A Rational Look at Brands

So, I was eating a Birds-Eye pie the other day (with a little dollop of Heinz tomato ketchup), wearing my lovely Esprit shirt and started writing this article on my Dell computer.

Three-eyed pie monster is sad

"Aaagh!", I cried! "I am one of them!".  I'm one of those consumers that are advertised at on the telly (Panasonic) and follow through with purchases based purely on what image they have been given!  I quickly started to try to justify myself - "Well, of course I would get Heinz tomato ketchup! It's a guarantee of quality!  It even says its Estd. 1869 on the bottle, just to show that their product has stood the test of time and the little slogan that says 'Grown not made', because obviously that shows that they put care into their...."

...uh oh.  Am I defending a brand based on something which was entirely fabricated by their own marketing department so that they could sell more of their products to people like me?

Right... deep breath.  Don't worry... there is still time to redeem yourself...

Brand names are a difficult concept, because once upon a time they had a very real purpose.  The brand name was the name of the company who made the product, and was therefore a guarantee of quality (if not of high quality, then at least a consistent one!) which you could then use to judge its relative value. This, it can be argued, is a perfectly legitimate application of brand names in a world where people are constantly trying to flog you stuff of such compromised quality that you wouldn't want to touch it with a bargepole.

But it didn't take long for companies to take advantage of their own success, cutting costs and letting the reputation of their brand name alone bring in the revenue.  If the lower quality of product led to reduced revenue, they would turn to marketing to bump up their reputation, rather than improving product quality.  Marketing is expensive, but it is cheaper than making real improvements to your product!

With such a powerful voice in the media through their advertising campaigns, companies took things a step further - they can bribe people into buying their products with promises of social status and happiness that are totally unrelated to the quality of the product.  They essentially sell, not something itself, but the mere hope of something.  It's extremely powerful, and when you understand a little of human psychology, it is not difficult to see why it works.

But it is, in my opinion, immoral.  It is not immoral on the part of consumers, because it is the marketeer who is being irresponsible with their promises, but unfortunately it is the job of consumers to rectify the situation, because producers sure aren't going to do it voluntarily.

Is it ever appropriate to defend a brand name?

"Ecover takes ecological, economic
and social aspects into account from the
origins of the raw materials, to the
biodegradation of the final products."
from Ecover's environmental policy.

When you look at a branded product, ask yourself what that brand really means.  Some brands really do mean something, and I think we would be stupid not to respect those meanings.  However, where the meaning of the brand is entirely fabricated by the marketing department, I implore you to look elsewhere and vote against it with your feet.

Look out for brands whose name is based on real, provable quality, best ethical practices and stands for the things that you actually care about, rather than what the advertisers think you should care about. And one big question: do you actually need this thing at all?

Images: Pie by the author; vintage advertising from http://www.wholesale-prints.net; Ecover image from Ecover website

Water, water everywhere and not any drop to drink!

One of the "big picture topics" we discuss at the Low Carbon Cookbook is water, principally its high use in industrial agriculture. But sometimes we also discuss our domestic use of water (well, one of our group is a plumber!), in our own houses and gardens. As everyone focuses on rain as the weather oscillates from drought to downpour, Sophie Chollet invites all low-carbon kitchen and bathroom water-watchers to meet and discuss ways to reduce (over) consumption.

When I say to my French friends I live in England, they often joke about the weather, along the lines of “you should be used to rainy weather, by now!”. So when I tell them that actually we are facing a drought for the second year running, they are surprised. How is it possible to have a drought in England, where rain is part of the definition of the country?

The weather is certainly the cause: it rained very little in the last two winters. So this has led me to question the impact of our water consumption on ground-water level.

The availability of water supply was one of the big improvements of the 20^th century’s houses. The widespread use of washing-machines and other modern equipment changed women's lives. They no longer had to spend hours cleaning dishes or washing clothes. Nowadays, access to water is a given. We would not consider living in a house without running water: we expect tap water to run everyday, all the year along, night and day (in France, when you build a new house, it is compulsory to connect it to the mains water and electricity supply, even if you would like to live off-grid).

Now we use water as if it was as common as the air. We have forgotten that tap water does not come from a never-ending spring. But our consumerism may have gone too far. We extract groundwater faster than it fills again and the levels are decreasing. Moreover, although we know how to remove most of the pollutants, some molecules, like residues of chemical medicines, remain in the water and affect aquatic life.

Apart from environmental issues, over-consuming water comes at a price. Producing drinkable water costs us energy and money (a third of our water bill is spent in water treatment). Water has to be pumped from a river, filtered, treated with chloride, ultra-filtered and deionised. Then minerals are added to make it drinkable.

Once in our tap, some of it is consumed directly, for drinking or cooking. Some is used for cleaning and is made into "grey water" with oil, soap or chemicals. Another amount is simply wasted: the water we do not use when we leave the tap running, unconsciously or from laziness. This water will be mixed with dirty water, increasing the volume sent to the water-treatment plant, and thus increasing the cost of treatment.

We also use drinking water to flush the toilet! After all the efforts put into cleaning the water, we use it to flush our toilet, sending the "black water" back to another water-treatment station!

Deciding to pool our ideas

The main obstacles, when one has decided to save water, are technical issues. In our modern houses, there is nothing to keep water in in order to reuse it. One of my friends would first wash himself with tap water, keeping the water in the bath to wash his clothes. After that, the water was dirty enough to be used to flush the toilet. Few people would bother with this, as it involves too much handling and storing, using buckets, carrying and transferring.

It is technically possible to collect rain water and use it for the house (for example for flushing or for the washing-machine). But how to do, when you are not a plumber?

It is also relatively easy to install a composting toilet in a house or a flat. Still, it involves some effort in emptying it, and a space for composting. Our houses and our life-styles are not made to facilitate those things. But it is not impossible, and putting our efforts in common is a good way to start!

In Brest (France), where I used to live, some people created the “Réseau Urbain des Toilettes sèches”, or urban network of composting toilets. They had a composting toilet at home (often in flats) and collected the compost weekly before sending it to a farm, where it was mixed with other compostable material. This does not only save water, but completes the natural cycle by bringing nutrients back to the soil. Indeed, urine is a great fertilizer, as it is very rich in nitrogen and phosphates!

Plumbing issues are not insurmountable. And for those who live in rented accommodation, why not build an “add-it” system that could, for instance, collect shower-water and transfer it to the toilet flush, or to a basin for treatment by plants? If you think we should moderate our consumption and are looking for advice about how to save water, then this blog is for you!

I would like to invite you to meet and share thoughts about water, speak about habits, saving tips, our desire or the difficulties we face. We can learn from each other about water saving, cleaning and cooking habits, hygienic issues that arise (or are feared!) when using less water.

For instance: boiling potatoes in a smaller volume of water would save both water, energy spent to boil it, time of cooking, and it will also reduce the loss of minerals from the potatoes into the water.

Some of us do use rain water in their house. Could we share our technical knowledge?

Some may wash dishes more efficiently than others. Why not compare the methods?

Do get in touch in you are interested! Sophie Chollet (s.chollet@uea.ac.uk or 01603 467595)

Images: rainwater butt for loo in Solitude by Chris Hull; wee collecting tubs at Edible Landscapes London from Waste Not, intro post to the Water week on the Social Reporting project by Jo Homan; grey water filtering system at Sunrise Festival, 2011.

Changing tracks

"I think I am living several lifetimes in one", said Blanche, as we walked across the Mexican square at dusk. The urracas were jabbering in the trees, the taco stands were doing a brisk trade, and it was one of those world-stopping moments, when you suddenly realise everything was about to shift: we wouldn't be seeing each other again. Though the tracks of our lives had run alongside each others', they were about to part ways. I was now in Mexico, and she would soon return to England. Our circumstances had changed everything, but then so had the times.

We think our lives should be fixed and stable, but they are not. We assume our friends should always be our friends, that we should keep our looks, our luck and our livelihoods. And yet life does not turn out that way. And in the extraordinary times we live in, it's not supposed to either. We are fluid, changing, alchemical creatures, and many of the old structures we uphold, sometimes represented by people in our lives, have to be let go. The dark stuff we have inherited has to be transformed, It's not the way we are trained to perceive the world, or ourselves; it's not what our culture tells us is desirable, and yet it is our nature, and, some would say, our destiny at this point in time.

Paying attention
A long time ago and in another life my attention was not on Transition. I had not heard of peak oil or climate change. The words community or resilience were not part of my working vocabulary. I was focused entirely on plants and the narratives and experiences they brought to my door.

Attention is everything on this earth. As human beings we have an extraordinary capacity to focus directly on one thing to the exclusion of the rest of the picture, which is both a gift and a curse. A curse because we are living out the consequences of living in a tiny part of ourselves, and having our attention deliberately distracted from the wider, deeper story. It's a gift because we can, if we desire, switch our attention at any time. We can change our minds, our hearts and our direction. We can, instead of ignoring and destroying the planet we live on, find out its extraordinary transformative nature, and alter course.

52 Flowers That Shook My World
52 Flowers That Shook My World is a record of a life spent changing lanes, searching for the future. At 35 I was a successful London journalist, living in Notting Hill, with friends, lovers, holidays and the whole city boho thing. My lifestyle was happening, but my life - as I write in the first chapter, Epazote - was not worth a handful of beans. I knew nothing of my true self, or the planet. So in 1990 when I met Mark and we went to Mexico, I decided to sell everything I owned and go on the road for real.

Pretty soon I realised that the second half of your life is about what you give back, or needs to be for things to be in balance. I had to unlearn most of my education, question every assumption, deconstruct the industrialised Western (hi)story I lived in and was surrounded by. I had, in David Korten's words, to move from Empire to Earth Community. It was a hard, alchemical journey, personally, socially, culturally.

It took everything I ever had away, and it gave everything I ever loved back

I met extraordinary people in extraordinary places, I discovered my own true form (rather than the hybrid one I was brought up to inhabit), and most of all I encountered the beings who have kept human beings alive and on track for millennia. The book was made from a log of that return journey, told through the lens of 52 plants. What they have to tell us about paying attention to the bigger picture, what they have to say about our coming home.

Some of those plants I found during my travelling years, but most of them were the humble "weeds" that we looked at during 1999-2005, as we conducted what we called The Plant Practice, a deliberate engagement with the medicine of trees, bushes and flowers.

I have This Low Carbon Life to thank for the book's publication on 1 August. Last year I ended my contribution to our Livelihoods week with an invitation . . .

The fact is when you burn your cello and go for that freedom you make a bad servant. That’s a risk you take. A risk all writers take, even though it sometimes kills us and sends us to the gulag. You leave what is known and safe in order to keep the door open. Because you know in your heart that no human being is born a wage-slave and that it is time the 99% of the world let their voices be heard.

So dear reader, if you know of any publishers . . .

(From What do you do? Writing on the Edge)

Out of the blue, an independent publisher called Sharon Blackie from Two Ravens Press (on the Isle of Lewis) responded and asked to see the manuscript. Now several months later of hard editing and design work from both of us, it is emerging into the light. I'll be writing about the flowers in the book when it does, but this is just to say: sometimes things really do change for the better.

Stop press! If you are in Bungay next Sunday I'll be talking about our relationship with the wild and reading from 52 Flowers at Bungay Bee Hive Day at 2pm. There will be a full reading and discussion of the themes in the book at Plants for Life, Sunday, 5 August at 3pm at Bungay Library. Hope to see you there!

For further details or if you would like to order a book (£10) do get in touch at theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk. 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Eath is published by Two Ravens Press on 1 August.

Images of some of the 52 flowers; Heavenly Blue Morning Glory on book cover; Opium Poppies, Reydon industrial wasteground (Radical Flowers) by Mark Watson; Peyote, Mexico by Robert Lambert (Bush School); Heather, Southwold Museum (Radical Flowers)

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Herbs for Resilience

This is our first archive Sunday and in line with many of our plant and tree posts this week, it is about limeflowers and has the same date as this one two years ago! Synchronicity all round . . .

"That’s very precise," said Erik. "The eighth of July."

"I know ," I said "But it’s true. Every year that’s the day when I start noticing them."

We were talking lime trees. Those extraordinary trees with sticky heart-shaped leaves which for most of the year appear inconspicous beside the showier oaks and horse chestnuts. But suddenly in early July they burst dramatically into flower. And every year I make a journey down the coast to an avenue of great limes and pick some of the flowers for tea.

Because if you want to go to heaven for five minutes drink a cup of fresh limeflower tea.

Fragrant, golden, tasting of honey.

Limeflower gathering is a very rewarding kind of foraging. The flowers are easy to pick and easy to dry. The trees are abundant, dripping, laden with flowers, so there’s no chance of reducing stocks. And what more lovely way to spend an hour: standing, paper bag in hand, beneath a lime tree, immersed in their awesome scent. You’re never alone when you do. Because every bee in the district is there with you foraging for its sweet nectar. Everywhere is humming.

There are three kinds of lime and all are good for flowers. The small and large leaved limes in the country, the common lime frequently planted in the city (several huge ones in St Benedict’s Street). The tea is one of the world’s great downtimers. You can mix it with other heart herbs (lemon balm, hawthorn flowers, rosehips) or have it straight before you go to sleep. It’s a flower that uncoils the springs inside and won’t weigh you down like valerian. Those relaxing flowers will put you on a different wavelength altogether. Out of the mind’s urgency and into the expansiveness of the heart.

I haven’t got a pic of limeflowers yet because it’s early (six o’clock - now added! ed.). But here is a downtime tea I’m drinking right now (rose, lavender and chamomile - divine!) and above some resilient herbs I picked from just outside my door. They are all stalwart members of my medicine cabinet. Elderflower and yarrow tea deal with any shivers in a chill. Marigold is a great anti-inflammatory and lymphatic cleanser (I’m using it right now as an eyewash for conjunctivitis). Rosemary, sage and horsetail, all excellent tonics.

The small daisy-looking flower is chamomile which I grew from seed (thank you Erik!). At the beginning of the year I decided I would put together a Herbs for Resilience Toolkit. Some simple wild and garden plant medicines that fellow Transitioners might like to know about. Plants I’ve used through the years that have been useful remedies or tonics. I’ll be writing about all these flowers and leaves in more depth later in the year.

Meanwhile here are one or two good tips about foraging. Rule one: Go for it! Walk out and tune in. Put a pair of scissors and a brown paper bag in your pocket, grab a flower guide and step into the green world of the neighbourhood. You’ll find the plants and trees everywhere once you decide to look. Rule Two: recognise what you need. Get a feeling for those plants appearing in front of you. Certain ones will grab your attention at different times. Those are the ones you need: for your body, for your mind, energetically.

The planet’s wild plants are stronger medicinally and nutritionally than anything cultivated. The native ones most of all. When I went on a wild plant walk at the Transition Conference the herbalist told us that wild greens contained ten times the minerals of commercially-grown plants and recommended putting a handful in with your stir-fries and salads through the year. Here she is talking about the daisy, a substitute for the rarer mountain-growing arnica, whose leaves can be mixed with chickweed and dandelion earlier in the year .

With the flowers of summer: take from the most abundant and least grimy places and only what you need. Shake out insects. Dry in the airing cupboard (in the paper bag or on a tray) and store in jars. You’ll find yarrow is on all the roadsides at the moment, horsetails in every damp patch and sun-loving rosemary and sage growing in neighbourhood gardens if not in your own (be bold, ask for a sprig if you don’t). Elderflower is almost at the end of its season (but keep an eye out for its marvellous berries later on).

And it’s the eight of July: so dear reader look upwards as you walk down the street today. You might find yourself in heaven very soon.

Photos: elderflowers, Greek mountain sage, marigold (calendula), common horsetail, chamomile, yarrow, rosemary; limeflower tea; rose, chamomile and lavender tea; pushing daisies at the Transition conference; walking down the lime avenue Suffolk.

In a fog of pollen...

I'd been doing quite well, not a single sniffle, not a single teary eye.  Then, suddenly last week, the hayfever hit, going from nothing on Tuesday to full-on runny nose, streaming eyes, sneezing and cotton wool filling my head on Wednesday.

And so now I'm faced with a bit of a dilemma - our house is flanked on two sides by beautiful flowering hedge (not sure what it is, but the flowers are heavily perfumed) so that when I open the front door I get a big lungful of fragrant polleny air before I even get out the gate.  So normally about this time I'm thinking about calling out those nice men with the long-handled shears to give the hedge a bit of a trim and stop the flowers making me a bit crazy.

But of course, this year is a bit different, as I'm more aware of the importance of flowers to the bees and so I'm trying very hard to put up with it.  On our walk into school each morning, we track the changing faces of the gardens we pass, and comment on the flowers that come into bloom as the seasons change; we concluded this morning that we like the messy gardens the best, the ones where the flowers spill out over the edges of the borders, where great clumps of lavender sway in the breeze like purple sea anemones.  There are lots of bees buzzing around, so I reassure myself that the sneezing is worth it in the grand scheme of things.

I read "The Moneyless Man" by Mark Boyle last month (well worth a read, and available, of course, from the wonderful, fabulous Norwich Millennium Library) - one of the low points of his year without earning or spending any money was when hayfever struck him during the summer.  As he couldn't just walk into a chemist and buy some over the counter remedy, he developed a tincture from ribwort plantain which he said was fantastic.  I've been using the standard loratadine tablets, but I think my immune system is now tired of them after recent years and is just ignoring them.

So if anyone knows how to create a hayfever remedy from ribwort plantain, I'm all ears!

Life is Roses... sometimes

This is my first post on the new self-organising This Low Carbon Life. My aim is to publish something each Thursday with the underlying theme of well-being, exploring what this means at a time when as a society we're seeing record levels of anxiety, stress and depression in people of all ages. What can we as groups and individuals do to keep sane and well in the face of mass insecurity and a future of constrained energy and financial resources (at least for a great many of us)?

Some of the posts will be my own and some I'll crosspost from other bloggers exploring the same question.

Here to begin is a story of roses, of connecting with transition in Spain and of spending an afternoon with friends from Dark Mountain Norwich on the best day of the summer so far this year. Oh, and a recipe for a lemon balm and rose herbal refresher.

Just as I was about to publish this post I went into the garden and found a flower on the wild rose outside our door - the first since it seeded itself there several years ago.

And then our first raspberries (another rose family member) appeared today, too.

This year the roses are everywhere abundant and blooming, wild and cultivated, from the briar rose with its apple-scented leaf to the sweet red roses in the hedges in our lane to the bushes in the nearby industrial park.

And talking of roses, on Sunday on the Transition Network Social Reporting Project we published our first post from a non-English speaking country - Roses and Tomatoes (Rosas y Tomates) by Fernando Valdepeñas from Transition Aranjuez in Spain. Fernando's moving account of facing personal and global crises, forming a transition initiative and setting up a Sustainability Centre, and learning to see life in all its colors, is direct and at the same time has great depth. I enjoyed (and related to) the piece more and more as I helped prepare the English translation. If you click the link above you get to the English version (with the original Spanish text following on from it).

One of my favourite things to do in summer is make fresh herbal drinks from plants in the garden. I recently made a summer solstice one with 47 herbs. Our garden is a mix of wild and cultivated with areas left untouched for birds, frogs, snakes, newts and insects and a few beds for vegetables and herbs, so I can put plantain and yarrow leaf in the drinks along with Swiss peppermint and lemon balm.

Yesterday, Kevin, Diana and Jeppe from the Dark Mountain group in Norwich visited us for our July meeting. So it was the perfect opportunity for another herbal refresher. This time I was more restrained with the plants. Having been inspired at the Sustainable Bungay Newsletter production day last week by the fab salad Josiah prepared to go with those fava bean falafels, I based the drink on Rose and Lemon Balm. Here's what I did:

ROSE AND LEMON BALM HERBAL REFRESHER

Makes 1 litre

Bunch of lemon balm

One fragrant rose bloom

Small sprig of lemon verbena

Small sprig of mugwort

One sprig of Swiss peppermint ('Ricola')

Juice of half an orange (I'd run out of lemons)

Dash of grapefruit juice (organic)

Local honey to taste

Fairtrade demarara sugar to taste

- Boil water, let stand for a minute or two. Put lemon balm, rose and mugwort into teapot and pour on water.

- After some minutes add lemon verbena

- Steep about fifteen minutes (I sometimes let it stand longer)

- Strain

- Add the honey, sugar, lemon/orange/grapefruit juice slowly, stirring and tasting until it's just right. Don't overdo the sugar/honey, you want to be able to taste the subtlety of the flowers.

- When cool enough pour into litre bottle, pop in the peppermint, put in fridge and serve later to friends and fellows be they dark mountaineers, transitioners or friendly neighbours.

The drink was a great accompaniment to Diana's polenta bake, Charlotte's hummus made with, you guessed it, great British fava beans (I'm not putting another link there!) and Kevin's salad of broad beans from his garden. And along with the boiled new potatoes from Malcolm, this was a delicious lunch on the first day that has felt like a 'real' summer this year in this place.

Later on we visited the beach and three of us had our first sea swim of the year. The water was warm and the tide was friendly. We revisited plans we'd made earlier in the year for a creative Dark Mountain Norwich/East Anglia 'happening' and discussed the upcoming UNCIVILISATION festival in August, which Jeppe, Charlotte, Kevin and Ava are going to. Get your ticket now whilst stocks last!

Sitting in Kevin's VW campervan in the late afternoon with the marshes behind us, we opened a bottle of Nick's (Sustainable Bungay) homemade raspberry wine, and finished the rest of the birthday cake Gemma made for me at the beginning of May. Two months in the freezer had not diminished any of its dense chocolate intensity and with the local gooseberries from Norman down the lane, it was a delicious dessert.

And the best close to the most relaxed day I've enjoyed in a long time.

Pics: first wild rose outside the back door; roses from the Rosas y Tomates project, Aranjuez Sustainablility Centre, Spain; Rose and Lemon Balm herbal refresher preparation; Dark Mountain in East Anglia in the beach (all by MW except Rosas y Tomates which is by Aranjuez Sustainability Centre)

Respect your youngers

At last week's Treehouse Festival, we were very lucky to have Bea Marshall talk to us about home education. Her particular strategy is unschooling, a methodology that is about learning through the activities of normal life, rather than abstract "lessons".

A is NOT for Apple

When I was at school, I remember being taught some pretty irrelevant things. Yes, things which, had I chosen a career in history or biology might have proven quite useful, but since they came at the expense of knowledge which all of us need, but never get taught, I'm less impressed.  I never once got taught how our political system is supposed to work.  I never once got taught basic economics or how to run a business.  I was never taught the significance of many of the things that I was learning, which is why many of them have now floated off into the ether of my brain never to be seen again.

Bea's talk was entitled "A is NOT for Apple and other things you learn when you don't go to school". The title refers to the fact that A originated from shape of an ox's head, turned upside-down later in the development of our alphabet (see image).  The apple thing, then, is a distraction - an irrelevant connection between the letter A and an object which just happens to begin with the letter A.

One of the central themes of the talk was the need to respect and trust children and give them the opportunity to enjoy their childhood.  Our culture has created an assumption that is exactly the opposite - children cannot be trusted, and must respect their elders, even when they are telling them off for things which they never knew they were doing wrong.  Imagine for a moment that you invite a guest into your home, someone from a completely different culture, who doesn't understand the need to, say, tidy up at the end of a meal (perhaps they have servants to do that where they come from!).  When they fail to offer their help, you don't start bribing them, or telling them off for being so rude, or saying "after all the things we've done for you, and all you can do is just sit there", like you might with a child.  No, you politely request their help, with an explanation of why that is the right thing to do in this culture.  Why shouldn't we give the same sort of respect to our children?  Won't it make their lives happier, as well as helping them to understand that there is more to life than obeying the commands of their "elders"?

One of the difficult things about our schooling system (at least until I finished school) is that it very much trains children for obedience - for following the social norm, and fitting into The System above becoming autonomous individuals.  This is bad news for transition, because it makes the highly established social norm of consumerism and profit-motivated capitalism harder and harder to break. It leaves school-leavers (and university-leavers, for that matter), at the mercy of "the marketplace", which is in turn at the mercy of banks and other corporations who want to earn a return on their investment (their investment in this case being a human being - using that term seems wrong to me, but its the way they see it!).

I'm not suggesting for a moment that all children should be home educated, and believe that there are some skills and knowledge sets that can only really be learnt in a professional college setting, but shouldn't we let our kids discover for themselves what knowledge they require, rather than dumping our prejudices and assumptions in their heads without thought to the relevance?