Our free groups for summer music festivals like Oxegen, Electric Picnic, Live at the Marquee, Sea Sessions, Indiependence, Castlepalooza, Life, Body & Soul Solstice, and many others make it easy for you to find drivers or passengers going your way. If you’re having a party and want a group of your own, let us know, and in the meantime here’s to meeting new tripmates - pump up the volume, dance dance!
Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.
1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too! When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.
2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)
3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.
4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.
5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?
6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.
7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.
Imagine that at the end of this century, when your human grandchildren have been born, planet earth will be a scorched dust-bowl and humans will only survive on the fringes of the Antarctic. Do you think that’s a possibility? Hard to imagine? Well humans, I’m sorry to say but this is indeed what will happen if radical changes aren’t made in global carbon emissions over the next few years. Some humans even think it’s too late, but, like a lot of dogs I’m keeping optimistic that people will wake up and smell the coffee.
What’s a dog to do?
Well, yesterday, in spite of the rain, I took myself off, with my humans, to the new Cultivate/Eco-Unesco building, The Greenhouse, in St. Andrew Street (where Enfo used to be, opening to the public on 2nd December) for a lunchtime seminar on Carbon Tax. The humans were very interested. I was mildly interested at first and just wanted somewhere to curl up and dry out from having walked into town in torrential rain. But… I couldn’t believe my dog-ears! I had no idea how serious the situation really is. The picture for the future of planet earth, home to us all, is bleak - the rain forests torched, the polar ice caps melted, heat and dust everywhere.
…and it’s not the dogs doing it!
Look at the past few weeks in this country… has the torrential, bucketing-down rain put a smile on your face each day? I wouldn’t think so. Look at the top left photo - that’s me and the position I’ve been in for the past few weeks. There was nothing else for it but to take to the bed and stay dry. Now, take a look at my photo below before things started to get really bad. That’s me carpooling with my human wearing my happy, smiley dog-face.
What kind of world do we want to live in because from where I’m standing it’s looking like we’d better get used to the fact that endless rain might not be a passing weather phase but a permanent fixture in this country.
Our climate is changing forever, unless you do something and do it now. I’m saying this as your Best Friend and I’m hoping that we dogs won’t have to re-evaluate this age-old relationship…!
It’s nice to see humans getting to do something fun on the beach – whenever I take my humans out all they do is walk along by the waves! But last Saturday a big group turned out and brought their humans with them for a dance/happening/choreographed runabout…whatever it was, they seemed to be having fun and it was supposed to be doing something about this crazy weather we’re having. My ancestors were from Cuba, so I like a little tropical showers and sun, but I never expected to see that in Ireland. Anyway, take a look at the video and see if you can spot the little white dog showing them how it’s done!
In case you have any doubts about how climate will affect Ireland and the UK, have a read of this - it describes the summers we might be having soon, which are fine if you’re a lizard, but not when you have a full coat of beautiful fur! Are you carpooling yet?
