This is my dream: To live as my forefathers once did - in harmony with the land that sustains us. A project to investigate and innovate the creation of a low impact home with methods of living in a form of permaculture designed to sustain my family and improve biodiversity. To leave the land richer than before and in doing so enable others to do so.
Southern Water wipe outs river for a small fee
Posted 08/03/10 by Matt B in the News category
The Environment Agency has prosecuted Southern Water for causing untreated sewage to escape from a pumping station for a period of over 14 hours last year killing hundreds of fish in a New Forest river.The Bartley Water is a river that passes through the New Forest. It runs from Bartley to Eling where it becomes tidal and flows out into Southampton Water. The river is despite the damage an important recreational and wildlife haven, especially at the Eling end of the river. It is also home to many protected species of fish and a diverse community of invertebrates and river life.
Sadly however the pumping station failure, wiped out whole communities of river life over a two kilometre stretch of river, including pollution tolerant species such as leeches and midges. The sewage stripped the oxygen from Bartley Water and increased the ammonia level in the watercourse to almost four times the lethal limit for fish. In many cases the species cannot be restocked and will have to be repopulated naturally.
Members of the public alerted the Environment Agency and Southern Water to the incident on 30 August 2008 after witnessing fish in distress in the Bartley Water. Southern Water sent an engineer to the site and the pumps were finally restarted at around 11.30am the following day.
» Read More: Southern Water wipe outs river for a small fee
The Bottled Water Scam
Posted 01/03/10 by Matt B in the Urban category
This article from the The Fun Times Guide to Living Green caught my eye today and I thought I'd share it.Next time you grab that ice-cold bottle of water from the fridge, be sure to enjoy it. It is probably, in fact, not any more healthy than you're tap water and is packaged in a crude oil derivative. Yummy.
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A useful day out with kids.
Posted 20/02/10 by Matt B in the Urban category
I spent the day at a seed swap at a community allotment area today. Mostly this meant that I was planting a lot of things and using a book to tell me how to do it. Mostly this meant digging a lot.Fortunately I was able to recall from reading the Vegetable Expert that I had seen the grub I dug up before. I was then able to identify it as a pest which chews up your roots and new shoots. This was entirely consistent with the fact that the area I had been digging had been grassy for quite a while.
The practical upshot of it all was that I had to dig over a second area somewhere else to give the birds more time to eat all of the aforementioned bug (whose name, typically, I can not recall).
Meanwhile my children had fun helping to mix sand for a clay oven and to plant seeds in trays. They should sleep soundly.
What Matt did next
Posted 17/02/10 by Matt B in the Online category
I have more news than a single blog post should rightfully try and hold but here goes anyway.I have been working out more and have been checking out health supplements. Additionally I have been looking into getting a small allotment patch with a friend towards which end I have purchased a shed load of books. Furthermore I have taken up a new role as guest blogging in residence here and will be willing to guest blog for others too.
Phew... one day I might even get to blog here on a somewhat regular basis.
Did China block Copenhagen progress to pave way for its own dominance in cleantech?
Posted 25/01/10 by Matt B in the Online category
You hear it all the time, one of the most frequently voiced excuses for Western countries failing to radically cut carbon dioxide emissions: Taking any such action would hand a massive competitive advantage to fast-industrializing China.
Yet evidence is piling up that the very opposite is the case. The main challenge from the world’s new industrial superpower is not that it will continue to use the dirty, old technologies of the past, but that it will come to dominate the new, clean, green ones of the future.
As developed nations fail to put an adequate price on carbon, and thus to stimulate clean-technology development themselves, they risk handing market supremacy to the rival they most fear. Indeed, it could even be hypothesized that China’s blocking of agreement on rich-country emission targets in Copenhagen was intended to hold back the development of cleantech by its Western rivals.
Did China block Copenhagen progress to pave way for its own dominance in cleantech?
Kent County to become factory centre?
Posted 10/01/10 by Matt B in the Urban category
Council in Kent offering all farmland for factory building in 2010 and onwards.Kent, the garden of England, could well loose it's title if one of it's Conservative run district councils gets it's own way.
The innocently named "Policy 25" would offer a way for planners to bypass all country and farm land protection rules by promising lots of jobs as a result of the build. The reason for this push is because the conservative leadership would very much like to build houses on the already desgnated industreal areas such as EuroKent. The companies most likely to benefit from this arrangment include those run by the council's own leadership!
(Local bloggers have more as do the BBC)
This all coming from a council that is never far from the news (for example misleading the public in a FOI request) with complaints about the behavour of their planning officers and irregularities in the way they have carried out certain actions. Not least of which are the significant threats to all the drinking water in the area. Is Thanet in Kent going to become a concreate jungle so that a few businessmen can line their pocket?
Are we stupid or something?
Posted 05/01/10 by Matt B in the Unspecified category
Why is it do you think that instead of putting the very finest ingredients into household consumables that companies put the most damaging and potentially deadly?Because they are cheep. Because we let them. Because no one makes a fuss.
Why is it that we pour a noxious blend of cancer promoting neurological toxins onto even our children's heads just to wash their hair?
It's not because it gets hair clean - it's because it makes the products last longer and so increases profit. Because we continue to use these chemicals and fail to understand the risks we take.
I think maybe we are very silly people.
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