So you’ve had one child and there’s another one on the way. You decide to move to the suburbs to be a stay-at-home-mother while your partner commutes to the city. You start house-hunting in earnest, your head filled with ideas and ideals: the big garden, growing your own veggies, somewhere safe for the kids to play. But the commuter-belt is almost as expensive as the city and you can’t afford the home of your dreams. In the cold light of day it looks like you’ll be buying a three-bed semi with a small(ish) back garden and a front garden that someone has thoughtfully concreted over to park both their cards. Sound familiar?

David Holmgren (co-creator of the permaculture concept), comments in this essay that the Australian suburbs have become “sterile wastelands, lacking in any true spirit of community, impoverished of local resources, and filled with fearful people whose daily efforts are focussed elsewhere”. The same could be said for the UK’s suburbs and commuter belt areas.

Holmgren suggests implementation of permaculture principles to greatly increase the “sustainability and livability of today’s suburbs”: ensuring food security by growing your own fruit and vegetables and passing on this valuable skill to the next generation; improving your family’s health by gardening for exercise as well as eating super-fresh produce grown in your back yard; saving money by growing your own and not depending on food transported from miles away to feed yourselves; fitting a greenhouse to your home to both insulate your house and increase the growing season; rainwater harvesting and greywater treatment to reuse water; keeping small poultry to eat kitchen scraps as well as laying eggs and providing manure; reclaiming the streets by walking more; and recycling creatively and as much as possible. David offers these and more ideas to improve the sustainability of suburban living in his essay entitled “Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability”. Read the full document here.

Source: sustainablog

Advertisement: Reduce your CO2 footprint by as much as 2 tonnes/year & save up to £150 on your energy bills.

Popularity: 1% [?]

During this past weekend The Guardian has reported that UK schools are now able to draw on a number of grant resources to help them become more eco-friendly and to save money and the environment by generating their own energy. You can read the full report here.

A number of schools up and down the country have already taken advantage of these schemes. Click here to see green energy in action in the UK’s schools.

Your child’s school could apply for renewable energy funding too. For more information on how the school can apply, see the following sites:
Energy Certification for Schools
Clear Skies
Solar for London
Sun Rise
Intelligent Energy Europe

In addition, for schools that have already started producing their own energy, the Ashden Awards are offering a new reward in 2006 for Sustainable Energy in Schools with a first prize of £15,000, recognising that schools play an important role not only in the need for green energy, but in demonstrating its effectiveness to the community, and to the children who attend the school. The Ashden Awards are calling for UK entries.

—-
Tags: ecostreet, the guardian, green energy, green, eco-friendly, environment, renewable energy, sustainable energy

Popularity: 1% [?]

It is expected that the government will be putting restrictions on junk food available in schools from September 2006, something that the Caroline Walker Trust considers to be 20 years too late. The trust reports that since 1992 obesity in school aged children has doubled, something that is easy to believe as a mother standing outside the school gates to pick up my son, and seeing the numbers of overweight little people emerging from school.

I decided two years ago that I no longer wanted my son to eat school dinners, choosing instead to send him to school with a healthier packed lunch. My concern that he wasn’t being fed a nutritious, healthy meal at lunch time grew as he reported to me each afternoon what he had eaten at lunch that day. There seemed to be an abundance of chips, white bread, potato ’smiley-faces’, sausages and pizza on the list of what he had eaten, only occasionally some fruit salad, and even more rarely salads. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything in the way of salads available, he reported to me, but that they were just a few leaves of iceberg lettuce and a few slices of hard tomato and not very appetising. It seemed to me at the time that there ought to be more of a choice of attractively prepared salads and vegetables, fruit and wholegrain foods, and because these weren’t being provided, the children were turning to sausages and chips as a ’safer’ bet.

Until the recent introduction of the Children’s Food Bill to parliament, the government have been happy to rely on voluntary controls from a group with strong industry interests. It’s not surprising that proposals for the controls have not been forthcoming, when many of the industry bodies aren’t willing to publicly accept that there are unhealthy foods, let alone admit that they are part of the problem.

Sustain have launched a campaign to help the Children’s Food Bill succeed and be made law, and to raise public awareness of the damage done to children by eating a junk food diet. More than 148 national organisations now support this campaign, however, the bill will only become law if enough MPs tell the government about their support. You can register your support as an individual online here, or write to your MP to tell him that you support the bill being made law.

The Soil Association’s Food for Life programme works with local authorities, schools, caterers and their suppliers to raise awareness of the lack of healthy, nutritional meals available to our children, and towards getting fresh, seasonal, unprocessed, local and organic ingredients included in school meals.

I am hopeful that the majority of parents feel the way I do about the neglect of the government to ensure that the future generation is being fed good food at school, and that the Children’s Food Bill will soon be making it possible for our children to have a choice of healthy school meals every day.

—-
Tags: junk food, Caroline Walker Trust, school dinners, obesity, Children’s Food Bill, Soil Association, Food For Life, seasonal, organic, good food

Popularity: 1% [?]