Migraines and Environmental consciousness.

God, my migraines and gut pains have been so bad today. I've been in bed ALL DAY, other than to get up to eat and take care of myself. I'm calling the neurologist on Tuesday, I got to get this shit sorted out.

I was watching Cool-Aid with my nephews tonight. I figure our family are doing pretty well. We don't use our drier unless it's an emergency situation and ONLY in the winter (not that it reliably works, anyway). Our fridge has a good energy rating (from memory, the sticker's gone). We have seven large trees in the garden (used to be more but we were forced to cut some down) and a few smaller ones that will grow into bigger ones, we don't have a lawn so we're saving water, and we don't have the TV on during the day. Only a few hours at night. There's one car in the family. The rest of the time we use public transport. I've only taken to using the car because of my illness. Before that I walked and trained everywhere I could.

I think our main sins of energy are with the computers. Mum has a laptop, Dad has a laptop, Scotty has two iMacs, I have a PC and a laptop. The laptop is off most of the day until I get to bed, but sometimes I leave it on. I might set it to turn itself off after an hour. My light consumption is pretty good cause I have migraines all the time. I have a tiny lamp I use. The top light in my room is rarely used.

The lights we use the most - kitchen and sitting area - are power-saving lights. We'll probably get more of them as time goes on cause Mum and Dad really need to save money on electricity.

We cook with gas and our heating is also gas. So we only really use up the energy in the summer when we use air conditioners and floor fans. We try to make the most of the cool breezes in the early morning by leaving open windows. The trees and the veranda really do help with the temperatures. If you walk to my property on a hot day, you'll notice the drop in temperature when parking under the huge gumtrees. It's really nice.

We are chronic recyclers, have been for years now. I was SO pleased when Claremont council started enforcing it with bins and so forth cause I'd learnt about it at school and I wanted to help out the environment. I'm so anal about it, I'll carry a bottle or can home rather than dump it in the trash, just so I can recycle it. They should make recycling bins more available in public, I think.

There's more I can do, I'm sure of it. I'm going to read up on it, see if I can help more. I'm really passionate about the environment but I know I don't do enough for it. I've gone on rallies, signed petitions, written letters to the government to protest old growth logging.

See, the problem is that there's a lot of people asking for money to help these causes and I just don't have any. And I'm not of the disposition to help with animals cause if something happens to an animal, I'll be mentally fucked up for a week. Psychologically, this shit gets me down. But I know there has to be SOMETHING I can do and it's been bugging me for months.

I suppose being poor kinda helps. I don't HAVE many things, I don't consume all that much so my carbon footprint is really quite low in comparison to other people. When all you have is yourself and your cats, all you buy is recycled clothing and cheap trinkets, and you're so sick that you don't go anywhere, you can't really have too much of an effect on the environment.

Still, I try to vote the best way I can and try not to waste things. Maybe I can switch Lenny from plastic disposable plates to the metal cups in trays like Rogie has. Easy to clean and not making plastics that rot in the ground.

It's the little things that help, apparently.

A really good meme!

People of LJ! Join hands! Get on the Love Train! Love Train!

Yes, it's a love meme. Three people have done it, one of them topped 5000 comments and now roguewords is passing the love onto you.

I've done a bunch of people - if I haven't said your name, don't be sad, it's not that I don't love you - it's that I have the memory of a goldfish and there's SO many people I love that I can't remember them all.

Just remember - I love you guys! All of you!

A meme worth forwarding.

Before I start, let me just say that this isn't a fun post. This isn't going to be cute pictures of fictional characters. It's not the latest quiz on what mythical animal you are. It's not the latest funny thing on Youtube or the stupid thing some celebrity has said. This isn't even me bitching about my own misfortunes.

This is above everything I've ever written in this journal. It's the most important thing I could possibly talk about. It's frightening and you might want to stop reading, but if you give even the tiniest damn about this amazing planet we live on, you'll keep on reading. If you really care you might even do something about it.

This isn't 'pass this along and Microsoft will save this dying cancer baby', or 'wear this colour-coded table in your LJ to show your support'. It's going to take more than that. You're going to have to actually DO something.

I've been reading up on global warming and by the time I had learnt even the tiniest bit of information about it, I was in tears. What I heard was staggering. We have barely ten years to save our planet from the irreversible damage of global warming. It's not a 'theory', it's not a debatable topic. It is HAPPENING. All climatologists worth their weight in degrees are telling the governments, telling US, that we have to change our ways and we have to change them NOW.

Are people listening? You have to do more than watch Al Gore for two hours. I went to the website stopglobalwarming.com and I was horrified to see that of all the millions of people that surf the internet every day, only 649,758 people had signed on to pledge their dedication to making a change. Let me put that in perspective for you.

The number of journals on livejournal: 12,423,887 (Halve that for averaging out duplicate and inactive journals and that's still six million.)
The number of people on MySpace: 100 million (Again, even if you halve that, it's a staggering number)
The number of people with a neopets account: 135,680,686 (The halving as before).

The most heartbreaking thing of all of this is that we can make a HUGE difference by doing a few little things every day. It's not convenient but it is NECESSARY. What will happen if we don't change our ways?

- Mass exinction of wildlife all over the world
- The spread of tropical diseases as dengue fever and malaria
- The sea levels will rise, destroying the homes of millions of people and creating an rush of refugees like nothing we've ever seen in human history
- The sea's acidity will rise, destroying our precious reefs and simple life forms such as algae, molluscs and coral. The entire ecosystem of our oceans will be affected.
- Huge superstorms and record-breaking droughts will ravage our world.

And this is from the world's climatologists, not for monetary gain but for the sheer desperation of saving our planet. It's the same thing we've been told since the 1970s and it's about time we listened. We have the technology to change and we can. Together we can make a difference.

It's time to kick your bad carbon habits.

Read the link above, do what you can. You can even do more than that if you're willing. Educate yourselves, empower yourselves and take care of your planet. We've taken only two hundred years to get it into this sorry state. We owe it to every single living thing we share this little rock with to make our mistakes right and conserve the only home we've got.

So. Enough of my soapboxing - it's time for action. Link to this entry. Or skip this entry (I don't mind) and link straight to any of these informative and important websites:

http://www.stopglobalwarming.org
http://www.climatecrisis.net/ (Official website of An Inconvenient Truth - handy dandy Carbon Calculator within)
http://www.greenhousenet.org

If you know any more, do let me know.

A lot of these pages are regional, so here's the best general advice for people all over the world:

- Write to your local political representatives
- Identify the ways your community is wasting carbon and try to join efforts to reverse it
- If you can, plant a tree
- Vote for environmentally aware political parties
- Educate yourself in every way you can and do everything in your power to help the effort

Most importantly - speak up in your journal, blog or myspace. On the internet, information can be viral. It can spread and reach millions. Instead of some chump singing in drag, or a cat falling off a piano (both of which are pretty funny) let's make it something worthwhile. Let's make use of the internet, its vast resources, and spread the word on something really worth going on about.

( Cause if we don't, this could all be gone after ten very short years... )

Some great advice to help be better for the environment and yourselves.

It's a matter of choice (on eating; and the environment)

A really good post by Pen, and you know, even the stuff about minding what you eat and eating less meat is appropriate because both where you get your meat from and what kind of meat you eat can make a big difference.

You don't have to stop eating meat to help the environment. For example, instead of beef (which ended up costing 30 bucks for some fillets which is outrageous) my Mum bought kangaroo fillets which can be prepared just the same as beef and is actually better for you - less fat, more iron. If it served native Australians for 40000 years I think it can do us some good too. It's a bit like turkey, a bit like beef, I couldn't really tell what I was eating when I first tried it. It's a new taste so it might weird some people out but it's good stuff and it is good for you. Kangaroo is not just for cats and dogs. It's also much better for the environment because:

- Kangaroos don't fart methane or breathe it out
- Kangaroos require less grass and vegetation for survival than do cows
- They also need far less water.

For Australia that is incredibly important to our resources.