Today I feel a whole heap better (mood wise and illness wise). I’m still being quite lazy in the not going out except to go to work, although my excuse is that I’m helping sort out stuff for a jumble sale.
At work, I noticed that Walker’s crisps have started noting on their crisp packets how much carbon is accrued when making a packet of crisps. My first thought was, ‘what the bleep?!!?!’ I don’t really know what to make of this, other than the fact that it’s just lip service to the Green Movement; but is it good that they’re making the effort for whatever reason?* Everyone has gone carbon crazy. It’s like a mad trend! What really bugs me is that many people seem to think that they can carbon offset their deadly carbon sins! I found a website which sums up this carbon con pretty well. Go to Cheat Neutral and see (and laugh). Basically it just says how you cannot offset carbon emissions, its just another money making venture to take advantage of those who can’t be bothered to change, and think money can solve our problems. But in a pretty amusing way.
But this whole carbon trend, still annoys the hell out of me, because it’s not just about carbon emissions. It’s about a whole change of lifestyle. Stepping back from the Industrial Revolution and all the problems of consumerism, globalism and mono culture it brought. We need to get back to basics. Learning skills, cooking, growing, raising animals, building a local community, a trading system which doesn’t rely on money. I don’t necessarily mean going back to the Dark Ages, but taking the good, useful inventions of modern culture and mixing it with traditional skills. Some may say this is regression, but I feel it would be real progress if the human race had the ability to say STOP! and change, so that the race may continue, and we can have children without worrying whether they’ll be the last generation on Earth.
On a personal level, I find I’m getting more and more disgusted with buying processed foods, partly because most pre-prepared supermarket stuff seems to have lactose in which makes me feel worse each time I have it, but also because it is such an effort to find out whether it meets with my principles, and don’t have unnecessary poisons in them. Mum and I had a chat and decided we would make more of an effort to make meals from scratch from now on. Usually Mum is quite good at this, but she admits she has slipped lately so hopefully together we will make more of an effort. She let me make the bread today. It wasn’t as much of a disaster as my previous ‘bread’ attempts have been (not even the seagulls would brave it), but had more of a cakey texture. But it’ll do for me!
This evening (after work) I’ve been having a good old giggle at some self sufficiency blogs. I’ll find the best ones and post them here in the future. But hopefully they’ll give me some good ideas!
*In my eyes, they should really be working on a recyclable packaging. Seems more relevant to me. There’s only so many shrinky dinks a person needs. But an interesting article – the band ‘Recoup‘ used old crisp packets (washed of course!) as cd cases for their single.
