It's generally easy to be environmentally friendly around the house when you live on your own and you own your own home, but it can get a little more complicated when you're a renter, as many of us are. Worse still, when you share a house with people who aren’t environmentally friendly or sustainable at all. Their lazy actions make your bills increase and you’re left to foot the bill. If you’re like me, it probably drives you crazy when your housemate leaves the light on after they leave the house and won’t even use the recycling bin. Seriously, how easy is it to recycle these days? So how do you make a lazy flatmate change their habits and be a little more sustainable and eco-savy?
A US study has concluded young people today are less concerned about the environment than previous generations. The longitudinal study of college students found only 5 per cent of young US students considered themselves "committed environmentalists" with 90 per cent saying they wouldn't be seriously inconvenienced or pay a cost to protect the environment.
Commentators in this New York Times article blame the decline in environmental concern on the fact that fewer young people today have much physical contact with the "unpaved world", and on fatigue and confusion over climate change created by vocal climate sceptics.
Its simple. Recycle your old phone at your local mobile store or Council and help thousands of koalas affected by the bush fires.
Its the Old Phones More Trees campaign by the Koaladoors Project and its helping not just koalas but all native animals. Full details are in this article at AustConserv. Well worth checking out and getting involved in.
It's worth reading this interview with James Lovelock from a couple of months back in The New Scientist. The author of the Gaia Hypothesis - known for his bleak pronouncements on climate change - predicts 90 per cent of mankind will die in the next century from even two degrees of warming.
If you live in Melbourne, make a note in your diary to head to St Kilda beach on 17 May to form part of the Climate Change Human Sign. Help put climate change on the news!
Having noted the recent passing of Arne Ness, the father of Deep Ecology, we ought to also pay our belated respects to Masanobu Fukuoka, inventor of no-dig gardening, who died in August 2008.
