Search Results for: low-impact & the city
WWOOFing
“I have so many lovely memories from WWOOFing, and hosts are always very welcoming. I’ve got up to all sorts because of it: kayaking amongst seals in Scotland, lots of horse riding, tractor driving, hand wool spinning, foraging and at times getting very merry indeed.” – Iona Desouza
“WWOOFing is really great for kids, I think – they get to see different cultures, meet incredible people and learn lots of new skills.” – Marianne & Gabor
What is WWOOFing?
In 1971, a woman living in London – Sue Coppard – decided she needed to get out of the city on a regular basis. She …
Low-impact tourism
… leading to overcrowding of popular destinations. In ‘must-see’ cities like Venice and Barcelona, locals are now so fed up with packed streets, noise, vomiting, drunkenness and even public nudity that a number of protests and even attacks on tourists have taken place in recent months. Barcelona, a relatively compact city of just 1.6 million inhabitants, welcomed 32 million tourists in 2016. The city council has recently taken measures to limit the number of beds on offer, has imposed a moratorium on building new hotels and introduced a ban on Segways or other motorised transport in the old town …
Keeping your tech ticking: how to extend the lifetime of your laptop
… them to good use. Here’s how Simon did it. If this isn’t an option, responsible recycling is a must when it comes to electronics. You can find your nearest eletronics recycling point courtesy of Recycle Your Electricals – but we hope you won’t have to!
How to extend the lifetime of your laptop: further resources
Low-impact IT and Free & open source software – our dedicated topic introductions with links to articles, books and more
Low-impact & the city (Parts 5, 8, 9 10 & 11) – our Dave’s journey to switching to Linux as a non-techie
So long …
Low-impact & the city 14: getting back on a bike after ten years
… tape.
Most kids had a couple of bikes – one for the road, and maybe a smaller one, with one, low gear, for cycle speedway. There were little tracks in various places, and bike speedway was just about the most fun you could have – but you had to watch out for the bigger kids. One track in particular was very exciting – one side had a ‘wall of death’, right next to a precipice into a disused marl-hole. There were rumours of kids taking the wall of death too high for a dare, and falling to their deaths into the marl …
Low-impact & the city 13: How to get lots of fruit from a small garden with no work
… happened, and now quite a lot of my time is spent working out how to explain to the world how mutual credit can change the system, and why the system needs to be changed. For no pay. I know – sounds a bit mad, but it does feel like being on the Titanic, but with life going on as normal, as if there’s no iceberg. So it feels as though I have to put effort into something that might be system-changing.
So growing veg has taken a back seat, along with the bread and the yoghurt. But composting continues …
In praise of the wheelbarrow: low-impact transportation at its best?
Perhaps these days most commonly associated with the garden, there’s more to the humble wheelbarrow than you might think. Sophie Paterson explores its potential, past and present, as a low-impact form of transportation.
The traditional European wheelbarrow pictured above has been the faithful friend of gardeners, farmers, builders, miners, market sellers and more for many centuries. With a traditional wooden body supported most typically by a single wheel at its front, it can be easily operated by an individual using the two handles at its rear. Historical sources suggest that the wheelbarrow was commonplace across England and the …
Low-impact & the city 12: switching to the Phone Co-op (do it today!)
The Phone Co-op is the UK’s only co-operative telecoms provider. 100% member-owned, they have a democratic internal structure and no external shareholders. You can just become a customer, or you can become a member too, and have a say in the way the co-op is run.
Click here and here for more information about the Phone Co-op.
We have our broadband and landline with the Phone Co-op already; we’ve switched our mortgage and banking to the Nationwide Building Society (they provide a current account too); we’re going to switch to Co …
Low-impact & the city 11: buying a laptop without Windows - with Linux or with no operating system at all
This is the last in a series of articles to help you to jettison Windows and corporate software generally. The other articles are:
How to switch to free / open source software
How do download Linux onto a datastick to use it alongside Windows
Learning to use Linux
Installing Linux on your hard drive
Plus there might be one more – a rant about how the Linux / open source world has to be simplified for non-geeks for mass take-up
I’ve now got Linux installed on my hard drive and it’s working well. It didn’t take much getting …
Low-impact & the city 10: how to install Linux on your hard drive (alongside Windows)
This is the latest in a series of articles intended to help you become Windows- and corporate-software-free. So far I’ve switched to free / open source software on Windows, then I’ve downloaded the Linux operating system onto a datastick, then I’ve familiarised myself with Linux on the datastick, and now that I’m happy with Linux, I’m installing it on my hard drive. I’m not getting rid of Windows though – I’m installing it alongside Windows, in case I ever need it.
Background
At the moment, my hard drive is all Windows, and I …
Low-impact & the city 9: learning to use Linux
… installed on the hard drive.
But the datastick is only for familiarising yourself with Linux. The next step is to install Linux on your hard drive, alongside Windows (at least at first). Then it will remember all your changes, installations and bookmarks. But that will be the next article in the series. (Of course, if you’re more technically-minded than me, you may have missed out the datastick step and installed Linux straight onto your hard drive. I wanted to test it from a datastick first).
Remember that I’m not a technical person by any stretch of the …
Low-impact & the city 8: how to test drive Linux from a datastick, but keep Windows for the time being
A while ago I blogged about the various open source programmes I’m using. I’m absolutely non-techie when it comes to IT. I have no interest in the technical underpinning of what I want to do with my computer, and this makes it difficult for technical people to explain things to me. It’s baby language or nothing. However, I’m guessing that most people are like this – you want to use your computer to do all the interesting stuff you need for your job, your studies or your social life, but you’re not interested in how …
Low-impact & the city 7: our experience of a local fishbox / community-supported fish scheme
… I signed up to his scheme to try it out. I’m now reporting on how the idea worked for us, what meals we cooked, how it worked out price-wise, and what the future for the idea might be.
The idea
Guy watched a TV programme in 2012 about the damaging effects of the large-scale fishing industry, and yet small, sustainable fishing boats were going out of business. He learned that there were a couple of schemes on the south coast that were labelled community-supported fish or fishbox schemes – along the lines of community-supported agriculture or …
Low-impact & the city 6: how we got ourselves a living willow 'fedge' (half-fence, half-hedge)
… the compost bins to enrich the soil
it’s prettier than a fence – especially in spring and summer when it has leaves
it doesn’t need any toxic preservatives
it won’t rot and need replacing – so if you don’t mind being able to see through your fence for the first few winters, fedges could actually replace fence panels
the shoots can be woven into the fedge, to make it thicker and therefore more of a visual barrier (shoots will need to be pruned at the top, if you don’t want your fedge to turn into trees)
The …
Low-impact & the city 5: if a non-techie like me can switch to open source, so can you
… the websites that contain the information you need, but it’s almost never written in a style that non-techies can understand. A lot of knowledge is assumed, and often, non-techies give up and have to wait until a techie friend helps them to switch at some point in the future. It doesn’t have to be like that though – I think that a lot of IT / open source enthusiasts assume that most people are as interested in the technical aspects of IT as they are, but in my experience, most people find it really tedious, and are just …
Low-impact & the city 4: front gardens - concrete or plants?
… paved front garden. I doubt that these would be vote winners with most people though, so I’m not holding my breath.
I suppose the root of the problem is the number of cars. In London, and maybe other cities, very few people need a car at all – it’s criss-crossed with a huge network of underground and overground trains, bus routes, night buses, taxis and a growing number of bike lanes. The tube has begun to run all night at the weekends too. So it’s ironic that the worst place in the country for paving over front
How to leave the city and regain a connection with the land
Many city people yearn to be involved with the land hands-on—and to do so on a long-term basis. But leaving the city for good is too big a step for most people; they need to keep a stake in the city for work or social reasons.
Country people and farmers, for their part, could often use the energy, time and skills of city folk—but can’t afford to pay. Volunteers are not ideal—especially if they only come once: Farmers end up as unpaid chaperones to a succession of strangers. Agritourism? Too passive—and often too …
Take back the city - if you're not "proud that London is the natural habitat of the billionaire"
People of Britain, are you proud that your capital city is geared towards attracting billionaires (that’s a quote by Boris Johnson by the way)?
What’s wrong with billionaires (as if I need to tell you)?
Property: people who actually do useful work in the city (rather than gambling with imaginary money) are being squeezed out as average monthly rents continue to rise (£1500 and counting at the moment), whilst at the same time London shifts more properties over $5 million than New York and Hong Kong combined.
Exploitative: you don’t become a billionaire without exploiting other people …
Low-impact & the city 3: our solar pv system is one year old - how's it performed?
… our flat roof on a London terraced home one year ago. The panels are attached to plastic tubs filled with ballast. During the daytime, we use the electricity as it’s generated, so we make sure we use the washing machine / charge phones / anything else we can think of during the day – plus it powers the fridge and anything else that’s on all the time. Any surplus is fed into the National Grid, and we get paid for it (4.7p per unit – compared to 14p per unit when we buy it back from the Grid, which seems a …
Low-impact & the city 2: what are urban gardens for?
… lazy as concrete slabs or decking, but the result is prettier and better for ecology.
Producing food was the other option that we both thought was an apt thing to do with a garden, but as she’s an overworked NHS consultant and I spend most of my time building the Lowimpact website and trying to work out how to get to a sustainable, non-corporate system, neither of us has the time to do it very efficiently – unlike the people in the video below, who are heroes.
But the other options didn’t really do it for us. We …
Low-impact & the city 1: introduction - how possible is it to live in a sustainable, non-corporate way in a city?
I lived at Redfield Community for 13 years – it’s where Lowimpact.org was born – but now I live in London, and so I’m assessing my options for living as low-impact a life as I can. The idea for Lowimpact grew out of the things that were happening at Redfield. Redfield is a registered housing co-op of usually around 15 adults and a smattering of kids, based in a huge Victorian house with 20 acres. All members are joint owners and all owners are members, decisions are made by consensus and evening meals are eaten together – people …