Building a pedestal

In 2004, I spent the year in the Greater London area. When I first arrived, I stayed with a relative who lived next door to someone who lived in a big house and drove an obnoxious 4x4 (it should be noted that the most hazardous thing in that neighborhood was the leaves that collected on the verges in the evenings). The pretentious neighbor had landscaped their garden to have a "natural" pedestal on which the Discovery was parked every night. There were also some subtle garden lights around the little knoll to show their 4x4 in good light overnight. I snorted at how flash they were trying to be 1) for living in that neighborhood (there were only named houses on that road, not numbered ones), 2) for driving such an obnoxious car and 3) for displaying it so ostentatiously (seriously, do the words "living green" mean nothing to them?).

Skip forward to today. We've been having electricity trouble of late (as in, a maximum of six hours per day, usually in the wee hours of the morning. We're told it's because the main power station has died from lack of maintenance. The official line from the power company complaints line is that it "should be fixed by the end of the year"), and Mum was complaining about the power-cuts and our inability to afford a generator to a friend at church. Said friend (read: angel) told Mum that he knew of someone who was selling a generator. Long story short, we're getting a genny...not a big one, not one powerful enough to run the fridge and freezer or geyser, but enough to keep the lights, laptop and TV/satellite dish going. It's ot a wind or solar powered one (I'm working on a design for one that combines both for when my parents move house), which is unfortunate, but we'll take what we can get at this point so a diesel-powered one it is.

Mum and I were sitting in the lounge chatting this afternoon and she asked where we were going to put the generator. My first instinct was to say "In a shrine, framed by mirrors so we can fully admire it, in the front garden, with space to kneel before it and chant 'Oh magnificent giver of power, we praise God for you' whenever we need to use it." Then it hit me that I'd be doing exactly what the pompous neighbors in Surrey did with their Discovery. Yes, I know, we'd need to put the generator somewhere near the electricity mains box where it's protected from the weather, but allow me to dwell on the point for a moment. Perhaps what we choose to display in front of our houses says a lot about our priorities. Our family's priority is obviously not looking cool, but surviving. As fossil fuel reserves dwindle, we're going to need to switch to more sustainable ways of meeting our energy needs. When we get a wind generator (I've already got one picked out. It's adorable. It's called a Turby and it doesn't mind turbulent wind), I have a suspicion that I'm going to plant pretty flowers around the base to decorate it so that the neighborhood can also admire the beauty of wind power.

Dear Zim

Dear Zimbabwe,

I'd like to ask you a question: why? Sure things were awesome in the '80s - our dollar was one-on-one with the British Pound; we were the largest exporter of maize and tobacco in the sub-region; we all wore the same trainers (because there were economic sanctions and apparently only one shoe company existed in this country back then); we had Bovril (which is a less awesome version of Marmite made from dead cows not yeast, so it's lower in the vitamins B); you couldn't tell who the rich kids or poor kids were (because there was also only one carpet manufacturer, ceramics company, swimsuit manufacturer); our moms all had crazy lions-mane perms; we were all super-proud of our power station that was fuelled by the largest open-cast coal mine in Africa (I'm leaving discussion of the Gukurahundi massacres out, because that's not really the point of this post. Also, that was one of the not-awesome parts of the '80s, so shouldn't be listed here) - but that was more than two decades ago.

Since then: America has invaded Iraq (twice); other countries have had elections and changed presidents; we've found out about the down-sides of burning fossil fuels for energy; we've started driving cars that were not assembled in Zimbabwe with mostly-the-same bits as their overseas counterparts; we've discovered the joy of Marmite on our morning toast; scientists have proved that margarine is bad for you; nutritionists have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of a varied diet; the population of the world has increased exponentially.

Yet here we are. I should probably mention that it's 4 a.m. as I'm writing this, because that's the only time when the electricity is on (I've been awake since my bedside light blinked into life at 11 p.m.). Sure, I'm all for living green, but I do need electricity to achieve things and (finally) finish a remunerative piece of writing. We're still being powered by the open-cast coal mine, and the generators at the power station regularly give up the ghost. In addition, we're sending electricity to Namibia (y'know, because, like, we totally have enough to spare), so we're upping their national carbon footprint as well. We gave up using our own dollar, because inflation was exponential, not incremental (no word of a lie: a few years ago the same bottle of cooking oil in the same store was $12,000 when the store opened, $24,000 at lunchtime and $48,000 by the close of business). Now we have American dollars, most of which are so tatty that you need to squint to determine which denomination it is. A number of times in the past decade, our economy would have failed if it hadn't been for people who had left the country sending money home to their relatives. Our municipal water is virtually non-existent, and when it does come through the pipes, it's got something in it that gives us all diarrhoea (I'm not counting the cholera outbreak we had a few years ago in this discussion. Nobody ever proved where that started). We need food aid just to keep our population alive, and now the government are considering planting genetically modified crops just to keep the food down.

So I ask you, why? Why are you content to sit and let s**t happen to you without so much as a squeak of protest? We're all (well, not all of us, from the looks of the mealies [that's maize for the non-Zimbos] that are growing on verges and in green belts around Harare) doing the Foundations for Farming mealies for the nation project to keep ourselves from starving this winter, and that's awesome, *hi5*. But nothing else is improving. Everyone is working so hard at damage control (whether it's buying a new generator, digging another borehole, or whatever) that nobody's even stopping to think what can actually be done. There are almost no solar panels or mini wind turbines (which, let's be honest, would be so much more convenient than having to find diesel to run the gennies), and we're all content with the bog-standard "it's load shedding" reply that we get whenever we call the electricity faults line to find out why we don't have electricity for another day. Why? How have you not all gone stir-crazy from being thwarted at every turn? Or maybe that's the answer - you're all so busy trying not to let it make you insane that you have nothing left to give when it comes to making progress?

The Unbearable Pointlessness of Being

There are more than seven billion people in the world. Every morning, we wake up, feed ourselves (well, not necessarily, but if you're reading this you have access to a computer and I assume therefore you can afford to feed yourself), dress, rush around making money and giving it to various government departments (the tax man, the vehicle licensing folk, the local council, etc.) or service providers, then we feed ourselves again, watch pointless TV, and go to sleep. The next day, we wake up and repeat the cycle. Endlessly, this goes on. Basically, we're nothing but hamsters who get up each morning, run on the same wheel all day, and then go to bed. Why?

Some of us have families; some of us have a partner; some of us have house mates. Most of us have people with whom we interact on a daily basis and have some kind of emotional attachment to. One would hope that these people have some kind of reciprocal emotional attachment. I suppose the point of earning money is to put food in our mouths, and those of our dependants, and to put a roof over our head.

But I still come back to this: why?

I'm aware that, as a bipolar sufferer, I feel the futility of existence more acutely than others, but riddle me this: what makes me (or you or, for that matter, anyone else in the world) so special? What do I have to contribute to the world that is any different or more special than what anyone has to contribute?

We feel a biological imperative to propagate our kind, but there are so many of us that, if half of us didn't breed, the planet would actually be better off. Yet we seem to view the reason for our existence as finding a partner and making a flock of little greenhouse gas producers to carry on running on our hamster wheel when we die.

Some people choose to contribute to the world through studying something. Some of those people do actually contribute – Einstein, et al. – but most are just running on their little hamster wheel. Very few people make discoveries that change the course of history or alter the fate of the world. Even fewer change things for the better. (No, I don't consider people who make more efficient weapons as having changed things for the better, despite my objections to the size and unsustainability of the human population.)

Some people choose to devote their lives to humanitarian work. Some of those people make a positive change in their community; some simply teach the people that they're “helping” to be dependant on someone else to solve their problems.

So what's the point? The Christians will tell you that we're here to worship God. Maybe they're right. However, they also believe that if we don't worship God, all of creation will do it for us, so it seems a bit redundant.

Perhaps we're here to make money. Really? Is that the point of being here? Are we all pumping infinite amounts of toxic crap into the environment to accumulate a vast amount of stuff that we just leave behind when we die? Are we here to become better people? Well, in light of the “life's a bitch and then you die” thing, becoming a better person is an ultimately futile pursuit: you become the best you can be and then you die and all your effort is wasted.

We look to other people for our examples – asking what would Thomas Jefferson/Andy Lally/Ellen Degeneres do – trying, all the while to be better. Granted, some people abandon the quest to be better people and become sociopaths and/or serial murderers, but I'm assuming none of us are in that group. However, the people we choose all have some areas of failure in their lives – whether in their personal or professional lives, they've all fallen short of the ideal.

Thing is, I don't want to believe that there's no point. I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, something we do changes the world for the better. Thom Hartmann (incidentally, the author of a book titled 'What would Thomas Jefferson do') suggests that, through small acts of mercy, we change the flavour of the soup of the collective unconscious. So maybe that's the point: to go about life taking opportunities to do anonymous good deeds in order to decrease the misery around us. I don't know about you, but that sounds far more pleasant to me than being a hamster funding a government that makes decisions that will ultimately destroy the earth.

Smart shopping, iPhone-style

I wish there was an easy way to decide what to buy in the shops; there's an enormous amount of choice, and very little information available about most products. Well, unless you want to spend hours online, trawling the end evil blacklist, the Stop the Traffik site, the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) site, Greenspace, Ecoshopper and numerous others with similar socially-conscious themes. Incidentally, it's interesting to pop onto those sites every now and then to make sure the lists haven't been added to/subtracted from, if you want to make responsible consumer decisions. No judgements if you don't.

Yes, I'm a hippie. I worry about where my food comes from, how far it's had to travel, (and, thus, how long it's been out of the ground), what it's been exposed to during its lifetime. I'm a vegetarian, so I don't have to worry about whether my food was subjected to horrible conditions (pens only big enough to stand up and lie down and not move otherwise, ten chickens to a cage with the cages stacked on top of each other, dairy farmers allowing sores to grow on their cows' udders, etc.), but I know many, many carnivores who (despite their meat-eating habits) care deeply about this sort of thing.

What would you say if I told you that you could find out all of this sort of thing with an iPhone (and, this autumn in the US, the new version of Windows Mobile) app? The new Augmented Living mobile app ("AUG" for short) allows you to scan the barcode of an item in the supermarket with the camera on your phone, and it then tells you where the product was grown/manufactured, its nutritional information, and other interesting data like pricing histories. Awesome, right?

Before I get onto the *hi5* bit of this post, I'd just like to point out a few things.
1) Most people don't have iPhones (or, later this year in the US of A, Windows Mobile). Thus, only the well-heeled can really afford to be conveniently socially conscious.
2) One assumes that one would have to be in countries where this sort of information was registered. For example, if you were in a foreign country and wanted to make sure what you were buying (which is likely to be labelled in a foreign language) didn't contain something horrifying like dolphin or excessive amounts of mercury. So, if you're travelling to the States, you're in luck: you can find out exactly how much lard and corn syrup is in your food (not that I'm generalising here. In my defense, a disturbing number of American products do contain those ingredients).
3) I have a friend, to whom we shall henceforth refer as "The Aussie Surprise Fairy" (TASF for short), who raises a point about this. It's becoming too easy to live ethically and yet people choose not to. What percentage of iPhone users would actually buy the app? I would, but then I'm one of those people who go to restaurants and ask whether the hot chocolate is non-slavery (and whether the cheesecake contains gelatine [which is made from pig/cow hooves, for those of you who were previously unaware, and is therefore non-vegetarian] and whether the cheese is Kosher). I'm also the kind of person who thinks about these things, which your average iPhone user isn't. Maybe I'm wrong and I've mis-judged the trust fund brats of this world by thinking that they weren't raised to question the ethics of everything they do.

But still, *hi5* to the four young programmers who decided to get together and create this for us, and congratulations to them for winning first prize in the Consumer Electronics Association's (CEA) annual Greener Gadgets Design Competition.