It's Never Too Late to Go Greener

BGI volunteer Juliet has decided that 2010 is the year to discover just how green a fifty-something single woman who lives halfway up a Welsh mountain can go. If she can do it, so can you!

January 2010

Okay, this is it. 2010 is my year of going green. Seriously green. Well, maybe not seriously: more a light-hearted, money saving, having fun and a better quality of life kind of green.

Well, that's the idea...

I've been thinking about this for some time, you see, and the thought has been making me strangely nervous. I like my home comforts. After years of living in a freezing cold house, I definitely love my central heating. I like nice food, nice clothes and nice shoes, my computer, my digital camera and my iPod. And I have absolutely no intention of giving up my wonderful little camper van, or my dream of seeing the Grand Canyon and visiting New Zealand some day.

It's not, I keep telling myself, as if I'm not doing my bit for the planet already. I carry shopping bags with me at all times. I recycle everything I can. I have my veg box from a local farm, and bread from a local baker. I use Ecover washing up liquid and pooper-scoop with biodegradable poo bags. Hurrah! Plus I boycott Tesco (apart from that particularly nice Italian rice, and when I needed a cake tin which I couldn't get anywhere else because I live in the wilds of Wales and that kind of shop has died a death since Tesco Extra came to town).

So, at this moment, while I'm thinking it over, it feels as if going any greener than my currently fairly respectably green life-style will mean thinking outside my nice little green box. A Change. Effort. Something that will take time and money, and will somehow give me less choice and make my life just that little more uncomfortable. Like going backwards to the dark days of the twentieth century, or maybe even the nineteenth. Maybe even further.

In fact, this feels suspiciously like the sort of New Year thing you start in a flurry of good intentions, and then give up before January is out. Like that diet which becomes oh so boring and uncomfortable once the first enthusiasm has faded and disappears into the nearest flapjack.

And then, I keep on asking myself, what is it all for? I mean, what difference can one single, fifty-something woman living in a cottage halfway up a Welsh mountainside make? I'm not dirt poor, but I'm not stinking rich. I'm lucky enough to have a biggish garden, but it is halfway up a mountain and contains more slate than anything resembling rich, veggie-friendly soil. I work full time, and I've a dog to walk. I've got a bad back, and several other bits are turning decidedly dodgy. Oh, and I've only just recovered from M.E.

Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe this is a very bad idea.

The strange thing is that I was brought up to be green. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, we were seriously weird. My mum - born in the 1920s, to a working class family from Lye Waste, in the heavily industrialised Black Country - was passionate about the environment. We ate local, went on marches and battled giant conglomerates vying to turn Welsh valleys into open cast copper mines. We didn't recycle. There was nothing to recycle once my parents had made-do-and-mended and hoarded all kinds of bits and pieces that might come in useful and ‘just in case'. Theirs was the generation that had known poverty and hunger and watched kids around them dying of TB, and, in my dad's case, had lived through two world wars.

And is that, maybe, where my twitch of unease comes from, as I contemplate this change in my life? Have you ever read ‘Reindeer Moon'? It's amazing. Based on Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' own experience of working with modern hunter gatherers, it follows the journey of a group of early humans as they struggle on the very edge of survival. You can feel the cold and the hunger and the fragility of life where one small mistake can mean the end of everything. A world where heaven is a sun that rises each day to be eaten piece by piece, over and over, so that hunger will never be known again.

And having reached that heaven in the twenty-first century, I can feel all my ancestors that ever were shaking their heads at me in disbelief at the prospect of any human being wanting to throw away even the slightest part of it. Especially when there are plenty of others out there to take up the slack of the petrol I save, the gas I don't use, and that nice piece of Brie I leave in the supermarket chiller because it made the carbon-crunching trek over from France.

But then, it suddenly struck me a few days ago, I don't have to be masochistic about this. There are no grand gestures to be made. I don't have to buy a smallholding, decamp to a yurt, or even - for the moment at least - put solar panels on my roof and one of those natty little chimney turbine things from Dragon's Den in place of my chimney pot.

I can start small, with the things I can do, and take on the rest bit by bit, hopefully gaining confidence as I go.

Right; here goes. So, where to start?

Okay, it's the depths of winter. I have great plans for the garden, but that can wait a bit until the ground softens up and frostbite isn't a possibility.

Then there's my kettle. I hate my kettle. I bought it in haste because it was half price and my old one had just died on me. Lesson one: never buy in haste and because it's half price. There's always a reason. This reason is that you can't tell how much water is in the dratted thing, and the base is so wide it takes loads to stop it from blowing itself up. It would make much more sense to have an eco kettle. And they're so sleek and sexy, and it would show all my friends I am really and seriously green. Yum.

Except I have a kettle. And it works. And I can measure out the right amount of water if I think about it. I suppose I could palm it off on Freecycle, but that hardly seems fair. And it's bound to blow up one day. It's my longest-lived kettle to date (sod's law), but its luck is bound to run out at some point. Down, credit card, down.

How about something even simpler? Something that really gets on my wick. Yup, it's plastic. Yogurt carton plastic, to be exact. The kind I pointedly put in with the recycling and which gets just as pointedly thrown back into the box every time. My mum made yogurt in the 60s, so I should at least be able to give it a go in 2010.

Hummus is another one. I love hummus. And I used to make my own. Recently I've made an effort to buy the one made by a local company. Well, it's local and it tastes like real hummus. Trouble is, it's expensive, which would be okay except it's also packaged in the thickest plastic you can imagine. Time, I think, to get out the chickpeas and the tahini once more.

And now, after nearly two years, I finally have running water and a sink in my kitchen (long story). So absolutely and totally no excuses.

In fact, now it comes to it, it's rather exciting.

Right: deep breath and here goes...

Juliet

Juliet is writing a blog about her challenges and successes about her attempts to go greener. Follow her progress at The Comfort-Lover's Guide to Going Green.

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