Doctor Who and the Vanishing Bees

Where have our bees gone? Honey bees, bumble bees... you name it, they're disappearing faster than Pooh Bear's honey. Now, I thought maybe there were some fairly simple explanations for this worrying phenomenon, like the damaging effects of Pestilential Pesticides or the loss of wildflowers due to intensive agriculture.

But I was wrong. I now know that the bees have gone off to their mother planet out in space because the Earth is about to be stolen by Daleks and hidden one second in the future along with twenty-six other planets so that Davros and his band of tinpot baddies can take over the universe.

It's a much more satisfying explanation altogether, and it fits the general Dr Who approach to our current eco-woes. What? you may be thinking. Surely Dr Who is just a fanciful adventure series - no one really believes that the bees are from outer space, do they? Do they? I don't know. But Dr Who has always reflected the fears of the age, and in this series the images of apocalypse (the stars going out, unknown terrors coming from the sky) seem to mirror our very real anxieties about climate change and its effects.

Dr Who is great. It's scary and fantastic. But the thing about the bees is keeping me awake at night. The disappearance of bees isn't part of some grand conspiracy of aggressive oversized saltpots. It's much closer to home than that. It's our problem, and one we could maybe solve if we put in the sort of time and effort it takes to make a TV series.

The trouble is, we're not going to get ten million people glued to the sofa of a Saturday evening for bees. Are we?

Bristol Cycling City? Let's See...

Hot on the news that the city is planning to turn our Malago greenway into a high speed bus lane comes the announcement that this same city, ie Bristol, has been named the UK's first Cycling City. Lots of fanfare, promises and a fair amount of cash accompany this accolade, but what will it mean?

I posted some thoughts on the Guardian blog, and I hope my first attempt at a cyber-linkage-doodad will take you there with One Click. Sorry if it doesn't work.

Here's a snippet from How to Turn Your Parents Green:

Funky Bike Facts
- You can park 18 bikes in the same space as one car
- In motion, 30 bikes take up the same space as one car
- If 40,000 people needed to get across a bridge in one hour, by train they’d need two lanes, by bus four lanes, by car twelve lanes, but by bike only one lane.
- The bicycle is the only form of transport that doesn’t create barriers for pedestrians.
- Riding a bike makes you incredibly fit and healthy, as long as you don’t get splattered all over the road.

How Green is Rapid Transit?

Sorry, rather a dull title, but the subject is anything but... The thing is, we all want our cities to be Greener, and in transport terms that means getting people out of cars and onto buses, trains, bikes, scooters, heelies, flying carpets, etc. With rocketing oil prices even Groans are becoming quite keen on forms of transport that don't involve them shelling out for petrol that will soon cost as much as wine. Imagine - a wine-drinking car, tooling along with a tank full of claret...

So we're all agreed. Every city needs a good transport infrastructure, with affordable buses, trams or what have you whizzing in all directions.

But where do these vehicles go? In our city the roads are already horribly congested, so any new bus or tram or 20-person electric scooter will have to crawl along at the same speed as everyone else. So our elders and betters hired professional plan-makers (a species in no danger of extinction) to make some plans for new routes that would unroll across the city like so much red carpet, allowing buses, trams, etc, to zoom at will.

These highly-paid professionals looked at the map and found a network of ready made corridors, where there were few houses and few roads. Quite an achievement in a built-up 21st century city. They marked out nice new transport routes in coloured felt tip pen and went away to count their loot. Job done.

One of these proposed routes runs not a million miles from my house. It comes rushing out of the city centre, over a new bridge, across a busy shopping street, under a railway bridge and then along a stream called the Malago, using a route known to people round here as the Malago Greenway. I say along. In fact the stream will most probably disappear under the new road. The trees along the stream will be cut down. Oh, and the many uncounted, quiet, non-motorised people who walk, ride and play along this mile-long ribbon of green will have to find somewhere else to go instead.

Except that there isn't anywhere else. We're surrounded on all sides by busy roads and railways. What these planners have found and seized upon with glee are the only remaining paths people can follow at their own pace and under their own steam. Yes, these are also wildlife corridors - places where slow worms and bats eke out a meagre urban existence - but they are, first and foremost, human corridors. You can't measure the value of city children being able to walk to school beside a stream under the shade of big trees - no one's cutting four and a half minutes off their journey time or earning an extra £3.75 - but we all know deep down that this is important.

Further along the Malago flows through a poorer neighbourhood, and city officials are keen to point out that the new route will bring prosperity to its people. Will it? And at what price? Aren't the stream and surrounding greenery already giving people there a kind of prosperity?

The truth is that city officials and planners have goals and targets. They want to get certain numbers up and others down. They think in traffic volumes and journey times, and their thinking is constrained by ingrained beliefs: you can't interfere with motorists' freedom; bikes and pedestrians are always less important than cars; a piece of land that doesn't have a measurable economic output needs to have one.

So how Green is Rapid Transit? If it replaces cars on the same roads, it gets my vote. Otherwise, it's just another Groanish scheme designed to speed things up for no good reason.

Five Reasons to Build a Severn Barrage (Not)

Being opposed to things can become very dull. People who are Greenish or Reddish or a mixture of the two always seem to be anti-this and against that, fighting this development or opposing that policy, and frankly I've had enough. I want to be on board. I want to be on the team. I want to start saying Yes.

So how about the Severn Barrage? What's that? I hear you say. The Severn Barrage is basically a dam, which will stretch across the mouth of the river Severn between the Welsh city of Cardiff and the English coast about ten miles away. This particular stretch of the British coast has a huge tidal range (at most about 15m or, whatever it is, 45 feet between high and low tides), which means that hydroelectric turbines set into the dam will be able to generate 5% of the UK's electricity.

That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? In fact the whole idea sounds fabulously Green and lovely. I want to be a supporter. I really really want to say Yes to the Severn Barrage.

But I can't. I have to say, once again, NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! That's Nein, Non, er Nul Point.

It's a terrible idea. A monstrously Groanish, ghastly and despicable idea. Why? Oh dear, I'll have to add a (Not) to the title. I meant to have five Pros, but it looks like a fistful of Cons instead:

1. The people who want to build the Barrage aren't in it for the Green power. They're in it for the development potential upstream. With the tidal flow reduced the river will flood less and the water will be clearer, making it more conducive to watersports and luxury waterside apartment blocks. The Severn has never been a river that likes to stay within its banks - the Barrage will finally tame it.

2. At the moment the Severn Estuary is one of the world's most important stopover points for migratory wetland birds. At Slimbridge, a ways upriver from the proposed Barrage, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust is like a motel and gas station for tired geese. Any reduciton in the river's tidal flow will have an impact on the birds, but no one knows exactly what it will be.

3. Migratory fish species are already declining around the rivers of Europe. The salmon and the eel were once both plentiful in the Severn, and their decline is at least partially because of ever more efficient flood defences. Weirs block the main stream and floodgates prevent water flowing from the main river into its tributaries. Since few people now make a living from the fishery there are few who care whether fish live or die. A barrage, even if navigable by fish, can only make the situation worse.

4. The Severn Bore is one of Britain's natural wonders. Formed by the incoming tide as it piles into the funnel-shaped estuary, the Bore is a wave up to six feet high, which travels miles upriver. Surfers travel from all over the world to ride on this most determined of rollers, and at present the unofficial world record for the longest single ride on a surfboard is held by a veteran Severn surfer Steve King. The barrage would of course kill the Bore.

5. There are alternatives. One is to build lagoons which will trap water as it flows out with the tide and use it to power turbines. These wouldn't block the river, which is good news for the river. However, this means developers or investors won't have the incentives outlined in (1) above, so it ain't likely to happen. Another option is to invest more money in developing free-standing tidal turbines - like wind turbines underwater. These have been developed on a shoestring (no, not literally) by some of the UK's amazing renewable energy boffins, and a couple of models are being tested right now. Will the inventors find UK investors? Or will they sell their fantastic ideas abroad, while we continue turning our beautiful island into a giant waterside housing development in which rivers are lifeless pools and wildlife clings for dear life to the tiny patches of SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning)?

Nature is soft, not hard. Rivers like the Severn are supposed to change with the tides and seasons. The regular flooding has given the Severn vale the rich agricultural land farmers have valued for centuries, but now we are only interested in bricks and mortar - which are hard and don't respond well to immersion in brackish water. We've tunnelled and bridged the Severn. Now the engineers want to finish the job and dam it.

Time to bring back the Monkey Wrench Gang.

Sunshade World? No! No! No!

Now and again people send me press releases they think I'll find interesting, but this one made me want to run upstairs and hide under the bed. Actually, to start with I thought this report, from a respected university not a million miles from my door, must be an April Fool that had got lost somewhere in the www. It began:

Sunshade World - a global warming solution?

I read on, and it became clear that this was no joke. Instead, a team of scientists had just devoted hatfuls of time and energy to creating computer models designed to help us understand what the world would be like if a giant sunshade were placed between us and the sun. Apparently such a scheme could be put in place in 25 years or so for so many trillions of pounds, so obviously we need to know what it will be like.

The good news is that, compared to the 'sky falling in' doom-monger's scenarios of runaway climate change, life under the sunshade would be quite pleasant. A bit less ice at the poles than at present. Rather drier in the topics. Possible catastrophic effects on plankton with potential global repercussions.

As I read and digested this, I tried to imagine these scientists going about their work, chatting over coffee and comparing notes, then I thought about all the other scientists all over the world who spend their time modelling futures and extrapolating data, which then gets turned into fabulous stories by the media and so makes its way into our tiny brains, where we try and come to terms with it.

And no doubt somebody, somewhere, is busy monitoring all these scientists, studying their carbon footprints and coming up with ingenious ways to make their future-mongering more efficient. And these people also issue reports telling the world how vitally important their work has been in cutting the climate impact of the climate impact studiers. And after a while someone says, you know, this Sunshade World really sounds pretty good, and then we're all in trouble.

You know what they say: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Turning the Parents Green? It's Eco Child's Play!

Thanks to Jennifer Lance for this thoughtful review on ecochildsplay.com:

http://ecochildsplay.com/2008/05/20/eco-kids-books-how-to-turn-your-parents-green/

Funny to think of Jennifer sitting in the wilds of northern California, in her off-grid, self-built house, surrounded by kids running about and playing American versions of the universal child games, reading this odd little book. Which was written, incidentally, in a south Bristol terrace built a year before Victoria died, with a view over the trees and rooftops and lots of sky in the window. In the summer evenings a sound like a cow snorting tells us a hot air balloon is overhead, the pilot turning on the burner to get that balloon over our hill.

It isn't what you'd call wilderness round here. Our wildlife is as urban as we are: the frogs in the pond and the swifts in the sky are city-dwellers, so are the herring gulls which started moving in when the Clean Air Acts were passed forty-odd years ago. The gulls are big, aggressive and unafraid, and they love it here. No one has any idea what to do about them, though the city has tried some strange and wonderful ideas, such as stealing the eggs and replacing them with fakes. They've tried introducing predators like peregrine falcons to scare them away, but the gulls are used to predators and don't take any notice. They've tried culling them, but more just arrive to take the vacant rooftop apartments.

We're entwined with nature, even here in the city, and all of our actions will have consequences we could never imagine.

Bin Tax: Pay the Kids not the City

We might not like the idea, but it won't be long before we're all paying for our rubbish to be taken away.* Of course we already pay for this service through local taxes, but new technology will soon enable rubbish collectors to weigh our bins and charge accordingly.

So what to do? Have a tantrum? Or become better binners? As readers of How to Turn Your Parents Green will know, most of the stuff we throw away can be recycled, so it's mostly just a question of doing this properly. If you sign up to the Glorious Green Charter included free with every copy of the book, you can put your kids in charge of monitoring bin usage. They will fine you for misdemeanours such as chucking drink cans in the wheelie bin** but these pennies will seem like money well spent when the real Rubbish Inspectors come to call.

Let's face it: kids like detail. They like yucky stuff. They're perfect for the job.

The book also provides handy tips on how to avoid creating rubbish in the first place, so why not save a few bob*** and peruse a copy? (preferably one you've purchased beforehand)

* Note for American reader(s): rubbish = garbage or trash; bin = trashcan; potato = potarto (should we call the whole thing off?)
** Trash can on wheels. Can perform 'a wheelie' but this isn't necessarily a good idea
*** No Robert here: 'bob' is an arcane word for 'shilling', a now obsolete bit of British currency

A Few Words from Mr Angry (or is that Ms?)

It's always nice to get a little feedback, and this morning a message arrived from someone bravely identifying themselves as Anonymous. Describing me as a **** idiot, my correspondent went on to explain that I knew nothing about anything and, in particular, that by mentioning the possibility of oil becoming more expensive I was effectively acting as a mouthpiece for the great liberal global warming conspiracy.

To back up their argument that I am a **** idiot (which I no doubt am, at least some of the time), Mr or Ms Angry pulled out an old chestnut called the abiogenic theory of petroleum formation. This theory, which was put forward in the nineteenth century and has since been rejected by everyone except a couple of rogue Russians and an astrophysicist, suggests that oil and gas are not fossil fuels, but that they derive from magma squeezed up through cracks in the earth's crust and transformed by complex chemical processes into oily hydrocarbons.

In other words, in the view of Anonymous, supplies of oil and gas are continually being replaced from below, and will never run out. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, but that doesn't matter with this sort of bogus science. Which would be funny except that people who know even less about the subject than I do tend to grasp at theories like this and cling on to them, and we don't need people's heads to be full of muddled ideas. We need people to be well-informed, and to think carefully about subjects like wind energy, nuclear power and so on.

The earth is rich with many forms of energy. Let's think about this in more interesting ways, not just make stuff up.

It Isn't Funny Being Green. Or Is It?

You may have arrived here from the website of the Guardian newspaper, in which case I hope you'll excuse the rather lo-fi ambience of this blog. My abilities as a Webmaster are quite limited. On the other hand you may have no idea what I'm talking about, so here's a ticket for a trip through cyberspace:

guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/08/climatechange.comedy

Anyway, the article is about the difficulties comedians face when they try to make us laugh about climate change, and after talking to numerous people (many of whose wise words had to be snipped away), I came to this surprising conclusion:

Climate change is funny.

Let me put that another way. I started out thinking that maybe the environment as a subject was too dull, worthy or scary to be amusing, but one or two ecologically-minded comedians put me straight. Think about - I don't know - squidging a rotting cucumber out of its plastic sheath into the food waste bin (don't have one?!! Tell your council to get on the stick!). Think of all the people all over the country trying to figure out how to get the cucumber mush out without it exploding all over the kitchen. Well it always makes me chuckle.

The problem for comedians, and the problem for anyone who is trying to get people thinking about global warming and stuff, is that people don't want to hear about it. I think people feel that if they laugh about climate change they're admitting that it exists. If they laugh at jokes about the environment generally they're siding with the environmentalists. And who wants to do that?

It's a bit like those long-ago days in the 1980s when liberal-type people turned against comedians who made jokes that were racist or sexist. I found an old book of sketches by The Two Ronnies the other day, which must have been from the mid-70s, and half the jokes were about Irishmen doing this or foreigners with funny-sounding names doing that. Then comedy went political and those jokes weren't funny any more. Perhaps they never were, but the point is our sense of humour changes with the times. We censor what we laugh at.

Right now it isn't funny being Green, but times are changing fast. With people like Marcus Brigstocke and Mark Watson leading the way, the age of the eco-comedian is upon us.

Adventures in Cleaning

It's all very well thinking and talking about this Green business, but what about getting stuff done? I have to admit that I'm more of a thinker than a doer, but my better half, the lovely Ms Peapod, likes to get her hands dirty. While I'm trying to think of something witty to say about Carbon (not very easy) she's toiling at the allotment, fighting slugs with her bare hands.

Cleaning is a subject I am certainly much happier pondering than doing something about. I think the world would be a better place if we all cleaned less, but the unkind might suggest that I just want to bring everyone down to my slovenly level. My argument is that our cleaning products are often dirtier than the dirt they're supposed to get rid of, because they're full of bleach and similar poisons. We wage chemical warfare on ordinary dirt and germs, and there is a lot of - what's it called? Collateral damage.

Because whatever you squirt around your house ends up either down the sink or drifting about as dust, and if the stuff is poisonous it isn't going to be doing you or anyone else much good. Is it?

Enter Ms Peapod, bearing a lemon. She had discovered somewhere that a lemon isn't just for squeezing - you can use the skin as a handy cleaning utensil, a kind of citrus scouring sponge. And to demonstrate she tackled a set of copper saucepans we got from a car boot sale. Just set to with that half lemon and the dirt fell away.

So successful was this experiment that she's now threatening to revolutionise our cleaning regime. There's talk of home-made washing powder - all you need's some borax and a few other bits and bobs, for heaven's sake! We already use vinegar for glass and stuff and new applications suggest themselves on a daily basis. Who knows where this will lead?

Are You Greenish?

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't think all that many people would describe themselves as Green. I think the quiet majority of people are wary of Green politics and not very keen on carbon-crunching. They're not really convinced by the fire-and-brimstone sermons of Monbiot and co.

But many of us have Green tendencies. We love nature documentaries and walks in the country. We grow things. With a bit of encouragement we easily become fiendish recyclers. We'll turn the temperature setting down on the washing machine, so long as we know the clothes will still come out clean.

In other words, we're Greenish. Unfortunately professional Greens sometimes give the impression that anyone who hasn't sent their car to the crusher and vowed never to eat a carrot that has travelled more than 200 metres is a carbon criminal responsible for the imminent destruction of the world. Which is hardly encouraging.

Instead, let's give ourselves a pat on the back for saving those cans or for trying to bike to work, or even for noticing the first swift of summer.

Can You Really Make Paper From Elephant Poo?

Yesterday I went to the opening of an extraordinary new building at the Green Shop, near Stroud. It's a funny sort of place, hidden away behind a petrol station on a B-road. You'll be driving along and there's this Murco gas station, then you look again and behind it there's a funky wooden building with a grassy roof and more solar panels than you could shake a stick at.

The Green Shop has been going for twenty years or so, and when you walk in from the garage you can see this evolution. First, there's a typical garage shop, with sweets and newspapers - only the herbal tea selection is unusual. Then you go into a bigger space with lots of Green goodies on display, from books and gadgets to washing up liquid and wholesome beauty products. They have solar battery chargers and little machines for making logs out of waste paper. It's pretty cool.

Then you go through a doorway and into the Glorious Green Future. The new building is light, airy, super-efficient and all the rest. There are displays of Green paints (other colours available) and rainwater harvesting gadgetry and solar gismos.

The Great Green Jonathan Porritt snipped a ribbon to open the new building in front of a happy crowd of future-makers, and he said A Few Words. He talked about other people around the country who were in a similar line of work - finding exciting new ways of doing things and laying the foundations of a low-carbon economy.

By coincidence I was reading something last night about Greens and the economy. I've already said that I'm not a great shopper, and the writer of this article seemed to be talking straight at me when he said it was our duty as citizens to shop a lot and keep the good old global economy going.

It's true that in the old days Greens tended to be a bit sniffy about shopping, but those attitudes are disappearing fast, along with droopy sweaters and Compulsory Muesli. Nowadays it's about where you choose to shop. Do you trail around Toys-a-Saurus or pop into your local toy shop? Do you follow the herd around Tuskos or get a veg box/visit a farmer's market/buy what you can find in the High Street?

At the Green Shop and places like it shopping isn't a chore - it's a joy! You can discover new ways of doing things, find brands you've never heard of and get inspired. I bought a little notebook with paper made partly from elephant dung. Elephant dung! Every time I look at it I picture a great big pooping pachyderm, and my day is made that little bit brighter.

How One Kid Turned Their Parents Green

I couldn't quite believe this when I read it. Someone at the Exeter Express and Echo had the brilliant idea of giving a fourteen year old a copy of How to Turn Your Parents Green and the licence to use it. Sure enough the kid set about doing just that, although it seems as though the poor parents were already doing better than most.

I'd love to reproduce the whole article here but I don't want to interfere with anyone's copyright so here's a little bit:

"Next, I am going to look at the water. I think we all do things like leave the tap on while we do our teeth. This is probably the only thing that I can think of we do that really wastes water.
"As I can't exactly watch my parents when they are in the bathroom, I have to take their word for it that they aren't leaving the taps running.
"My mum is the worst culprit for leaving the tap on when she cleans her teeth. The book says to fine anyone 25p if they leave the tap on while brushing their teeth. I think it came to £2, before she got it into her head that tap off good, tap on bad. So a miracle happened when she turned the tap off when she brushed her teeth. Well done, mum."

Unfortunately the author of the article isn't named (perhaps because he or she is under sixteen), but it's fantastic. For now you can read it at:

www.thisisexeter.co.uk (enter "turn your parents green" in the search box)

Caps and Climate Change

Fear is a beastly thing, especially when you're a kid. I remember being about seven and losing my school cap. We were supposed to wear our caps at playtime for some weird reason, so for about a week I didn't go out. Nobody knew I was harbouring this secret terror of caplessness, but it was the centre of my existence for long enough that I remember it vividly.

I know it was just a cap, but thinking about it helps me imagine the kind of fears kids have about climate change. If I was eight or nine I know I'd be lying awake worrying about the weather, and a report last year suggested that lots of children are worriers like me. This same report said that when children got to talk about eco-troubles at school and started doing things to change THEIR environment they worried less.

That's sort of the point of this book. I don't want my kids or anyone else's losing sleep over global warming. Instead, let's talk about it and start making some little changes. Even as an adult I find myself thinking, OK the world is huge and out of control, but I get milk from the milkman now which means no more plastic bottles. and that's A Good Thing.

Adam's Review from Life Goggles

How To Turn Your Parents Green is written by James Russell, illustrated by Øivind Hovland and was supplied to Life Goggles by Charlie at Green Books.

Aimed at kids ‘from 8-80′ How To Turn Your Parents Green is a book for a future generation of eco warriors. Presenting the challenge to be green as a battle of the Greens versus the Groans (ungreen adults) the book urging children to become green by fining their parents if they’re not environmentally-friendly.


But it’s more than that, it tries to put the pester power that kids have to good use - turn it away from sweets and candy to switching off the tap and buying local food. And it does this with the help of humorous phrases and great drawings by Øivind Hovland.

Although I make the ludicrous age range for this book, I’m admittedly quite a bit older than those it’s really aimed at. So at first the phrases ‘Ghastly Global Warming’, Hellish Halogens’ and other similarly alliterate and capital lettered ones got on my nerves. But after a while I got used to it and ‘Lazy Train to Chubville’ got me smiling.

While humorous, the book is also informative and it does this cleverly by asking questions but then often making up one of the answers just to make you smile. It nicely explained what a leachate is (rubbish sludge mixed with rainwater) and other facts are presented simply and in a way that a child could easily relate to a parent.

The explanations of subjects like importing fruit from abroad or having a standby button on the TV show how ridiculous they are and that the reader shouldn’t stand for such practices. Luckily it then tells you what you can do about them and gives examples of things done in the past - such as the boy who saved the Severn Beach railway line. Practical examples, goals and checklists make it almost an activity book and even inspired me to do more.

Apart from my initial problem of getting into the book, once you’re used to the style it makes an enjoyable and informative read for all ages. Aimed at kids changing their parents’ habits (fining them for using carrier bags etc), it also has useful tips for turning teachers green and also becoming a green citizen yourself.

Available at Green Books, How To Turn Your Parents Green costs £6.50, is 91 pages, is printed on Nine Lives recycled paper and published by Tangent Books.

Win a Copy of How to Turn Your Parents Green from Life Goggles

It's simple really. Follow this link, answer a question, fill in some info, and you could win one of six copies of How to Turn Your Parents Green:

http://www.lifegoggles.com/1292/win-a-copy-of-how-to-turn-your-parents-green

No, I'm not going to tell you the answer, but you'll find it around here somewhere! You've got until 21 March, so get those thinking caps on...

The Times: Let the Kids Set Green Taxes

Times blogger John-Paul Flintoff has an interesting take on the government's predictable failure to set a Green budget. Refering to How to Turn Your Parents Green, he suggests that kids take matters into their own hands by levying taxes at the household level:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/environment/2008/03/green-tax-payab.html

I was really thinking in terms of fines rather than taxes - 20p for throwing a can in the wheelie bin, stuff like that - but I'm not going to argue with a man from The Times!

The main point is, don't wait for the Government to go Green: we need to get on with it ourselves.

What Happens When Oil Isn't Cheap Anymore?

Yesterday I woke up. Well, I suppose I wake up most days, but this was different. This was like an alarm clock going off and waking me up EVEN THOUGH I WAS AWAKE ALREADY. Hmmm. Tricky concept. Anyway, what woke me up was a man called Rob Hopkins, a tall, mild-mannered sort of chap with sticky-out ears and a nice sense of humour. He was talking about something called Peak Oil - no, not oil pumped out of mountains, but something altogether different:

The moment at which the oil waiting quietly in the ground for us to pump out is less than the amount we've already sucked out and burned up.

My grandfather worked for an oil company and I always thought of oil as something that was THERE. When one lot was sucked up, you just went and found more. There had to be more, because in our Groanish world we can't imagine less. Things aren't supposed to run out or close or end in our world, so the oil had to keep flowing.

More recently I began to realise that oil would one day run out, but I imagined that we'd have found some other wonderful source of energy by then. Nuclear fusion or cosmic rays - I don't know. Until yesterday I didn't understand that oil is special. Oil is like having a whole room full of cash you can just pull out and spend. Oil is like pickled sunshine. It's like the richest chocolate brownie you can imagine, only instead of butter and sugar and chocolate it's full of energy.

Over the past 150 years this chocolate-brownie-sunshine energy has made the modern world what it is. Cheap oil is the difference between a modern Western city and a poor city in the developing world. Look around you. How many things that you see were either made or brought to you using oil?

But once oil starts to become scarce, it will be expensive, and expensive oil is an altogether different creature. Expensive oil is a luxury. Expensive oil means no more cheap plastic, or cheap computers or TVs or clothes. Expensive oil means that only rich people will be able to drive or fly. It means having to live WHERE YOU ARE and eat food that is grown nearby.

In fact expensive oil could make life a whole lot better. It will stop people rushing around, trying to be in seventy-two different places at once. It will stop people getting fat. It will force people to spend their time living instead of shopping or watching TV. Provided people are positive and make good decisions, expensive oil will make our lives healthier, Greener and less stressful.

What happens when oil isn't cheap anymore? That's up to us.

Coconut Jet Fuel and the Icarus Moment

The idea of a plane powered by coconuts sounds quite funny, but when I read about this in the papers the other day it didn't make me laugh. Instead it made me think of Icarus, the unfortunate flying boy. He tried to fly too high and melted his wings, confirming the view that people ought to stay put on terra firma and not act like gods. The Greeks had a word for this sort of behaviour: Hubris. In their myths people who put on airs and graces were guilty of hubris and generally came to a sticky end. Prometheus is another example.

Cut to 2008 and people are concerned about the environmental impact of cars and planes. We want to go wherever we want quickly, but oil is getting more expensive and our journeys are releasing ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. I don't claim to be an expert Carbon-cruncher, but wiser heads have pointed out that carbon released high in the atmosphere causes more trouble than the same amount released at ground level. Yes, we're back with Icarus...

Airlines are attracting more and more customers but they're not enjoying the bad publicity. So a certain British businessman, who owns an airline, hit on the idea of putting biofuel in the gas tanks of a 747. Of the jet's four tanks, three contained ordinary jet fuel, while the last had a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% fuel made from coconut and babassu palm oil. Apparently 150,000 coconuts were used, along with an unspecified amount of palm oil. I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like an awful lot of coconuts to provide a small percentage of one airplane's fuel.

The entrepreneur in question described the flight as 'historic', and perhaps it is. Perhaps this was the moment when the human race finally took leave of its senses. The Icarus moment.

Biofuels are made from living plants, which absorb carbon as they grow. The idea is that, on balance, a car or jet running on biofuel emits less carbon than one using ordinary fuel. Groans point to this and say, Here is the future of transport! And that future is bright leafy Green!

What they never mention is that all these plants - oil palms, rape, wheat - have to grow somewhere. Land which might have been used to grow food or left alone for wildlife has to be cleared and planted with biofuel crops. These are not cosy little farms but vast plantations run by big companies that want to make as much money as they can - what they do is called Green because people have this obsession with carbon, but isn't even remotely Green. It's hugely destructive. Oil palms grow in the tropics, which means rainforest is being cut down and burned to make way for them. The oran utang is losing its home so that people in Europe can put biofuels in their petrol tanks and feel all virtuous and Green.

And now people want to power jets with coconuts! This isn't Green, this is Gruesome, Grisly Groanishness of the first order. It's unbelievably stupid. By contrast, Icarus was just a kid who forgot where he was.

Confessions of an IMBY

You know what NIMBY stands for? Not In My Back Yard. It's a very handy expression used to describe people who are all enthusiastic and excited about, say, wind power, but turn against it when someone suggests building a wind turbine up the road from their house. There are lots of Nimbys in the world.

But for today I'm an IMBY, and I have a sort of confession. Our back garden is tiny. It's miniscule. In fact it wouldn't look out of place if you unpeeled it and stuck it on an envelope in place of a stamp. It's the kind of garden you have when you live in an old terraced house on the side of a hill and most of it is hidden by an enormous tree. Whereas all our neighbours have nice little flowering cherry trees or funny shrubs covered in red dangly things, someone sometime decided to plant the world's hugest apple tree in our back garden. Left to its own devices it would probably be ten metres tall and just as wide. It's like an oak.

You can see where generations of desperate homeowners have hacked branches off this monster. I pruned it pretty severely a couple of winters ago and in the meantime it has grown and grown. Last summer the tree's dense foliage shaded the whole garden, more or less all day. On the plus side, though, it was a happy hang-out for our small local population of streetwise bluetits and blackbirds.

So I was torn. I venerate the tree - we've even wassailed it - but having written a book about orchards (Man-made Eden, published by Redcliffe Press) I know you shouldn't be sentimental about such things. I thought about having it cut down, then hit on a compromise, and instead gave it a really good pruning, I mean more or less a pollarding. It's about quarter the size now, but still alive, and the garden is light again.

The only losers are the bluetits and blackbirds. Of course I could say, well, it's just one tree, there's plenty of other places for them to go, and it could be true. But then I think of my neighbour who hacked down and burned every green thing in his back garden and turned it into a sort of box, with decking that stretches its length and breadth and a patio heater for decoration. And I think of all the other people in the city, and the county, and in England and over in Amazonia, people who need or want to tame their bit of nature to make their lives better.

But at least I didn't cut the tree down completely. It will grow back. The bugs are still there for the bluetits. Perhaps I've stumbled on a happy medium between the needs of nature and the desires of people. In My Back Yard.