Nothing is really disposable

My ride to work route goes through several industrial estates, past a McDonalds, and alongside a university. Naturally the roads, footpaths, and bushes in the area are clogged with an inordinate amount of rubbish. Over the last four years it has amazed me how I can pass the same rubbish week in, week out, and it never moves until there is a big storm at which point it is magically whisked away, out of sight, out of mind, to be replaced a new crop of flotsam from somewhere upwind.

Last week I finally got around to buying myself a long “claw on a stick” device that means I can pick up rubbish without getting on and off my bike, having to bend down, or getting my hands grubby. I take a shopping bag with me, fill it up with rubbish, then empty it into a bin when I get to the end of my ride.

Today’s haul included a balloon on ribbon, several lengths of polystyrene, juice boxes, plastic water bottles, plastic bags, coffee cups, and straws.

Taking an extra 5 minutes to get to work gave me time to pack a standard plastic shopping bag with rubbish. On the way home I did that again, and this time also picked up a huge length of pink plastic bubble wrap that has been sitting in the bushes for weeks.

I like to think that this will make a difference – there are a lot of plastic cups, plastic bags, straws, and juice boxes that won’t wind up in Port Phillip Bay because of me. There was quite a lot of polystyrene (where does it all come from?) which breaks down into little white balls that look just like fish food in the water, and it’s now safely in bins because I took those 10 extra minutes out of my day.

But in practice I will still look at those spaces and be appalled by how much rubbish there is there. I can’t pick it all up, even over time, as it accumulates faster than I can pick it up. So I started pondering how we could stop it – maybe make McDonalds responsible for all of their rubbish? Make them pay to send cleaners out and pick up every item of branded trash within a 5km radius?

Make businesses responsible for the roadside rubbish outside their premises? What about the parkland? Who is responsible for that? Pay people for the rubbish they turn in? Container deposit schemes for plastic bottles? What about the lids on coffee cups?

Until it finally dawned on me that this was very much post-horse-bolting thinking. Picking up the rubbish is not the point. Stopping it being dropped is not even the point. The point is that we can’t afford to continue generating rubbish. We really can’t. We need to come to grips with the idea that there truly is nothing disposable. Rubbish persists, whether it’s in the streets, floating in the bay, or in landfill. It takes energy to create it, to transport it, and to trash it, and it still remains, a toxic blight on our landscape.

There are so many ways to avoid rubbish – keeping a water bottle with you for refilling, having a keep cup for your coffee, buying fresh, unpackaged food – yet most of them require effort. And goodness knows we’re all busy, exhausted, and stretched to our limits. But until we recognise that “disposable” is a myth, we’ll go on making the wrong choices every day, piling our earth high with rubbish that none of us wants in our garden.

These days everything is temporary. Hole in your jacket? Chuck it. Phone a couple of years old? Toss it, it’s obsolete. Ipad not the latest model? Upgrade! Microwave door broken? Get a new one! (microwave, not door)

We don’t repair things anymore. We are ashamed of things that are old, not the latest model. We have to have TODAY’s fashion in devices, clothes, and cars. But in the long term? This is just not going to work. We are going to be outnumbered, out-massed, and outlived by our own rubbish. What an epitaph.

Hands off Point Nepean

Have you ever gazed out over a pristine beach and felt both awed and calmed by its beauty?

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a forest, breathing in a sense of peace?

Have you ever wondered what it is about natural places that causes them to speak to us in this profound way? That changes us every time we interact with them? That draws us in and gives us a sense of connectedness and belonging?

These are the reasons we preserve these magical places in National Parks. According to the Australian government:

“National parks are usually large areas of land that are protected because they have unspoilt landscapes and a diverse number of native plants and animals. This means that commercial activities such as farming are prohibited and human activity is strictly monitored.

Like zoos, national parks have several purposes. The foremost of these is to protect native flora and fauna. But national parks are also there so Australians and foreign visitors can enjoy and learn about our unique environment, heritage and culture.”

Unfortunately somebody will need to update this – it is becoming increasingly clear that national parks are now nothing more than commercial opportunities. After all, we wouldn’t want our forests “locked up”, would we, Mr Abbott? The Federal government plans to put a coal port slap bang in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef – not merely a national park, but a world heritage area. An irreplaceable treasure.

And now the Victorian government plans to excise a huge chunk of the Point Nepean National Park for commercial development.

Pt Nepean was declared a National Park in 2009, after years of vigorous campaigning by the local community.

Beach at the Quarantine Station, Pt Nepean National Park

Understandably, they believed this meant that the park was now protected, open to the public for ever more, to be preserved and maintained as a national treasure.  Point Nepean includes the old Quarantine Station, and if you have never visited, I urge you to make the time to go while you still can, because it is an amazing site – a wonderful combination of stunning scenery and the incredibly moving stories of those early settlers, brought off ships and housed in quarantine on this wild and remote patch of coast.

See it while you can, because if the State government has its way it will be rezoned, stripped of its environmental and heritage protections, and access restricted to wealthy clients of the “Wellness Centre” and “Geothermal Spa”. Of course, there is no geothermal spa at the site, but it’s only a matter of drilling around one kilometre into the earth, and with any luck they will find some nice hotsprings to bring to the surface – without damaging the surrounding bushland, you understand, because of course drilling one kilometre (one thousand metres! Can they really be serious?) into the earth is so easy to do in a non-disruptive, non-destructive fashion.

The proposed development includes a jetty designed to allow easy access for speedboats coming from around the bay. Which sounds all very fine until you realise that the jetty would be right in the middle of an integral section of Port Phillip Heads Marine National Park, and a known dolphin nursery. According to Parks Victoria, the thinking behind the park is this:

“By keeping some of these marine areas in a natural state, free from potentially damaging human activities, we will protect these environments into the future. Victorians will also benefit from the positive effects that this protection will have on recreation and tourism, community education and scientific research.”

Which seems rather at odds with a high-traffic jetty encouraging speed boats and jet skis through an already fragile area. The development is being fast tracked and deliberately placed outside normal planning controls and public scrutiny, which is always a red flag. If it is truly of benefit to the community why try to hide it, and avoid public discussion and debate?

I often think that the measure of a truly civilized society is the value it places on intangible things that don’t fit in traditional economic models. On community, on nature, on sustainability, on relationships.  On things we can’t easily label with a price tag. Our relationships with these wild places are irreplaceable. As we break down our connection with the natural world and base our lifestyles on foundations of ipads and concrete, we lose a vital part of ourselves.

I often walk on the beach at Pt Nepean, and I frequently see dolphins playing in the shallows. My family and I pick up rubbish along the beach, most of it washed up from other areas of the bay. When I told my girls, aged 11 and 7, that there was a big development proposed for the area, they were horrified. “There’s too much rubbish there already!” they cried. Sums it up, really.

PS. If you want to protect our history and our national parks, you can contact your member of Parliament and urge them to act.

How could you, Mr Abbott?

I spent the holidays with my family having the most wonderful holiday I can remember. We went to Heron Island, where not only were our myriad food issues just brilliantly catered for, we made breathtakingly wonderful new friends, and relaxed properly for the first time in years.

The reason we were so relaxed, apart from bonding with fabulous people, was the Great Barrier Reef. We snorkeled for hours every day, and without fail we saw new and wondrous things every time. We didn’t have to leave the island, we just stepped off the beach, put our masks in the water and were overcome with the incredible biodiversity all around us.

We swam with turtles, who were magnificently unconcerned with our presence.

We discovered sea beds carpeted with cow tail rays, shovel headed rays, and white spotted eagle rays, so camouflaged against the sand that we often didn’t notice until we swam right over the top of them.

We saw fish and coral of astounding colours and variation, and learnt bizarre and wondrous things about the lives and behaviour of a myriad of weird creatures – like the sea cucumber who can squirt out its internal organs at you when it feels threatened (I do feel that “Stop, or I’ll throw my kidneys at you!” doesn’t sound like the most frightening of threats), the sea star who can casually drop off one of its legs and feast on it if it feels like a snack, or the beautiful reef sharks who are harmless to humans, despite their clear and slightly creepy resemblance to their larger brethren.

While walking among the coral at low tide we had an Epaulette shark swim right up to us and pose, helpfully, for photos.

And we saw brilliantly coloured sea stars just hanging out on the rocks. Sometimes literally, as they eject their stomachs in order to digest large food.

I could rave on for pages and pages about the astonishing and wonderful things that we saw, but overlaying the trip was an overwhelming, desperate sadness. This richly biodiverse environment is under catastrophic threat, and our politicians seem to be actively hastening its demise.

They do things like ignore the overwhelmingly strong evidence that human driven climate change will spell the end of this kind of environment in an alarmingly short time, doing away with an effective carbon tax and subsidizing coal and fossil fuels to an absurdly uneconomic degree. They approve coal ports in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. They decide that this stunning environment and all its creatures would be the perfect place to dump dredging spoil.

They are trashing our environment, our world, and our future, for reasons I cannot possibly begin to fathom. They may not be  playing dice with the universe, but they are playing God in an all too tangible and destructive fashion, and we don’t have long to stop them before this exceptional place is gone for good. And that will be just the start of our woes.

What right do we have to wantonly and irrevocably destroy this most remarkable place for a fistful of dollars? And how do we stop it??

The new normal

Here in Melbourne, Spring has suddenly sprung. Truly it has – don’t bother me with your petty calendar-based technicalities, I know Spring when I bask in it.

Outside the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and the temperature has reached that balmy level where, if it were summer, we’d all be muttering about brass monkeys and their frozen … er… seed cases (this is a family friendly website, ok?). Truly, it’s 17 degrees out there and we’re breaking out the t-shirts, shorts, and thongs, making plans to head for the beach. Weather like this in January would have us reaching for our coats and beanies. But coming as it does after a grey, cold winter, 17 degrees is pure, unadulterated bliss.

We are a remarkably adaptable species. We adjust quite quickly to new circumstances, and sometimes we forget that anything has even changed. What’s normal today is entirely dependent on what happened yesterday. Was it 12 degrees and rainy? Then 17 degrees is fine. But sometimes it pays to examine the new normal, and wonder if we have actually progressed. So here is a random list of normalities that could use some adjusting.

1. Politicians lie. They do. It’s a fact. We’re so used to it that it’s not even newsworthy anymore. It’s just a thing we know they do. I don’t know what the point of elections is anymore. We vote for some party on the basis of promises that we know they will break. We accept the lies, the inhumanity, and the gross inequity of their actions. Perfectly intelligent people swallow all kinds of lies like “saving lives by stopping the boats” and “budget emergencies”, even when evidence has shown them to be complete rubbish. And we are neither surprised nor horrified when they turn out to be corrupt. It’s just the way they are.

But we don’t have to accept it. We don’t have to vote for politicians. We can vote for independents, and minor parties. The major parties would have you believe that it leads to chaos, but Julia Gillard steered a hung parliament and a very fragile senate through some of the most significant progress Australia has seen in years. We got a National Disability Insurance Scheme, we got a price on carbon – a step that much of the world is now implementing, while watching in horror as we dismantle ours. The worst thing that can happen to a government is to have complete control. Good government is a process of negotiation, balance, and compromise.The more independents and minor parties get the vote, the more politicians will take note and start to listen to us. Your local member broke a promise? Sack ’em. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

2. We need new stuff. It’s hard rubbish time in my area, and the number of large, fully functional televisions that have been thrown out because their owners have shiny new flat screen tvs is ASTOUNDING. All because we need new stuff. We picked up a coffee table that needs a couple of nails and a polish to be as good as new. It’s a sturdy, high quality table. It’s lovely. But it was chucked on the scrap heap, because we need new stuff. More with the shiny things. Newsflash: We don’t need new stuff. Things can be repaired. Things can be polished. I can imagine a whole new class of profession in the future: people who fix stuff. Freaky, eh?

3. There’s rubbish everywhere. Yes, there is. But like politicians, we don’t have to accept that. We can take responsibility for our own rubbish. We can create less rubbish (don’t get me started on coffee pods), and dispose of what we do create carefully. We can pick up a little of everyone else’s rubbish every now and then. How many times have you walked into a school, a shopping centre, or a carpark and thought “how disgusting, people are such pigs!” and yet not done anything about it? Be the change you want to see in the world.

4. We need cars. We don’t, you know. We have feet. We have bicycles. We have public transport. Sure, there are arguments against many of those things, but you have more power in your body than you give it credit for. You can walk further than you think you can. You can ride further than you think you can. And the beautiful part is that the more you do it, the more you can do it. Got kids to transport? Get yourself a cargo bike. Cheaper than a second car, and you’ll save yourself the cost of a gym membership too. I’m not saying cars aren’t useful, but does your family really need two?

5. Productive=Busy. We are greatly invested in being busy these days. Wasted time is anathema. Got to be up and doing! But if there is one single thing I have learnt from being ill for a long time, it is that sometimes the most productive thing we can do is nothing at all. Mindfulness, stillness, peace and quiet – whatever you call it, we all need it, and we don’t value it nearly enough. I recharge my phone with ferocious obsessiveness, rarely letting it get flat. But I let myself get flat all the time. When was the last time you prioritized recharging yourself?

6. We mustn’t interfere. I have friends who live on a beautiful beach in Tasmania, where signs say dogs aren’t allowed, as it is a significant nesting area for a number of threatened species. Nonetheless, dog owners take their dogs there regularly, even off the lead. Rather than tut-tutting under their breath, my friends call them on it. Gently. Tactfully. But ever so firmly. They’re clever about it. They give people a chance to save face with comments like “Did you realize that dogs aren’t allowed on this beach?” which gives the owners the chance to say “Oooh, no, thanks for letting me know” and scuttle away with their tails between their legs (sorry). They still see dogs on that beach, but there are less of them, and they rarely see anyone they’ve spoken to coming back. This is how progress is made.

The mum next door screams at her kids a lot? Strike up a conversation. Maybe she really needs someone to talk to. There’s a dad in the supermarket with his toddler on the floor, screaming up a storm? Reach out to him. “Hah, I’ve had days I’d have liked to do that!” or “we’ve all been there, eh?” to let him know he’s not alone. When I was away from work for an extended period, I got lots of messages, emails, texts and phone calls, just checking that I was ok. I even got a few visits.

The world needs more reaching out, not less. So often we have no idea what’s going on, even next door to us.

What’s normal to you, and how much of it needs to change?

If it ain’t broke, throw it away anyway

Our 20 year old microwave broke yesterday. The mechanism still works, but the door opener snapped so that the microwave could no longer be opened. My husband, who has the heart, soul, and incidentally the degree of an Engineer got it down, choked a little on the accumulated dust behind it, and took it apart to see if he could fix it.

Inside he found a piece of aged, brittle plastic that had snapped. And then he asked me a curious question: “So, Lin, do we want a new microwave, or shall we fix it?”

“Is it hard to fix?”

“No, I just need to find a bit of wood or metal, shape it to fit, and screw it in.”

“Ok, I think we fix it, don’t we? By which I mean you fix it, and I’ll stand around looking impressed.” (I’m a software girl. I don’t do hardware. It’s fiddly and I tend to break myself in the process.)

Roughly 20 minutes later the microwave was fixed, cleaned, and back in its rightful place.

What puzzles me is that if I did not have access to this wonderfully talented & obliging engineer-type person, I don’t think I would have hesitated – I’d have chucked it out and got a new one. Sure, the big ticket items like fridges and washing machines usually rate an attempt (generally expensive, often futile) at repair, but smaller items like microwaves and coffee machines are alarmingly disposable. I’m not even sure I could find someone willing to repair a 20 year old microwave, if I tried.

Indeed, when my coffee machine broke under warranty a couple of years ago, the shop did not even look at it, they simply replaced it. Odds are that machine wound up on a rubbish heap somewhere, even though the broken part was simply a piece of tubing that needed replacing.

That’s the act of a society that has infinite resources to call upon. No limit to the metals and plastics we can chew up, and no constraint on the pollution we spit out.

Let me hear you say ‘smogulous smoke’ (smogulous smoke)
Schloppity schlop (schloppity schlop)
Complain all you want, it’s never ever, ever, ever gonna stop.
Come on how bad can I possibly be?
How ba-a-a-ad can I be? I’m just building an economy.
How ba-a-a-ad can I be? Just look at me pettin’ this puppy.
How ba-a-a-ad can I be? A portion of proceeds goes to charity.
How ba-a-a-ad can I be? How bad can I possibly be?

How bad can I be? The Lorax.

There are other signs of a society that believes it has infinite resources. Such a society might, for example, buy a new mobile phone, laptop or tablet device every year. My phone company spammed me incessantly when my contract was up, trying to persuade me to buy a new phone. They could not wrap their heads around the idea that the one I’ve got is working just fine, thanks.

Or it might package food to within an inch of its life (or perhaps beyond) in foil, foam trays, and plastic. It might produce plastic toys that break on the first use, and pack them into plastic packages, tie them down with plastic cable ties, anchor them to a plastic backboard, and shrink wrap the lot in still more plastic.

It might produce an infinite variety of single purpose items that nobody actually needs, like separate cleaning sprays for kitchen, bathroom, and laundry benches, another for shower screens, and still another for the toilet. Oh, and don’t forget the magically different floor spray. (We use a combination of vinegar and bicarb for all of that, and it’s amazingly effective, despite the devastating lack of brightly coloured packaging and almost, but not quite, entirely unreal floral perfumes.)

Such a society might throw away bike tubes every time they puncture. Buy coffee in take away cups every day. Store leftovers in disposable plastic wrap, and take lunch to work or school every day in new plastic bags. It might even buy a single item at the supermarket, put it in a plastic bag, and then just drop the plastic bag on the ground somewhere when it’s no longer needed.

And maybe, one day, such a society might pause and take a good hard look at itself. Such a society might wonder what kind of a world it was handing to its children.

And then it might take a travel mug to buy coffee. It might choose simple, multi-purpose cleaning products, and use reusable containers for leftovers and lunches. It might buy in bulk to minimize packaging, and refuse plastic bags. It might even choose to ride, walk, and catch public transport instead of driving.

And who knows? Such a society might even feel good about itself, eventually.

 

Treading lightly

When I say “teenage boys,” what’s your first reaction?

My daughter is vehement about not wanting to become a teenager, because everything she hears about teenagers is bad. They graffiti. They are rude. They are grumpy. They are vandals. Teenagers have a really serious PR problem.

And, indeed, 3 teenage boys made me cry last Tuesday. But not, perhaps, the way you are thinking. They showed up at my desk at recess with a gift, to tell me how grateful they were for the opportunities I have given them, and the work I have done with them.

And it wasn’t just any gift. We worked together on a dolphin research project, so they gave me a purple bracelet with a silver dolphin charm on it, together with one of the most appropriate and eloquent cards I have ever seen (also purple, and also with dolphins, naturally).

purple bracelet with silver dolphin

That project was one of the highlights of my career, both as a teacher and an academic. I had a wonderful time working on it, and the fact that it’s ongoing and turning into a real, usable, useful system is intensely satisfying to me. It was clear from the way the students kept working on it long after the assignment was submitted that they were highly motivated. I knew how they felt about it. And they knew I knew. Yet they wanted to express their gratitude in a tangible form.

So I wear my bracelet every day, and when things get overwhelming I use it to remind myself that I must be doing something right, and that I am appreciated.

They didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to write the card, or buy the bracelet, or do anything at all. They could easily have taken the attitude that I was just doing my job. They could have been all take and no give. But instead, as they have done throughout the project, they took the opportunity to give back. To lift my spirits in a way I could never have anticipated, and certainly never asked for. They left me far happier than they found me, both with their work, and with their gift.

They chose to make a difference.

There are so many ways we can all make a difference.

On the weekend I went walking with my family at the Quarantine Station down at Pt Nepean. As we usually do, we took a plastic bag and collected what rubbish we could. We collected a wide range of random stuff. Polystyrene, plastic bottles and caps, hair bands, food wrappers, pieces of glow stick, rope, and a large chunk of silicon sealant.

Rubbish from the beach at Pt Nepean

There was some rubbish wedged in rocks where we couldn’t reach it, and it took so long to cover a small section of beach that we couldn’t collect it all. The bag we carried away with us was only a small fraction of the rubbish on the beach on that one day, and it was heavy.

Volume of rubbish collected in half an hour at Pt Nepean.

The trouble with starting to collect rubbish is that it’s very hard to stop. It’s easy to become a bit obsessed, and not stop as long as there is rubbish in sight. Sadly, in our current environment, that often means not stopping. Ever. Because there is SO much of it. Ever since our involvement with the Baykeepers Documentary, we have been a lot more aware of rubbish. Heartbreaking pictures of dead birds and dolphins with a stomach full of plastic bags tend to have that effect.

So if you make yourself responsible for it and decide to clean it up, you could be at it forever. And ever. And ever.

But you don’t have to pick up every single piece of rubbish to make a difference. The other day on the way home from work I ignored a lot of rubbish, as I have to, or I’d never get home. But I did pick up quite a few large pieces of polystyrene. This is particularly nasty stuff, because it breaks down into small white balls that look exactly like eggs. It attracts toxins and pollutants, and winds up floating, egg-like in our waterways. Indigestible balls of poison that our native fish, birds, dolphins and seals snap right up, with tragic results.

So I picked up as much of it as I could, and then I rode home. The rest of the rubbish that I had not picked up nagged at my heart, but I was comforted by the idea that there was a whole lot less rubbish than there would have been if I hadn’t stopped at all. Sure, I hadn’t got it all, but I left that part of the world a little cleaner than I found it.

I think this is a lesson I can learn at work, too. I can’t fix everything. I can’t do everything I want to do. I can’t solve every problem for every student, or even make my own subject perfect. But I can aim to leave the world better than I found it. Not perfect. Not clean. Not sorted. But better than it would have been without me.

It’s easy to feel that we have so little power, such a faint voice, that nothing we can do counts. There’s so much rubbish that it feels as though there’s no point in even trying to pick it up. But if everyone picked up 3 pieces of rubbish, our insoluble litter problem could vanish overnight. We can’t fix everything alone. But we can do a little every day, and have an impact that surprises us, even in a week. And by doing what we can, we can inspire others to do what they can. And together, our tiny acts can build up into a tsunami of change. Just by doing a little, when we can.

Like my students, we can choose to give back. To make a difference in the world. By showing someone we appreciate them. By cleaning up our local environment a little. By seeing something that needs doing and getting it done.

And that’s something that everyone can do.

 

 

We have to look to the future

“We have to look to the future. Either that or we say there is no future. I don’t see that as an option.”

Neil Blake. Baykeeper. Port Phillip Ecocentre.

My 10 year old, Zoe, worries. She worries about climate change. She worries about the environment. She feels helpless. She wants to pick up every piece of rubbish she sees (which can make for very slow car trips). She wants to care for every injured animal. To rehabilitate every patch of trashed bushland. To clean every waterway. I know exactly how she feels.

Earlier this year Zoe got the opportunity to be part of a documentary about plastics in Port Phillip Bay. Called Baykeepers, the film is about the impact of plastics in our waterways, and the people working to stop it.

Every piece of plastic that gets dropped in Melbourne, whether it’s in the street, the playground, your backyard, or your school, is likely to end up in Port Phillip Bay. And plastics are forever.

This is the tragic irony of this Plastic Age we live in. We create plastics to throw away after mere minutes of use – think soft drink bottles, coffee cups, or the wrapping on your sandwich – and then they last forever in the environment. Oh, sure, they break down, but only into smaller pieces of plastic. They never actually go away.

Do you know what happens to those tiny bits of plastic? They get washed into the sea where they collect toxins. Then, being the size of fish eggs, algae and other tasty things, they get eaten by fish and other sea creatures. The plastics and the toxins get concentrated up the food chain, and end up in your plate of fish and chips, or your smoked salmon pizza.

And now we are introducing micro-spheres of plastic into the environment in, of all things, makeup. Exfoliating scrubs are made of tiny beads of plastic, intended to be washed down the drain. We are making plastic specifically intended to wind up in our waterways.

It’s enough to make you despair, just like Zoe. Fortunately tonight we saw the premiere of Baykeepers. It was the first time we had seen the whole thing put together, and understood the story that the film’s director and producer, Michael J. Lutman, was planning to tell. Baykeepers isn’t just a story about plastic. It’s the tale of people who care about our impact on the earth. It’s a story of enlightenment. Of people beginning to recognize our place in the environment, and our responsibility for it.

It’s a tale worth telling, retelling, and telling over again. It’s about waking up to what we’re doing. It’s about telling your friends, your neighbours, and your colleagues. It’s about taking that lightning flash of understanding – of that devastating image of waterways choked with rubbish – and sharing it with anyone who will listen.

Zoe was very lucky to be a part of this powerful and compelling film, but we all have a role to play in the story of the earth. We all have people around us who don’t quite get it. Who haven’t yet realised what it actually means to drop an empty soft drink bottle, or let go of a helium balloon on a plastic ribbon. Who bring their lunches to work in plastic wrap instead of reusable containers. Who casually toss their chip packets aside.

It’s not enough to change our own behaviour. We have to be the catalysts for changing the behaviour of others.

We have to look to the future. To make sure there is one.

Feeling the burn

Like many of my left-leaning compatriots, I have spent the weeks following our federal election alternately despairing and angry, while “our” government dismantles anything to do with climate change and renewable energy, signals its utter contempt for women (they just don’t have much merit, apparently), and sets about making it illegal to publicly support boycotting companies who do environmental or social damage (a move even Chris Berg of the IPA  seems to feel is going too far).

Climate change scares me. Not, as the likes of Andrew Bolt would have it, because I am a crazy alarmist, but because there is an utterly unprecedented degree of scientific consensus saying that we need to act, and act now. That the world is very close to environmental catastrophe. That it may already be too late to avert the worst of it, but that we are making things worse with every day we deny the need to change. Scientists. Climate Scientists. The Scientists whose job it is to study these things.

Sadly Tony Abbott doesn’t feel we need science. What Tony Abbott feels we need is big business making obscene profits at any cost. That’s what’s important. David Suzuki, on QandA on Monday night, said “We now have governments who seem to believe that the corporate agenda is the job of government.” As I watched him debate the audience, I alternated between cheering him on and despairing at some of the questions posed. Not to mention the comments on twitter.

I feel helpless. I can’t influence the government – I lack the billions of dollars required for that. I can’t change the world. I try to live as sustainably as I can, but ultimately what difference does one person – even one family – make?

But then at the end of the program, Dr Suzuki said something striking. He talked about the old slogan “think global, act local” and pointed out that as soon as you think global you are paralysed with horror, and you feel unutterably helpless. He said we need to think locally and act locally. That maybe we can’t influence governments, but we can influence the people around us. We can organise on a local level, and when we do these things successfully, they spread.

I am already trying to organise on a local level – I have a facebook group dedicated to sharing home grown produce (the Monash Area Shared Home grown Produce network, look it up if you are local!) such as fruit, herbs and veggies when they’re in season. It has a small but dedicated band of members, and I have hopes that it will take off. We can do more, like planting fruit trees on our nature strips, and lobbying the council to do the same, rather than planting merely decorative trees.

We are involved with a group organising a veggie garden for our school. We cycle everywhere we can, and encourage others to do the same. There is evidence that your network of friends influences everything from your behaviour to your weight, so perhaps just seeing us out and about with our various bikes is helping to change our corner of the world, just a little bit – just as seeing other people out on their bikes has influenced us.

I am planning to work really hard on my veggie garden this year, and share ideas, techniques and produce with the local network and other friends. I’m going to try to buy seasonal produce grown locally wherever possible, rather than grapes from the US in winter. I am going to stick with my “old” mobile phone when my contract falls due (sorry, telcos, no churn for me!), and put off buying new appliances until the old ones are quite, quite dead. I’m going to drive even less, ride and walk even more, and talk more about it.

Recently I had a birthday and several friends gave me plants, most of them edible. It might be that I have collected like-minded friends around me, but I think it’s also that they know me and know what I like. One friend said she thought about buying me flowers but decided on strawberry plants instead. They make me smile every time I see them, and soon they will be flowering, I hope, and making me salivate too.

Maybe I can’t change the whole world. But I have hopes that I can at least improve my small corner of it. And maybe, just maybe, we will build a future for our children.

Giant Yellow Duck 1, Weather Gods 0

Today was a long day. After a late night last night and an early start today, we had parent-teacher interviews from 4 until 7pm. This process fascinates me. I have 5 minutes to see each set of parents, usually with the student present. Sometimes I have a series of scattered bookings and time to talk more deeply. Sometimes, as tonight, I have bookings every five minutes for long, long stretches, and emerge from the process utterly spent.

As the night went on I used my short breaks to keep an anxious eye on the weather bureau’s radar page, watching the rain arrive and settle in for a protracted stay. As it became clear I was going to get wet on my ride home, I briefly contemplated cadging a lift. It was a toss up between staying warm and dry and chatting in my friend’s car on the way home, and getting cold and wet but shedding the day’s tension and stress with every pedal stroke.

In the end the stress relief won and I suited up for the ride home. I have a large yellow rain cape that makes me look like a giant yellow duck, and plenty of very bright lights, so I wasn’t worried about visibility in the traffic, and I stay fairly dry from the knees up.

As I left the building I took a moment to commune with a fellow cyclist – a rider far more intrepid than I, who averages about twice my speed and rides for almost 3 times as long. We shared rain avoidance tips, compared bikes (His: lean, fast and serious. Mine: an armchair on wheels.) swapped good wishes for the journey home and whooshed off into the night.

I started to sing my favourite boppy song (currently “Love is Easy” by McFly  – it’s very difficult to feel miserable in the presence of this song) and took my usual gentle approach to the ride, magnified slightly by the need to keep an eye out for particularly deep water and wheel-snatching mud holes. I safely navigated the building site where they have changed the footpath on an almost daily basis for last six months, wresting my back wheel free of the mud, and I scooted down a local side street, on the home stretch now but also hitting that point where water from my helmet was dripping down onto my nose in a most uncomfortable fashion. Also my legs were starting to get cold.

Then I saw it.

A shape on the fence I was passing turned to study me, as if wondering what strange manner of large yellow creature was disturbing the peace with splashing noises and flashing lights, and I was suddenly eye to eye with a large tawny frogmouth. It watched me impassively as I sloshed by, with a curiously contemplative air.

By the time I got home I was warm and tired on the inside, cold and wet on the outside, and energised by my chance encounter with this charmingly enigmatic bird.

In a car I would never even have known he was there.

Power Up!

We have long been considered a little odd where we live. Years ago we cut down (and up) a dead tree with handsaws, and fended off no fewer than 5 offers of chainsaws from our neighbours. The idea that we chose to do it under our own steam was perplexing. Never mind that the noise, stench and danger of petrol powered chainsaws was off-putting, it was actually quite satisfying to physically engage with our environment. Yet this was seen as quite peculiar in our little street.

Add to that our bizarre insistence on being a one car family, our strange propensity to mow our lawn with an ancient hand mower, our curious fascination with the bicycle as transport, our stubborn refusal to buy a large plasma TV, and our neighbours simply don’t know what to make of us.

My husband has been building a cubby house out of mostly recycled materials. Today I gave the floor a second coat of paint while working on my mindfulness. I could feel the cool breeze on my cheek, smell the violets and narcissus blooming nearby, and revel in the warmth of our unseasonal sunshine. When I came inside for a break I was browsing The Conversation when I found an article by Dr Alessandro Demaio, arguing that our physical health and the health of our environment are inextricably interlinked.

The article put into eloquent words something that I have always believed but never fully articulated – that we are a part of the world, not separate from it. That cars and big houses and plasma screen TVs serve to divorce us from the world, bit by bit. That being out in the world, using active methods of transport, growing your own food, and preserving our environment are fundamentally satisfying because they build the health of our world, our communities, and even ourselves.

I know this at a visceral level when I have been out on my bike. I feel it deep in my bones when I am weeding my veggie patch. I see it on the faces of the people I chat to as I ride around our local streets. Yet the pull of the car is strong. The urge, even on a bright sunny winter’s day like today, to collapse into the car and drive the 2.5km to school is strong.

The desire to eat junk, to buy more stuff, to build ever larger houses and consume ever more resources seems a little like an addiction to narcotics. We know it’s bad for us. We know the first buzz will be replaced by a gradual decline, that we’ll have to constantly up the dose to achieve the same high, that it is consuming our bodies and will very probably be fatal, yet we are inevitably drawn back to that road.

That’s why articles like Dr Demaio’s are so important. Before I was even halfway through it I was spurred to go outside and weed my garden. And I am about to ride to school to pick up my girls, with their scooters in my cargo bike so that they can scoot home with me.

Like a child faced with an endless supply of lollies, the temptation to eat myself sick is intense. But I know that the taste of fresh air is sweeter, in the end, than those bright red lollies could ever be. If I can show my kids the truth of that, then maybe, just maybe, the world will change. One bike ride at a time.