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The woman with a tiny carbon footprint
Emine Saner, Guardian
Forget planes, trains or automobiles – if Joan Pick wants to go anywhere, she runs. And she eats nothing but raw food. Is her lifestyle extreme or the future we must all face up to?
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We all know we are meant to be reducing our carbon footprint, but I suspect that many people wouldn’t be prepared to go as far as Joan Pick. She hasn’t driven a car since 1973 and has only been in a petrol-guzzling vehicle twice since then (once in the hearse at her mother’s funeral, the other time when an ambulance came to pick her up after she dislocated her shoulder). Her gas supply was cut off sometime when the last Labour government was in power, and her electricity usage is minimal. She eats only raw food and the only items she ever buys are new trainers – because she gets around by running everywhere. Pick is 67 and claims her lifestyle keeps her healthy. “I’ve been living on nothing for the past 35 years,” she says.
She isn’t, you gather, an average sort of person. She is charming, in her tracksuit, ready to go out running, with her hair pulled into a baseball cap bearing the symbol of the high-IQ society, Mensa. A scientist for many years, she has a mind that darts off in different directions and it can be hard to keep track of what she is talking about (perhaps because I am not a member of Mensa).
… She decided to start living like this, she says, “because I realised we have got the energy question totally wrong. I decided to imagine that the earth was a business in need of sound management. We are all members of the board, a shareholder, a trustee, a consumer and an employee. We believed that fossil fuels were infinite, but they are finite.”
Pick was a scientist, and writer, for many years, with a particular interest in energy consumption. She despairs that most people have to be forced to change the way they live, rather than making the choices themselves.
(13 November 2008)
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us
Jeff Cohen, Common Dreams
Independent media outlets that contributed so mightily to the stunning election result are about to be tested as to their “independence.” With Democrats in control, will these outlets be guided by principle or just partisanship? Will they speak truth to power and expose corruption and injustice over the long haul – no matter who’s in charge?
U.S. history offers role models. In this era when indy journalists reach mass audiences via blogs, viral video and podcasts, there is much to learn from the originators of dissident journalism. From the start of the Republic, bold entrepreneurs (often sole proprietors like many of today’s bloggers) stood up to censorship, jail and violence to sustain independent outlets that transformed our country.
Our Republic’s founding owes much to revolutionary pamphleteers like Tom Paine, who agitated against the King in Common Sense, a pamphlet that sold 150,000 copies when the colonial population was only 2.5 million people.
Study any cause that has improved our country since and you’ll find stubbornly independent journalists who challenged injustice in the face of ridicule and scorn from the mainstream media of their day. These journalistic heroes are chronicled in Rodger Streitmatter’s inspiring book, Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America.
(14 November 2008)
Prince Charles – Unelected, yes – but a true green hero
Peter Melchett, Guardian
Whatever your views on Prince Charles’s constitutional position, he has always been right on environmental issues
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Prince Charles comes in for criticism for all sorts of reasons, in particular from those who want to abolish the monarchy and replace it with an elected head of state. Those campaigning on that issue sometimes find it necessary also to attack the opinions Prince Charles holds, as if that will somehow strengthen their case. In the area where I work, campaigning to protect the environment and to move farming and food away from environmentally destructive, cruel and unhealthy systems that destroy small farms and agricultural jobs, Prince Charles has got it right. His interventions have made a real difference.
… When the generally conservative British media, and our broadly anti-environmental political and business establishment, were ignoring or dismissing the environmental case, an intervention by Prince Charles really made a real difference.
… In the area where he has come under huge criticism from vested interests, GM food, scientific evidence is increasingly showing that the prince got it right.
(14 November 2008)
