Some thoughts on Changing Lifestyles

I bought this book new in 1991, read it a couple of times then lent it out to anyone who was interested. Somewhere along the line it didn’t come back and I added it on to my list to re-buy when I saw it (along with Shockwave Rider, The Dispossessed and Ender’s Game). When Amazon came along I looked for it on there. I don’t know when it had gone out of print but it wasn’t even mentioned and for a long time it wasn’t in the secondhand section either. And then, joy! Not only was it available but there were a number of copies.

It arrived a week or so ago when I was reading Sandi Toksvig’s ‘Valentine Grey’. Given the need to scramble to get work completed I was losing the plot of VG repeatedly and so I put it aside to read over Christmas and picked up Changing Lifestyles, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t grip me in quite the same way. It turns out to be an excellent book to read whilst struggling with a heavy workload. The chapters are short, the language is simple and the ideas are not new, but I found a piquant pleasure in reading his exhortations to the extent that I had to ration myself to just a chapter before bed.

For many years I have enjoyed the writings of those who have recently been redefined as grumpy old men/women. Lawrence D Hills and John Seymour typify the category. They were not grumpy so much as opinionated. Lawrence Hills, founder of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now Garden Organic), seems to have all but disappeared from popular culture but John Seymour’s Self Sufficiency seems still to be around and has stopped him falling into total obscurity.

I’ve been giving some thought as to why the highly opinionated (environmental) writer appeals to me. I think it’s because, although I believe in the urgent need to change our actions, and though my work involves raising awareness of environmental issues for businesses, I am not evangelical. It’s just so lovely to read someone who says it plainly and obviously lives his ideals. And so, John Seymour.

I first recall coming across Seymour in my teens. My father, a reluctant gardener but great dreamer, had a copy of ‘The Self Sufficient Gardner’, I think from his book club. I have no idea whether he chose it in a moment of enthusiasm or whether it turned up because he didn’t cancel it. I think he passed it on to my uncle, a man interested in gardening for food production rather than simply avoiding censure. Before it disappeared I spent some time reading it, loving its downright instructions and beautiful illustrations although I felt no call to put its advice into practice at that time.

I was a teen in the 70s, a time of flared jeans, cheesecloth shirts and a dawning awareness of potential limits. Limits to Growth was published in 1972. There had been electricity blackouts during the 1972 miners’ strike and again in 1974. The oil price shock of 1973 meant that the school cruise I went on didn’t go to Dubrovnik because the cruising speed was lowered to save fuel. A further oil shock happened in 1979. None of these issues were caused by real shortages but we became aware, for the first time in the post-war UK, that our modern systems were not invulnerable. Then, of course, there was the Good Life and Jimmy Carter’s ‘cardigan’ speech. At my first election I voted Ecology Party. In other words, I was environmentally aware and not averse to the whole idea of living more lightly.

Changing Lifestyles was published in 1991, when my son was just walking and I was expecting my daughter. It didn't change my life. I was already the breastfeeding mother with my babies in terry nappies, cooking wholefoods and heading towards educating otherwise. It wasn’t life changing but it was lifestyle affirming. He wrote about energy, transport, work and homes, rubbish and recycling, the land, farming and food. Twenty years on and there is nothing that he was saying that couldn’t be said right now, although he thought that by 2012 we would be safely post-petroleum. 

Reading it now it is really difficult to find something surprising to say about it. We should turn down the thermostat, we should drive less, we should find meaningful work that supports our communities, we should grow much of our own food and buy what we can’t grow locally, we should eschew processed ‘dead’ food, we should step back from the precipice and save ourselves. There have been twenty years worth of books saying the same thing since Changing Lifestyles, although a great deal of what we come across these days is so based on emotional manipulation that it wearies me to even begin to read it, and much is a call to action for everyone else, whilst making no effort to reduce the author’s own impact. Al Gore is the quintessential example. This book was written by a man living his beliefs and, as he notes,  ‘this book is about quality of life.‘  

I determined some time ago thatI wasn’t very happy with my own quality of life. I needed some sort of meaning. God does not really provide that for me. Shopping doesn’t do it either. John Seymour’s vision of a life lived to the full, a life of hard but meaningful work, of food made with natural, local ingredients, of making a difference, speaks to me in a way that so much of the modern lifestyle and the recent calls to action do not. 

At the end of his book Seymour looked at where we were and what options were open to us. He delineated a continuous growth scenario, a palliative scenario and a radical change scenario. He concluded that the only possible choice was radical change. I would suggest that, since 1991 we have attempted to paper over the cracks of continuous growth with a little bit of palliative action. I’m no different. Maybe a bit more palliative than continuous growth but not by much. And not anywhere near radical change. 

We are still discussing what, if anything, we should do to pull back from the brink of disaster, as the edge crumbles under our feet. As Seymour says, ‘in the end each one of us has got to take responsibility for what we do, and what we don’t do. There is only one person in the universe over whose actions I have complete control and that is myself.’ And yet. I am so weak. I know what I could do and I don’t, because I’m trying desperately to pass for normal. I think perhaps I should spend some time returning to this book where the issues are clear, and remind myself that I have control over my own actions. 

Weeds!

This is the first reading book (as opposed to knitting pattern or gardening book) I have borrowed from the library. If it were not borrowed I’d put it in my ‘definitely keep’ category. I might end up buying it anyway which sort of negates the whole cost saving benefit of using the library.

I picked it off the shelf whilst I was looking at gardening books. I have a weakness for single subject books – they are often as illuminating about people as they are about the putative subject. This was no exception and proved truly fascinating. I had come across Richard Mabey only as the author of the ubiquitous and useful ‘Food for Free’ but had never read anything else by him. This is a shame because he turns out to be a knowledgeable and lyrical writer. Anyone interested in plants should seek his work out, this book in particular.

What are weeds? Before we began farming I guess there were just plants, some of which were useful to us, some not; weeds probably only arrived as a concept when we began to try to control nature for our benefit. The standard definition seems to be ‘a plant in the wrong place’. Ruskin, though, is quoted as saying a weed is ‘A vegetable which has an innate disposition to get into the wrong place … It is not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent – thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other people’s business – that makes a weed of it.’

Each chapter is named after a weed, beginning with Thoroughwort and ending with The Shoreditch Orchid by way of Love-in Idleness, French Willow and Triffid. We see how weeds arrive; by accident in hay or wool or packaging or deliberately (damn those Victorian gardeners) escaping into the wild. Our views have changed too so a lovely wildflower may be reclassified as a weed and sometimes back again.  Generally, though, weeds are associated, some might say made, by people. We select them, inadvertently, by our actions and the choices we make. Examples are the cornfield weeds, which were selected by our harvesting methods to be a similar height to the crop and by our threshing and cleaning methods to have a similar size and shape of seed. Evolution in action, with us as the evolutionary pressure. But as we disturb and compact soil signature weeds turn up to take advantage of our work. I am fascinated by the idea put forward that the weeds in an area indicate past human habitation and can be a living picture of what has happened on a site long after other signs have disappeared.

An illustration of the type of fascinating story embedded in this book is that of ‘the trunk-road hitchhiking of Danish scurvy-grass. Up to the 1980s [it] was a scarce native of the drier areas of the coasts around Britain….In the mid 1980s it began to appear on a few inland railway-line sites, where its seeds had been introduced with stone rubble brought from the seashore. Then it began to show up along the edges of motorways and major roads. The plants were packed close together, especially on the central reservations, and in their flowering time of March and April it was as if a deep and persistent frost had gripped the verges.’ Mabey continues his tale, noting that in Ireland, where road grit is salt free, there has been no similar diaspora. He notes other contributing factors but concludes, ‘the saltiness of the modern road – that shoreline tang sprayed from council gritting lorries every icy evening even in the landlocked heart of Britain – has been the crucial factor. Again, a social innovation has been immediately exploited by a weed.’

Mabey, towards the end of the book, suggests that we might consider restraining ourselves in our war against weeds given that something living is better than nothing as we move towards a different, more disrupted world. Even more, the urban ecosystems that have developed and made our cities more interesting are no longer in danger of infecting valuable cropland and could be left to naturalise. Weeds are usually pioneer creatures – they move in when we have destroyed a balanced ecosystem. Mabey comments that ‘they are like a kind of immune system, organisms which move in to repair damaged tissue, in this case earth stripped of its previous vegetation.’ He continues, ‘Weeds’ rapid, opportunist lifestyles mean that their role – what they do – is to fill the empty spaces of the earth, to repair the vegetation shattered naturally for millions of years by landslide and flood and forest fire, and today degraded by aggressive farming and gross pollution. In so doing they stabilise the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants and begin the process of succession to more stable and complex plant systems.’ I will admit to a sneaking affection for most weed species and it’s good to see someone like Richard Mabey articulating this view so eloquently. This is definitely a keeper, not only for its sound ecological viewpoint, standing back a little from the concept that the world and its contents are solely for the use of humanity, but for its beautiful prose, dense with both information and imagery:

‘We habitually think of weeds as invaders, but in a precise sense they are also part of the heritage or legacy of a place, an ancestral presence, a time-biding genetic bank over which our buildings and tinkerings are just an ephemeral carapace.’


Picture (discussed in the book) by Albrecht Durer

Reporting the environment

Ian recently sent me a link to an article on The Register. He often sends me links just to annoy me. I usually read them, feel a bit grumpy, then forget them. This one, though, just about hit my tolerance limit. It's a fabulous example of bad reporting, drawing conclusions that are unwarranted from the information.


The piece is titled, 'People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy' and subtitled, 'Those keenest to be green are most ignorant - survey.' I guess they provide fair warning in their titling that this is not an objective report. It is, however, based on a fairly interesting piece of scientific research and the Register were good enough to provide  a link to the original paper. 


Having read both the Register's article and the original paper, 'Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings', I can agree what the Register reported was not incorrect but the spin they had imparted to a sober little paper was so strenuous it is probably still reeling. 


What the original article says is that people are not fully aware of the energy used by their various activities, appliances or embodied in the products they use. From the information presented this is true. 


I will even admit, sheepishly, that the contrasting embodied energy costs for glass and aluminium surprised me. I hadn't really thought about it but it seems fairly obvious that this would be the case once I had given it some thought. The melting point of aluminium is around 660C, for glass it is at least 1400C, depending on constituents. From this the Register concludes that 'as a true eco-person, you shouldn't be recycling glass, you ought not to be using it at all.' Well, yes. And no. Unfortunately, at present I am unable to find the sort of wine I want to drink in aluminium cans. Given that I am unlikely to stop drinking wine in the immediate future it is still better for me to send my glass bottles for recycling than not*. 


The article continues, 'Again, when asked what the single most effective thing they could do to save energy, the most popular response in the survey was to turn off lights. In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use and almost all of us could save far more juice (and carbon) in other ways - for instance by turning the heating down as little as a single degree, something which many extremely keen lightswitch nazis** refuse to do.'


I have an issue with this paragraph. I am not disputing that turning the heating down will save more energy than turning off lights, but there is also no reason not to turn lights off in a room not being used. The Register seems very keen on either/or choices. It might surprise them but it is quite possible to turn the heating down by one degree and turn lights off in unused rooms. 


They go on to quote the original paper that states 'participants estimated that line drying saves more energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true)'. My concern with this statement is twofold. One is that I always wonder when I hear such loose phrasing. 'Changing the washer's settings' could mean anything from reducing the temperature by 10 degrees to reducing it from 90C to 30C or more. Looking at the paper's Figure 1 it is quite possible that, depending on what that phrase means, line drying may be a better saver. Difficult to tell; the graph is small with a logarithmic scale. My other concern again is, what does it matter? Both of these are potentially high energy saving. Change the washer settings and line dry. 


Never mind though, the Register goes on from this paragraph to state, 'Perhaps the killer revelation from the survey is that it is, in fact, the very people who are keenest and most active about reducing their energy consumption who are the most ignorant.' Despite the exaggeration and emotive language this is, in fact, the conclusion of the paper. People are optimistic that what they are doing is having a positive effect. Their perceptions are not as accurate as they could be. This is a problem if for example, you comfort yourself that the impact of your flight to Australia will be offset by turning the lights out and recycling your wine bottles. It may also be a problem if, as a Register reader, you can only take one action at a time so rather than turn your thermostat down, line dry your clothes, boil only as much water as you need and cycle to work you unplug your phone charger. 


The lesson the Register takes from the information contained within the paper is, 'In other words, ignore that earnest friend of yours who recycles religiously, turns off the lights all the time, and unplugs the telly every night... They quite literally have no idea what they are talking about.' Well no, that's not what the paper said. The original paper suggested that better and more accurate information would help to reduce emissions and public information campaigns should focus on behaviours that could have a greater effect - forget the phone chargers and turn down the heating.  They conclude, 'It is therefore vital that public communications about climate change also address misconceptions about energy consumption and savings, so that people can make better decisions for their pocketbooks and the planet.'  The Register, on the other hand, concludes that we should 'ignore the many worth organisations - for instance the Energy Saving Trust here in the UK, which you pay for through your taxes - which have made us all so ignorant.' I took a quick look at the EST website. The top ten tips did indeed include the admonition, 'Don't leave appliances on stand-by and remember not to leave laptops and mobile phones on charge unnecessarily'. It also, however, suggested sorting out dripping hot water taps, fully loading our washing machines, boiling only as much water as needed, changing to low energy bulbs, turning lights off, closing curtains at dusk and draught proofing, turning your water thermostat down (also reduces the risk of scalding small children) and turning your central heating thermostat down. The information on the site would be improved if each tactic was rated on energy saving effectiveness but the tips given were all generally good and do not seem to me to be making us ignorant. The worst that could be said is that it is not as informative as it could be.


I wonder what the Register gains by subverting a worthy piece of research. It makes no sense to me. Unless the author of the piece is still living with his parents who keep turning the lights out on him.




*Ideally glass bottles should be reused. My milkman very kindly takes my glass milk bottles back for reuse. It doesn't need vastly more energy to take them back because he was coming to my house to deliver anyway. 


**As a rule of thumb, use of the word nazi in an article not talking about the german fascist movement of the mid 20th century is an indicator of a lack of objectivity.   

Another fab link

Courtesy of Ian, this is a BBC website (beta at present) showing the comparative size of things centred over whatever postcode you enter. I particularly like the environmental disaster section. Wow! The Gulf oil spill, the toxic cloud from Bhopal, the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl and, very worryingly, the Eastern Pacific garbage patch. Go have a look!