One Planet chat

I noticed on the program that Dick Strawbridge himself got a planet score of 2.11 even with an environmentally friendly home. It shows how far we have to go to get the score of 1 planet, to have sustainable living.

He said it himself – the calculator is designed around UK averages. He’s pretty far along the road to sustainable living and it becomes less and less accurate towards the extremes.

If you go through the eco-tips you might find if you’ve already done some of the suggestions your footprint drops too. Mine started at 2.1, but it went down to 1.68.

Whilst I certainly enjoyed watching the show I found the footprint calculator to be the most relevant & immediately useful item to us regular Joes whereas most of the features seemed to require a big plot of land or wads of cash and that’s probably why Dick’s score seems so “high” despite his efforts. (More commentary on my green blog)

All that said it’s good that we have such a show on TV and it’s the little things that it highlights that seem to have more impact than the 100 grand eco swimming pools.

Cheers to INEBG for showing us the footprint calculator.

I’m with you, GoneGreen – I wonder if they deliberately made the first show the ‘aspirational’ side of green living? It’s a real double-edged sword though. As one of my colleagues is fond of saying “You can’t buy your way to sustainable living”.

The second in the series is on tonight, featuring Alex James of Blur. Does anyone want a sweepstake on his footprint?? I’m going for 2.7!

I have to say that Dick Strawbridge is a person we should all aspire to be more like. He’s funny, green, a nice guy, lively and has one hell of a moustache. I saw this calculator on that show and immediatley went on. He has got so many good ideas, and his son gave a tip on salt rocks being an alernative for deoderant. I happen to know that salt rocks can also help get rid of spots, but don’t mix up the one you put under your armpits and the one you put on your face and back!

I think we should all make an effort to be green by reducing our need for and using public transport when we need to travel, buying organic food, recycling, using renewable sources of energy. I don’t use a car or mobile phone and i’m quite happy without them. Do you really need your phone and car if you have one? Do you need to fly so often?

Why not look up www.ourfutureplanet.org where you can add comments and ideas about food, agriculture, climate change and other green topics.

This weeks show had the eco refurb family installing a water tank of 2700 ltrs. A major contribution to the green agenda but also a very serious mistake in showing it as it was. The couple dug the hole themselves and the piece showed the bloke down the hole about 15 ft ish below ground level WITH NO TRENCHING EQUIPMENT OR MEANS OF HOLDING BACK THE EARTH!!

The BBC should really have cut that part of the programme out.

Well I start at a score of 3.42 planets and consider that I am trying to do my bit, particularly when comparing with friends and family. How willing am I to make the sacrifices in lifestyle that will make a significant change?

i did a very green answers on the survey and it came in at 1.68 planets I cant see away for us to use only 1 planet my own personal is 1.79 planets which is better than dick’s 2.11

I was catching up on iPlayer and saw the calculator. I must say I found the first episode offputting but the next 2 were better.

I’m weighing in somewhere between 1 & 2 planets – it’s moving about as I’ve been experimenting with which parts of the calculator have most impact. Certainly when you get as low as 2 most of the lifestyle pledges only seem to make a tiny difference on their own.

As the guidance notes say, a whole planet is taken up by UK infrastructure. Get that down and maybe we all have a chance.

I’m sure that Dick would fare a lot better if the calculator allowed for his home electricity generation and his bio-diesel.