Low Impact Living in Leeds: Three Stories

Yesterday I spent a great day visiting three friends in Leeds trying to live more sustainably in different ways. The day was sparked off by Isabelle, who has decided to take up the new year challenge I set myself in 2014 and measure her carbon footprint so I took along some resources I had found useful including George Marshall's book Carbon Detox.

This was also an opportunity to see her newly insulated house, having followed her blog (with photos!) describing her efforts and lessons learned.

Advent Reflections 7: Finding Our Purpose

 “For we know that nothing we do for the Lord is ever useless” 1 Cor 15:58 

At the beginning of a new year, many of us have hopes and dreams as well as fears for the future. So now seems like a good time to consider our purpose. A sense of purpose can be powerful enough to keep us motivated through difficult times, but it can be hard to find, especially when we are demoralised. The simple fact is, much of what we do feels pointless and too small to make a difference, a drop in the ocean.

Over the Christmas period, we have considered God’s awesome creation, made with love, the frustration of living in a world of sin and death (and the need tolament the tragedies of life) and his great plan for redemption through Emmanuel. This is where the final part of the Bible’s story comes into play for us: the consummation of all our hopes, the resurrection and redemptionof the whole world.

Advent Reflections 5: Learning to Rejoice

This post is the sixth in a series of weekly posts during Advent inspired by "Holy Boy", a Christmas oratorio which we performed in Acomb on 21st December.
Today is a day for deep joy, as our choir and band expressed in joyful song on Sunday in Holy Boy, and in a variety of carols and readings in York Minster on Monday night, and in Christmas services around the world today. So this is a reflection about rejoicing.
As Christians, we are actually commanded to rejoice (more than a dozen times in Paul's letters, for example). CS Lewis wrote that: "Joy is the serious business of heaven".

A Fossil-Free Nativity

This year I'm singing in two very different productions of the Christmas story. I've written previously about Holy Boy, a choral nativity we're perfoming in York on 21st December. Yesterday I took part in a fossil-free nativity play outside Methodist Central Hall, next to Westminster Abbey, calling for the Methodist and Anglican churches in the UK to follow the lead of the World Council of Churches and divest from fossil fuels. 

Renewable Heat for Community Buildings

Acomb - the story so far

What do you do when your boiler is very old and you know that the next time the gas man comes to fix it, it might not recover? Most people would replace it with a more efficient new gas boiler, but the issue is: given that fuel prices are on a steady upward curve with the expectation that this will only get worse over the next 20-30 years, why lock yourself in to an old technology and high bills?
For Acomb Methodist Church, the answer is obvious: power the new boiler with renewable heat. Work is still in the early stages of getting prices, but I thought it would help to summarise the story so far.

Wildlife (and weeds) on track - October

My first site visit of October took me to a rural stretch of railway near Corby which included a stunning brick viaduct across a wide valley – the bridge has been repaired so often with so many different colours of brick that it’s hard to tell which are the original bricks!
On the wildlife front, we saw a stoat running along near the track, a hedgehog, a pheasant and several different butterflies.

Wildlife on Track - September

I have blogged previously about my efforts to spot wildlife and "get my eye in" so I thought a good challenge would be to record what I've seen on my various site visits this month, mostly to railways. I wonder what I'll see next month? 

If there is no home for nature..

If there is no home for nature

There will be no evening starling chatter,

Nor swifts left to soar.

There will be no hedgehogs nestled in your garden,

No woodlands to explore.

Spring will pass without a bluebell,

And June without a bee.

Butterflies will flounder without a flower,

And the birds without a tree.

If there’s no home for nature,

The wonders on our doorstep will diappear.

There will be no place to play,

No meadows. No moorlands. No wilderness. No adventure.

If there’s no home for nature,

There will be no nature.

This poem was printed in the Guardian last week, and struck me to the core, the last couplet ringing in my ears long after I had read it.

Learning to see

Having celebrated the joyful hope of new life at Easter with a great feast at my brother's house (thanks Mick!) I have a new challenge for the next seven weeks up to Pentecost: I want to learn to recognise more wildlife.

As an engineer, it's obvious that I notice different things than other people in the landscape because I know what I'm looking for and I'm interested in what things are for. So on train rides, I notice radio masts, retaining walls and rock netting and as a cyclist I know every set of traffic lights on my routes around York. I know which ones are old fashioned and based on a fixed sequence and timing, which are camera controlled (eg PUFFIN crossings which allow elderly and disabled people more time to cross) and which rely on pressure pads in the road to detect traffic wanting to turn (which don't work when you're not as heavy as a car!)

But while I enjoy seeing flowers in gardens and have learned to tell the difference between a courgette and a bean plant by growing them myself, I often don't know the names of the trees, plants, butterflies and birds I see every day when out and about - and I think that's a shame.

Should an environmentalist support HS2?

I have promised previously to write about HS2 and this week presented an opportunity as I debated the issue with friends from Christian Ecology Link. The discussion was sparked off by a recent Guardian article which concluded that “areas of irreplaceable natural value along the planned HS2 route, including 48 ancient woodlands that are home to rare bats and butterflies would be damaged by just phase one of the route (London to Birmingham)”. So is it possible to justify such destruction and still call myself an environmentalist?

2014: Review of the first quarter!

We're nearly at the end of the first quarter of 2014 and I think that makes it time for a review of the year so far. I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately but I'm hoping to make up for that in April – I have loads of ideas and looking forward to some time over Easter to put them onto paper (virtually, at least). I set myself the aim this year that every month I will try to make a difference to climate change in four areas: personal and work-related carbon emissions, campaigning and prayer.

What a Wonderful World!

What motivates people to act on climate change, Fairtrade or other global issues?

• Is it fear that if we do nothing, it looks likely to be an absolute catastrophe for our country, especially low-lying areas vulnerable to flooding?
• Is it guilt that in the UK, as the first industrialised country, we have been responsible since the 1750s for such a large proportion of the carbon dioxide emissions now causing so much harm to our neighbours, and that we continue to live as it if doesn't matter?
• Is it anger that we have known the scale of the problem for over 30 years, and every single international conference has been an abject failure to do anything about it? Or that millions of people will be made climate refugees, like most of the population of Bangladesh or the residents of Vanuatu and the Maldives who may see their homes disappear under the waves within 20 years?

I suggest a different approach.

A Knotty Question: Green or Greenwashed?

I set myself the challenge this month of reading my company's annual sustainability report. There's some great stuff in here which we can be justly proud of. We are one of the world's biggest environmental and engineering consultants, with some impressive stories from low carbon buildings to new wastewater treatment plants that can remove much higher proportions of pollutants such as nitrates from sewage and capture methane from solid sludge as a source of energy for the plant. We have also worked with councils to change user behaviour when it comes to waste and divert 95% of waste away from landfill. We have committed to WRAP's commitment to halve the volume of construction waste arising from our projects which goes to landfill.

Climate Politics: Where Are We Now?

Addressing climate change requires international as well as local solutions, which means co-operation and negotiation on a grand scale. The scientific community has been doing this very well: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, and has been called the largest international scientific undertaking in human history, with thousands of experts involved from around the world in the task of examining peer-reviewed technical literature and publishing the results to advise policymakers. Over the years, the language in the reports has grown stronger and stronger as the scientific consensus has grown more and more confident, to the point that the 4th report published in 2007 could state baldly that:

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising sea levels”.

However, the policymakers' response to the ever-growing body of evidence that the climate is warming and that human activity is responsible has been essentially: “La la la, I'm not listening”

Towards a Sustainable Railway - Part 2

A few weeks ago, I met an environmental consultant who told me about a small architectural practice which he had helped to implement an environmental management system accredited under ISO14001 – but this ONLY related to their office environment, not their project work. I'm not sure which of us was more surprised by this conversation: me, that any company could be stupid enough to think that recycling the office's waste paper is 'doing enough' while failing to address energy efficiency and waste in the buildings they design, or him, when I told him that no public sector client would ever employ a consultant engineering firm in today's marketplace who doesn't have an effective EMS for their projects.
But sometimes I wonder if we have allowed this to put sustainability in a box.

Carbon calculator: The results!

I have used the method set out in the book 'Carbon Detox' by George Marshall (highly recommended!) to calculate my personal carbon emissions in six main areas: energy for the home, transport (land/international), food, goods and services. Note that this is (necessarily) an estimate, but the purpose is to provide an indication of where my biggest carbon emissions are and opportunities to reduce them.

January Challenges

This post is a summary of my challenges for January, because it helps to be specific.
Personal: I will calculate my carbon footprint and publish the results. This will act as a steer for future months' challenges by highlighting the areas where I can achieve the most significant reductions.
Political: I will write a letter to my MP as part of Age UK's 'Spread the Warmth' campaign calling for measures to improve insulation for people on low incomes. This is really important, because Age UK's estimates indicate about 24,000 elderly people will die this winter unnecessarily because they cannot afford to heat their homes. Given that research indicates that the UK has the leakiest homes in Europe (letting more than 3 times more heat out of the average house wall than houses in Sweden, for example), we need to act.

Engineering: As I noted previously, this requires some research. So this month my challenge is to read my company's sustainability report and two  recently published reports about low carbon infrastructure: "Construction 2025" and "Decarbonising Infrastructure".
Prayer: This is a commitment to pray daily for an effective response to tackle climate change. This problem is much bigger than me, and I want to work with the creator of everything so prayer is absolutely key. To that end, I have signed up to Christian Ecology Link's prayer community and I'll be using their daily prayer guide to help me pray.

Towards a Sustainable Railway – Part 1

My first stage in working out where I can usefully contribute to making the railways more sustainable is to consider where our environmental impacts are coming from. Today I'll consider the impacts from normal operation of the railway, for example powering trains, buildings and encouraging passengers and freight to use more sustainable forms of transport.

Storms, Floods and Landslides - An Engineer's Tale

At this point in my blog, I could try to explain to you the science behind climate change, and the ever-growing body of evidence demonstrating that the atmosphere is getting warmer and that this is almost certainly the result of human activity releasing astonishingly huge quantities of greenhouse gases. I could show you the 5^th report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published this year demonstrating yet again the consensus from scientists across the world about this problem.
But I won't, because you learned the basics of the greenhouse effect at school and people have an uncanny tendency to switch off as soon as anything is mentioned that relies upon them understanding any details about the workings of the troposphere. I am not a climate scientist, I'm a civil engineer. So instead, I will tell my own story of how the change in our climate is already affecting us in the UK and my daily work through storms, floods and landslides.

2014: The Challenge

In 2014 I want to live differently.  Instead of a traditional New Year's Resolution to lose weight or whatever, I want to start taking the environment seriously and make effective, long term changes to my habits and behaviour to reduce my contribution to environmental damage.  That is, I want to lose some carbon and keep it off!

I am sure that this year, as every year, the newspapers will be full of stories about New Year's Resolutions that apparently most people only manage to keep theirs for about a fortnight. But last year we tried something different in my workplace: the 'Change One Thing' campaign encouraged people to make just ONE change that they can sustain.