Recent Comments

1. Get Rid of Your Car - OK, ambitious, but... - 06 Sep 2005

   This is the big thing we have tried to do this year and, so far, six months on, we seem to be getting by. We’re lucky – we live in a big city with good transport links, we’ve joined a local city car club and some good neighbours have let us pay to go on their insurance for occassional borrows. It can be awkward (family of five waiting for ever on train platform the other night, wondering how much easier it would be in the car) but as the weeks pass, more and more of the time we don’t even notice we don’t have a car. For now anyway!

2. Get Rid Of Some Of Your Books - 06 Sep 2005

   So far, sold £70 worth of books on greenmetropolis.com. Idea being that in due course will use revenue to plant trees to offset carbon emissions on flights to North America last year.

3. Encourage Others To Go Generous - 06 Sep 2005

   Ok, here’s one thing that came off. I heard that a senior cleric in the CofE was addressing the General Synod on the subject of the environment. I told him about the very clever hippo’s you can get for free from Thames Water for putting in the cistern – saving lots and lots of water with every flush. The very senior cleric said he’d use the hippo as an illustration in his talk – then we thought if I could get them, he would distribute free hippo’s to everyone at the debate. I called Thames Water PR and they said they’d love to deliver 900 hippo’s to his office. So they did and so he distributed them as part of his talk.

4. Buy Nothing on Buy Nothing Day (In November) - 02 Nov 2005

   I’m up for this. One day may not seem so challenging but perhaps it will feel different, raising consciousness every time I am about to buy something and then think, ‘No, not today’. That’s what happens to me when I clean my teeth. As I turn the tap on, then off.. and keep it off, I think of Generous. This is what consciousness raising is. And the more you do something, the more it becomes you.

5. Buy Nothing on Buy Nothing Day (In November) - 06 Dec 2005

   this action was a good one to undertake, more for the way it gets you thinking about your innate consumerist instincts than whether you manage to down wallets completely on the day. And one of the problems with trying to not buy anything on a single day is that because all our consumption is so commonplace and routine, when you are bent on not doing it for even a day, you can appear a bit self-righteous in having to explain your apparently pompous self. I kept to the spirit of the day, but not in the end in a, er, fundamentalist, way. Principle is good though.

6. Give Thanks Before A Meal - 06 Dec 2005

   We got hold of the Iona ‘Grace’ book in the SPring and it’s completely brilliant for an easy way into giving a moment of thanks before eating – with your immediate family or with your friends. Anyone can choose one and read one and many of the graces are quite groovy and not too naff.

7. Buy Presents That Make A Difference - 06 Dec 2005

   Living in London we’re lucky, every December there’s a big Christmas Fair Trade Fayre and we went along last weekend to sort quite a few gifts out.

8. Start A Generous blog or journal - 03 Jan 2006

   One of the best things about the Generous project is the way it helps raise your consciousness about your different choices in life – and their consequences. Writing things down helps me remember things so I’ll give the diary a go – maybe twice a week if I get my act together.

9. Give Your Unwanted / Unworn Clothes To Charity - 03 Jan 2006

   Great feeling to take a couple of bags of stuff off to the TRAID shop the other morning, so that, following Christmas, our total amount of clothing we hardly wear has not risen quantitatively by that much. Gets you thinking about the total amount of clothing being produced today, whether it might be too much but driven along by marketing to the wealthy like us who want to get new stuff long before the last new stuff has past its sell by. Presumably part of the answer lies not just in taking surplus clothes to Oxfam etc shops… but also buying your ‘new’ clothes from them. Or maybe learning to knit… no…

10. Volunteer Locally With The Homeless - 13 Feb 2006

    In my brown patch of inner London, seven enterprising church communities run the Islington Night Shelter project, each of them hosting up to 15 homeless people for one night a week over the first three months of the year, on their church hall floors. Not only does it provide food, warmth, bed and friendship for people who are down on their luck but it provides a cool way for people like me – every few weeks – to meet with people who I would probably pass without noticing on the street. It’s also one of those rare ways in which you feel the ‘Christian’ community is being who it was meant to be.

11. Energy Efficient Cooking - 13 Feb 2006

    I have tried this twice now and next time I am going to keep a lid on which I am advised will mean the pasta cooks even quicker, tastes even better.

12. Get someone to join the Generous Community - 01 Mar 2006

    Sounds like a plan. What would be good would be if the Generous team, when they emailed us, included a short email-within-the-email – explaining what Generous is and how to join – which we could use to mail to others.

13. Choose to have one meat-free day a week in your home - 05 Mar 2006

    We were looking for something to do for Lent which would mean we would notice we were in Lent and we decided to go vegetarian on weekdays. Five days in we seem to be going vegetarian every day (except for the youngest of us). Feels good to have to think more about what we are going to eat and thanks to some friends with good advice, tastes good so far too.

14. Switch off and unplug appliances and chargers - 25 Mar 2006

    Have just told the kids that we are committing to this action – lot of mobile phones in this house, but we’re all up for turning off the chargers at the plug when we’re not charging.

15. Put Eco Balls in your Washing Machine - 07 May 2006

    We’ve been using them for a few months and it did seem bonkers initially but they seem to work. As I was hanging out one of the kids shirts on the line yesterday I noticed that while they were clean and fresh, there was a hint of a playing field stain on one elbow… but I figure that’ll be there again next week even if we painted over it in white emulsion. So – except for the worst of stains – they seem pretty damn fine. Saves quite a bit of money too.

16. Get A Free Home Energy Report: Save Two Tonnes of C02 (and £250!) - 11 Sep 2006

    this is a very cool little piece of work because all you have to do is answer a few questions and then it gives you a string of energy-saving suggestions for your own home. For example, we are about to decorate a bedroom which has two external walls and unsurprisingly is generally v cold in winter. The report suggested we go for something called internal wall insulation which I had never heard of. So I will check it out and if we can afford it then it will both save energy and keep the room warmer.

17. Why Pay More? - 08 May 2008

    Interesting article by Giles Bolton here http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/trade-secrets on how ethically-minded consumers sometimes don’t realise the virtues of buying ‘cheap’ clothes.

    ‘Why has there been a boom in cheap clothing in recent years? Mainly because the EU reduced its unfair barriers for textiles against a number of poor countries including Bangladesh, giving them a fairer chance to compete. And that’s exactly what they’ve done – bringing us more affordable clothes as a result. ‘Many people instinctively feel that if our clothes are getting cheaper, workers must be getting more exploited. Yet there’s no logic to assuming that something we buy in an expensive store must be produced in better conditions than its cheaper copy in say, Primark. Unless the shop concerned has a clearly stated policy on their ethical sourcing standards, the likelihood is that conditions are similar for both products and the difference is only in the mark-up. The fact is that there are now more chances for employment in textile factories in Bangladesh and other countries, and people want those jobs.’

18. Can You Be A Generous Reader ? - 30 Jun 2008

    As I find bookshops induce in me a trance-like religious state in which my credit card whirls dervish-like into action, i try to modify my indiscipline and curb the shelf-space by regularly using green metropolis. It’s a great second-hand book shop where you post details of books you want to sell (all you do is input the isdn detail and they automatically add the cover/blurb etc) and each time you sell a title they contribute to planting a tree.I’ve sold about fifty to date. http://www.greenmetropolis.com

19. Recycle Your Greetings Cards - 20 Jan 2009

    i’ll collect them all up today: i was about to ask which shops are collecting them up but checkin the woodlands trust link above, its WH Smith, Tesco, TK Maxx and Marks & Spencer

20. ‘Potato day’ - 03 Feb 2009

    Good timing Paul, reminded us to get ours this week and get chitting. Dug out a small tree at the weekend to create more room and light for our veg this year. The spuds were among the easiest and most rewarding to grow last year. Never imagined I could find potatoes this promising. I am channeling the spirits of my ancestors (ie I have become my dad).

21. A wake up call to the G20? - 03 Apr 2009

    I think I understand the choice between growth and prosperity but does it come down to this: on a single planet with finite resources a few of us have become ‘overdeveloped’ and have too many resources and we will have to adapt to a different standard of living if most people in the world are to achieve a higher standard of living ?

22. The Benefits of Recession? - 11 May 2009

    Reverie. Now there’s a great word which could do with making a comeback. How else to respond so such ordinary epiphany.