not a potential child” and began to believe that the 24 week time limit on is horrific. Yet during her third pregnancy, the one that would produce her second child, she planned to attend a pro-choice rally.

“To me I was exactly the right person to be there, saying ‘look at me, I’m pregnant, I love my children but I’m still pro-choice.’ The conservative right and the Catholics like to paint women who terminate pregnancies as morally, emotionally and intellectually weak. I could never have terminated a pregnancy myself, but I believe I should have the right to, and I will publicly stand with women who have had to make that decision. I will also stand against anyone, politician or religious zealot, or both, who thinks that religious dogma is an appropriate basis for lawmaking,” she says.

Lucy says that if she could have gotten to the same point in her life in a less awful way then of course she would choose that.

“But I did what I did and I’m fine with that. No one is pro-abortion, no one wants to actually do it, but sometimes it is the best option. I’ve spent a lot of time mired in existential crises and trying to rationalize it and eventually realized that we decide who lives and dies all the time. We make conscious decisions to have a baby; that someone knew should not exist. We send people to war to die. The death penalty sends innocent people to their graves every year. We have people die from famine or drought or brutal regimes and we allow that to happen. We decide that our grandma or uncle or best friend has reached such a point in their illness that their quality of life is too diminished and we quietly ask the doctor if they can up the morphine dosage. It’s just part of the way stuff works. We can call upon Fate or God and be a victim of circumstance, or we can engage with it, choose our lives, the course of events that are best for ourselves and our families. If you don’t like it, so be it, but no one has the right to interfere with those choices. I now consider my first true act as a mother was realizing that I was in no position to become a mother. In a sense I am proud of that and it gives me confidence that I am making the right choices for my family now.”

Image: The Guardian, zeevveez, Medill DC, Elvert Barnes

The post 3 Mothers Embrace Abortion As a Woman’s Right appeared first on EcoSalon.

Can swapping be a cure for many of our environmental woes?

We like to share in Brighton & Hove. So much so, that one overexcited Freegler offered her used Mooncup (clean) on the gifting website. A “taken” message never appeared, so we will never know if the local commitment to reusing unwanted stuff goes as far as communal menstruation products.

Freegle is to the UK what Freecycle is to the U.S., and it started right here in Brighton. But long before the internet allowed people to give away a plethora of Billy bookcases or the gradual accumulation of tchotchke, there was the very first public swap shop: the street.

Unwanted items regularly get left outside people’s houses with “Please Take Me” signs, and with double beds, sofas and computers often found touting for new owners on the pavement, these free little markets do a roaring trade.

Roland Miles lives in the Port Hall area of Brighton. He says he and his neighbors regularly put stuff outside and it all usually goes within a matter of hours. One child’s bike elicited a knock on the door within two minutes of being left out to check it was really free. He says: “I once put out some boxes with about 300 books in. All but five were gone by the evening. As a bookseller, I am committed never to destroy a book – it is a sad fact that almost all books gifted to charity are shredded or sent to landfill. For that reason, giving books away like this feels like bucking a system in which too many companies’ growth depends on destroying what has gone before. It also feels good when you see the Please Take boxes outside people’s houses – it is like seeing a flag which announces that you are living among like-minded people.”

The city is also home to a Local Exchange Trading Scheme, two exchange websites, Bid & Borrow and Netcycler, and The People Who Share, a social enterprise set up with the sole purpose of promoting the sharing economy and encouraging people to be less about a “me” mentality and more about “us.”

Benita Matofksa is the founder and chief sharer of TPWS. She says the sharing economy is based on identifying surplus in the system, not just of stuff but of time, skills, knowledge or talent, and redistributing it to those who need it. It’s less about personal ownership and more about community.

She says: “We’ve been living in very individual, consumerist times and we’ve seen where all that’s taken us. We’re dealing with dreadful global crises. Brighton is the place to be for this kind of venture, the people really embrace it, but there is still resistance to the idea of sharing. People say what about me? What about my stuff? What about my interests? Why should I do that? What’s in it for me? These are some of the things we’re hearing all the time. There are some people who won’t find it easy, who say ‘I’ve worked for it why should I give it up?’ But it’s not about giving up things you need on a daily basis. There is loads of surplus in the system, there is stuff lying around that isn’t being used that could be used by someone else.”

Aside from the obvious advantages of sharing and swapping – financial and environmental – keen swappers also find themselves benefiting socially and emotionally. Liz Bolt (who Freegled a fresh squid) says the gifting community, through her acquisitions and the opportunities they have provided, has become very important to her. Her latest find was an enormous sack of knitting wool. Originally she intended to make pom-poms for a friend’s little girl but there was so much she ended up donating some to the children at the Brighton Women’s Centre pre-school and has asked about setting up a knitting circle.

She says: “A little act of generosity can go a very long way. Brighton is a very chilled out town and although it has its problems, most people are generous and kind. We are a very green city. We are also, apparently, the most godless city, of which I and many others are very proud. We do good deeds and help each other not because some sky-pixie says we should, but because it is the right thing to do.”

Perhaps ironically, the sharing economy has a value in the real economy, about $474 billion worldwide. It is an emerging market, but growing exponentially. Disruptive entrepreneur Matofska believes this is the path towards a genuinely sustainable global system and has dedicated her working life to moving it from the fringes and into the mainstream. She says: “Sharing is the solution to our crises, be they environmental, economic or social. People struggle because it feels like something new but it’s innate. We were all born to share.”

Image: My Swish

The post Sharing as a Solution to Our Environmental Crises appeared first on EcoSalon.

Hey mom and dad, what the freaken hell were you thinking?

I thought getting married was a corporate cashing-in-fest, but it turns out having a baby is a million times worse. Just have a look at the length of the Babies R Us “must have” new parent check list. All the essentials in one place: love, cuddles, milk, warmth and a switch plate cover (I didn’t know they existed either, but apparently they are a necessity).

As a pregnant woman expecting her first child at any moment, I’m personally baffled.

I’m not even sure when these things became more important than the way one looks post-pregnancy, but the message is very loud and clear: buy more stuff or you’ll be a terrible parent. I’ve accepted my status as terrible parent, and thus far have gathered everything we need via hand-me-downs and Freegle.

But there are people who want me to want more. In fact, here are the top seven pointless things companies have tried to sell me while I’ve been pregnant:

A Little Black Birthing Dress (or LBBD)

According to the advertisement, every woman deserves a little black dress to give birth in. Am I supposed to ask the midwife to wear taffeta? Should I be upset there are no hors d’oeuvres on the maternity ward? My mom told me I’d end up butt naked on all fours, pooing myself and screaming blue murder – did she lie? Is birthing actually like a swanky drinks party?

In summary: a very ordinary wrap dress with a price tag of $70 and a single-use life span before being sent off for medical grade incineration. Unless afterbirth stains are your thing.

Wiper Warmers

An electric device to keep your bum wipes warm. First world problems? We got ‘em!

Thudguard Baby Helmet

Toddler in falling over shocker! You know what? My baby’s head is pretty clever. In a few weeks it’s going to do that cool thing where it squishes up nice and tight so it can squeeze out of my tiny lady parts, and then it’s going to expand again and toughen up pretty quickly. My guess is that a skull that well made can cope with everyday bashes and knocks without being literally wrapped in cotton wool.

The human body has spent millions of years becoming what it is today. The fact of me being here and you being there suggests that at some point in the last 200,000 years there was a tiny fragile baby who grew into a wobbly toddler who grew up to have babies of her own, and that person somehow survived living in a cave and wild animal attacks and earthquakes and tornadoes and violent storms, all without the help of sturdy houses or rescue services or a specially designed protective helmet (although no doubt she had warm bum wipes because how anyone could survive without them is a total mystery).

Here is an important lesson even a not-quite-parent-yet knows: if you don’t let your child injure him or herself on occasion he or she will never learn how to remain un-injured and will grow up to be completely lacking in sense and coordination.

Peepee Teepee

I get the basic sentiment. If your little boy pees while you’re changing his nappy it has the potential to go everywhere: your face, his face, the ceiling, the floor, on the dog. But let’s be realistic. A couple of sheets of TP held over his boy parts will do the job, so will a muslin, or your hand, or the dog. This is not a problem that requires a) spending money b) a patented product c) the use of our precious and limited resources.

Tummy Tub Baby Bath

Again, I get the idea, but it costs $32 and I’ve already got a bucket in the Cupboard Where Junk Lives.

Video Baby Monitor

With night vision. Sit in your living room and watch your freaky green baby do its freaky green baby things. Or just go into the nursery and sit and stare at your child. Maybe pop that Thud Guard on him while he sleeps too, just in case.

And finally, a special mention goes to: Shrinx Hips

A device that utilizes ligament softening pregnancy hormones to permanently reduce the size of your hips. When did walking or yoga go out of style?

Image: Juhansonin

The post 7 Pointless Baby Products appeared first on EcoSalon.

Guerilla gardners are radically seed bombing vacant spaces to create lush gardens.

Last year, a group of guerrilla gardeners broke into a disused plot of land in central Brighton and set up a community garden called The Mound. The land had been derelict for the last 14 years and the gardeners wrote to the land owners saying they would vacate as soon as development on the site began. The land owners were – perhaps understandably – unamused at the squatting and responded by sending in bulldozers to level the 20 square meters of vegetable patches, blooming flowers and educational resources, returning the site to its previous state of neglect. Rumor has it a colony of rare crested newts was also lost in the process.

Today, however, the land is a thriving green meadow of mustard and poppies, thigh high shining green weeds and bright yellow thistles, all thanks to an extensive campaign of seed bombing.

The seed bombing phenomenon seems to have bloomed from nowhere; radical gardeners making little muddy balls from damp compost and mixed seeds and throwing them into any unloved urban area where the plants might take.
Josie Jeffery is the author of Seedbombs: Going Wild with Flowers and widely considered the go-to authority on seed bombing in Brighton & Hove. She says seed bombs originated in ancient Japan and were revived halfway through the 20th century by philosopher and microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka as a way of introducing revitalizing plants to tired soil that had been exhausted through over use. The little muddy grenades were then adopted by the New York Green Guerrillas who used them to begin transforming run down areas with bright flowers and greenery.

From there, their popularity has spread weed-like, across the world. Josie became interested in them in 2008 when her studies in horticulture and an overheard snippet of a radio interview led her to the work of Fukuoka. She says: “When I first started making them nobody knew what they were. I loved seeing the looks on people’s faces when I explained what they were because they are funny little things, a ball that looks like a truffle and grows into a plant.”

It was a fascination that coincided with a collective gardening mania in Brighton & Hove. The Lewes Road Community Garden, another patch of derelict land squatted for food growing, had just been established, and the now huge movement towards personal food growing was emerging. Josie says: “People wanted to reclaim the available space in the city because gardens are so small. It appealed to radicals and then it spread and people asked me to do workshops in schools and at different events.”

Before long, children as well as those radicals were chucking seed bombs over fences, into disused street planters or empty tree pits.

When The Mound was first occupied in early 2011, Josie helped gardeners line the soil with hundreds of seed bombs. It was a dry summer and with no immediate water source on the site, the bombs failed to germinate. Subsequently, The Mound met its end, but the big yellow digger wasn’t just destroying the visible plants, it was also spreading the invisible seeds.

Vera Zakharov was a regular visitor to The Mound and after its demise attended a memorial ceremony for the space, where participants walked through the city with signs and plants. At the site at the end of the procession, the group stood and hurled seed bomb after seed bomb over the eight foot high metal fences. She says: “It wasn’t revenge, it was about sovereignty. The developers had made a very active statement that they had no need to engage with community members, even though its presence affected us. We were saying that regardless of the law, you cannot stop human interaction with a space. In that way it was an act of defiance.”

There has since been a lot of rain to wake up the seeds and through the gaps in the newly reinforced fence passers-by can see a huge green meadow filled with wildflowers. Josie is very happy about it.

“After The Mound was levelled everyone forgot about the seeds but now that they’ve grown it’s so exciting. Even though it’s not a garden any more we’ve made sure it still is,” she says.
Vera says: “it’s such a meaningful thing. Seed bombing is activism. It allows us to continue a relationship with the spaces around us, even if the law says we can’t.”

Make your own seed bomb
1.      Use water to dampen compost, or a clay/compost mix
2.      Add a mix of seeds – salad leaves or wildflowers – and roll in your hands to make a ball
3.      Push it into the soil in an appropriate place, or throw it at an urban wasteland
4.      Wait and hope!

Remember: Only use native, non-invasive species. The law around seed bombing private land remains unclear. Do so at your own risk.

The post Flowers of War: Seed Bombing Gets Political appeared first on EcoSalon.

Here Today Here Tomorrow aims to connect shoppers with the clothes they wear.

When four friends became the first graduates from the inaugural MA in Fashion and the Environment at the London College of Fashion, their next step seemed eminently clear: open a shop, get people in, share ideas, and begin exploring more sustainable ways of working in the fashion industry.

With that, Ines Vicente, Emma Rigby, Julia Crew and Anna-Maria Hesse formed a collective called Here Today Here Tomorrow. They found a shop in Dalston, London, and kitted it out with wood and furniture found in skips and left on street corners. Ines eventually returned to her home country of Portugal, and the gap was filled with artist designer Katelyn Toth-Fejel.

That was just under a year ago. Today, Here Today Here Tomorrow is now a thriving hub of sustainable fashion, and we caught up with Emma Rigby to find out why.

As the first graduates from the MA, what did you take away from the course?

The course allowed us to develop a thorough understanding of the key environmental and social problems in the fashion industry and develop solutions via our own work as designers.

It also provided a ground to meet like-minded creative individuals with one common agenda; to envision a more sustainable fashion industry. We [the HTHT collective] all had different backgrounds and experience of working in various areas of fashion, which was a great starting point for opening a shop and experimental workspace.

What’s the philosophy behind HTHT?

Here Today Here Tomorrow is a collaborative and experimental shop/studio that is used to make, showcase and sell sustainable fashion and accessories. The aim is to connect the customer and local passer-by to the processes involved in making the products. The importance of transparency and showing people the materials, skills and time required to create unique products by hand is something that is not frequently communicated to the average high street consumer, and encourages customer engagement and understanding.

Our work focuses on different elements of sustainability including high quality handmade craftsmanship, durability, locality, recycling, natural dye, organic materials, individuality and transparency of production.

What kind of clothes are you making?

We make a selection of clothes and accessories in the studio, including knitwear, leather bags and accessories, jersey t-shirts and some more tailored pieces. We also sell other local designer clothing who manufacture within the UK and have a commitment to sustainability. At the moment we are selling: Remade In Leeds, Lilia Yip, Miko Spinelli’s super funky baseball caps made in Hackney London, and handmade jewelery by Fox Le Magpie.

What kind of impact are you hoping to have on the sustainable fashion industry?

HTHT hopes to show that there is not a one-way approach to sustainability. There is a trade off to every choice that is made, and the fashion industry needs to go a lot further than just offering organic material and fair trade. We hope to encourage creative thinking, locality, mindfulness, material diversity, community engagement, empowerment and resourcefulness.

Where do you see sustainable fashion heading in the future?

A growing awareness around social and environmental issues in the fashion industry is important for the future of sustainable fashion. Business and policy play an important part in building sustainability, yet often the most poignant contributions towards sustainability are people centered. In the future we hope consumers will feel empowered to be less passive and more engaged with their products and the making process. We hope sustainable fashion will be about longevity of
products, beautiful design, durability, reconnecting with nature, understanding limits and recapturing values.

The post Here Today, Here Tomorrow Brings Shoppers Close to Design Process appeared first on EcoSalon.

Tired of supermarket shopping for packaged junk? So are four city food projects.

Oh supermarkets. You are cheap, you are convenient, but sustainable? Not even close.
If I walk half a mile in either direction of my home in Brighton & Hove I will fall over six supermarkets, with a seventh currently under construction. Only two out of those seven shops require me to cross the road. Evolution wasted its time giving me legs.

As for the rest of the city, there are no official statistics, but I counted 47 chain supermarkets, which works out about one shop per 5,000 people. Is that too many? Residents certainly think so, and no new supermarket opens now without a slew of protests.
Placards aside, foodies of Brighton & Hove are at the forefront of the fight against the inexorable onslaught of strip lit aisles and bags of grated cheese. Here are just four projects aiming to get local, fresh and sustainable food back on our plates and into our bellies.

Harvest Brighton & Hove
Harvest B&H exist solely to get people growing and eating more local food. Jess Crocker, Harvest manager says, “We want to make the city the food growing capital of England.”

Alongside educational events, such as courses on balcony gardening, preserving and pickling and fermenting workshops, Harvest also acts as an umbrella organization for a number of offshoot projects. These include a garden share scheme, giving landless people who want to grow food access to unused gardens, The Scrumping Project, which collects excess fruit from trees around the city to turn into jams and juices, and the demonstration vegetable garden, a productive allotment placed in the middle of one of the city’s busiest parks where passers-by can see just how much food they can grow in a relatively small space.

hiSbe
Sisters Amy and Ruth Anslow want to fix the whole food system, from farmer to fork. It’s a big task, but the two women aren’t to be deterred. At the beginning of this year they both gave up their jobs to dedicate themselves to finding a way of making sustainable, fresh food accessible to everyone. They began by creating their “8 Everyday Choices,” a simple guide to making better food buying decisions. By the end of this year, they hope to have opened their first shop, something they describe as a middle ground between the cheapness and convenience of supermarkets and the expensive middle-class mazes of trendy organic boutiques.

They are currently negotiating a lease on premises in central Brighton, and in the meantime their campaigning continues, helping people navigate the complexities of what is sustainable and what isn’t.

Amy says: “There’s this perception that supermarkets are always cheaper. It’s drummed into us by the market but the reality is when you do a like for like comparison on a lot of produce from supermarkets to farm shops, farmers markets or independent stores there isn’t always a huge price differential and in a lot of cases its cheaper.”

Brighton and Hove Alternative to Supermarkets
Not unlike hiSbe, Brighton and Hove Alternative to Supermarkets recognizes that the food system is well and truly screwy. Initially, a few interested people got together to discuss opening a People’s Supermarket, but very quickly realized that another food shop might not be the answer to their wishes. They want to make sustainable, local food accessible to as many people as possible, and shops come with a number of inhibiting factors, such as overheads to drive up prices and their static nature restricting catchment area.

Ideas currently being looked at include a pop-up shop, a food delivery service, or a number of food pick-up points located around the city.
Members of BHATS include academics, people who work with NGOs, co-operatives, and think tanks for food poverty. While they are taking their time formulating a cunning plan, they are all motivated by something much larger than profit.

Moulsecoomb Forest Garden and Wildlife Project
Proving the vital link between food and community, Moulsecoomb Forest Garden and Wildlife Project is dedicated to reducing anti-social behavior and helping young people who have been excluded from school by teaching them how to plant, grow and cook their own food. Based in one of the most deprived areas of Brighton, the project has helped countless teenagers and improved their long term employability by giving them skills when the schools system had given up on them.

That’s what I call, sustainable.

Image: Miamism

The post Sustainable Food Fights Back: 4 Projects of Interest appeared first on EcoSalon.