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A beautiful guide to Carbon Trading Polls claim BP now less popular than molasses
Guest Editor
In a hot, new, exciting, and potentially disasterous experiment, this month's newsletter is being brought to you by a guest editor, me. At birth, my parents gave me the name "Sylvie", however, last summer I participated in the Wild West Tour and became known to fellow tour members as "Sylvia's Mother". It's all a bit hazy now to be honest, but there was definitely a lot of cycling, many ice creams and a rap about tupperware. I was briefly an engineer in Cardiff but I ran away to the country to work at the wonderful Centre for Alternative Technology as an Information Officer instead.
When I'm not doing that I draw cartoons which you may have seen on Otesha's Blog. If you like jokes about climate change and aren’t too fussy about frills such as technical competance then you should really check out the website, and follow it on MyFace and download the Tweets.
Seasonal salads and the very best vegetables
This month we challenge you to find out what you can eat seasonally, then eat it. Or grow it using the handy step by step guides then eat it. Or steal it from Tescos… no wait, definitely don’t steal it, carrots look very obvious under the trenchcoat. But seriously now – don't steal. Gardening is far more fun and you won't end up in prison.
Possibly the best eco-holiday ever, see where we're going
We're bouncing off the walls with excitment about the 10 days tours.
From September 24 – Oct 3, nestled in the beautiful Fforest Camps in Wales. We're hosting 10 days of long bike rides along the coast, canoeing, coasteering, workshops, inspirational speakers and visiting incredible projects like the Brithdir Mawr Community and West Wales Eco Centre. If you want to have a holiday in a beautiful place/ learn how to build a bike generators/ permaculture/ delicious vegetarian cooking/ bike maintenance/ mend your own clothes/ bake bread or create your own world-changing sustainability project, then this trip's for you.
Register with a friend and get a 10% discount.
Pretty Things Corner
Climate change and social justice are all well and good and we’ve got so much to deal with if we are going to mobilise our generation to combat the greatest… oo, oo, look shiny things!
Ahem, as well as a somewhat fickle attention span I must confess to a stationary fetish. If you do too, click here to see a very awesome flickr account detailing a japanese guy's system of processing his creative thoughts through index cards. If you don't have such a fetish, and I'm coming off as a little weird right now, then carry on scanning down the newsletter and forget I said anything. Come on move it along…
Back to the serious stuff
“I’m confused about renewable energy, I can't find simple trustworthy information anywhere, I mean, how much does a solar panel cost? What grants can I get? What on God’s green earth is a heat pump? What insulation should I get beforehand? Which installers are just going to rip me off?”
Europe’s leading and Otesha’s favourite eco-centre, the Centre for Alternative Technology has a handy website to answer questions just like these, so, if the contrived exaggerated quote applies to you, your parents or your landlord then check this baby out. You can also call them 7 days a week with your sustainable questions for free. In my wholly un-biased opinion it's the best advice around.
I <3 Aviation (I’m waving a flag marked "sarcastic", yeah?)
If I print my true thoughts on flying and the middle classes' insatiable thirst to travel to “better” themselves I suspect my guest newslettership will go flying (ho ho) out the window.
Instead I will talk about Seat 61, a brilliant site telling you in the most fantastic detail how to travel by train all over Europe and beyond. From timetables and prices to how to navigate foreign websites and what the best part of the carriage is to sit in. This is invaluable and all compiled by just one tireless man. He deserves a bigger high five I can muster.
You emailed some data to who now!?
Did you get more lost that a whale in the Thames during the whole "ClimateGate" thing?
The controversy began in began in November last year with the internet leak of thousands of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Climate change sceptics said that the emails revealed the climate science community were hiding and manipulating data, an accusation which the media (those loveable scamps) picked up and ran with. The CRU has since been cleared in three separate enquiries of serious misconduct but sadly the dent in the trust of those pushing us to lower are carbon emissions still stands.
Are some of your friends and acquaintances suddenly doubtful about climate change thing and would you like some information to send them? Here’s a rundown of what happened, why climate change is very much still happening, and details of he most recent retraction.
The trees thing was totally made up though.
And finally
Last month I have mostly been hosting rehabilitated Otesha members on the Wild West Tour 2009 reunion (which involved vegan welsh cakes, alcoholic ginger beer and a cat playing the keyboard), hosting delightful strangers through couchsurfing, salivating over my new secondhand bike (which looks similar to this one), and wondering where I can get an affordable yet professional video made.
This August I'll be mostly visiting Climate Camp and Climate Camp Cymru where people will be taking part in skills sharing and non-violent direct action (which is potentionally dangerous, often illegal and never works).
If I bump into you do say hello, and lend me a pen, yeah? I think I've lost mine.
Kind regards,
Sylvia's Mother & The Otesha Project UK
youtookthatwell.com