Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts
Learning about and trying to live lightly on this beautiful planet. The natural world, inclusive bushcraft, evidence-based environmentalism and sustainable living.
This past weekend saw the first Glastonbury festival post pandemic. Now that the stages are silent, the cows have returned, the revellers are home and the more organised among them may even have made their way through the horror that is post-festival laundry. And as always, after the party comes the cleanup. Glastonbury employs a … Continue reading Shrinking your festival footprint
Back in January last year I wrote about Loop, an online grocery shopping system offering goods in reusable, refillable containers that had launched in the US and France. This week Loop launched in the UK, finally giving me a chance to try it out for myself. It does seem to me utterly perverse that we … Continue reading Out of the Loop?
https://youtu.be/WT8NemS6FmQ Greta Thunberg is currently crossing the Atlantic in the sailing yacht Malizia II in order to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, which in addition to being an exciting adventure for her of which I am extremely envious is a CO2 neutral alternative to a flight that would have released two … Continue reading How Greta Thunberg’s Atlantic crossing is accidentally tackling period stigma
Why you shouldn't leave your packaging at the supermarket checkout, and what you should do instead The growing awareness of the impact of plastic pollution is being matched by an increasing awareness that plastic recycling is not the panacea it has been sold to us as - plastic can only be recycled into a lower … Continue reading Packaging, piñatas, and punching up not down
Today the Government announced that from April 2020, plastic straws, drinks stirrers and cotton buds with plastic stems will be banned from sale to the general public in England. Much of the commentary I've seen on social media seems to see this as a victory for sustainability advocates, but while I've never understood the point of … Continue reading Grasping at straws
We are becoming increasingly aware of the problems caused by plastic waste, particularly single use packaging, and of the inadequacies of our methods of dealing with it as it becomes clear that recycling is not the panacea it was sold as. It's therefore encouraging to see a new scheme being launched to tackle the problem … Continue reading Closing the Loop for grocery packaging?
With the caveat that environmentalism is increasingly framed as a matter of individual consumer choices rather than collective action, which is bad news both for the movement's likely effectiveness and the way we think of ourselves and one another in society, I do nevertheless believe that personal environmental choices are worth making. This is not … Continue reading Ways to reduce single use
The natural world is so busy and full of beautiful, remarkable things to pay attention to that it sometimes causes me problems when I help out at the bushcraft school where I was privileged enough to spend many of my weekends this summer. I frequently find myself going out to collect firewood and coming back, … Continue reading Out of sight, out of mind: the problem with balloons
Whatever the spiritual significance of the Christmas period to you, the holidays are a time when our consumption as a culture goes into overdrive. With many planetary boundaries already exceeded and an increasing awareness of how resources are being depleted to manufacture products in exploitative labour conditions, and the subsequent pollution caused when these products … Continue reading Have yourself an environmentally conscious Christmas now
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 