Bill Burns’ Safety Gear for Small Animals fill my head with thoughts. Photo: Bill Burns.

Grasping what huge processes like climate change actually means to society and us as persons can be difficult. Reading about it can sometimes be a bit technical or abstract, and even talking about it it’s sometimes difficult to find the words.
I suppose this is natural, since we are facing something entirely new. Never before has humanity had to deal with globally hitting environmental problems in this way.

Going towards anti-utopia?

As in most cases when trying to deal with new and big issues, art can be of help – or confuse us even more. But at least I think it starts a lot of new thoughts.
The other day I went to an art centre in one of Stockholm’s suburbs, Tensta Centre of Contemporary art. Their current exhibition Rethink Kakotopia has taken its name after the term Kakotopia that the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham used to describe an anti-utopic society in chaos and disintegration. This exhibition plays with the idea that climate change could bring us into that state, and poses the question: Will our psyche and socio-economic systems be capable of grasping and responding to this challenge?

Humorous perspectives

Several of the works tries to see the problem from a different angle, recognizing that we humans are not the only ones affected. Humour is an important part of it, as the artist group Superflex’s project where they offer people a hypnosis session to experience climate change as an eagle, a polar bear or a cockroach. Or Bill Burns’ Safety Gear for Small Animals. At least my head was filled with thoughts about how we choose what is worth protecting when I saw his tiny frog or mouse sized life vests, bullet-proof vests and helmets.

Virtual gallery

On the art centre’s web page you can also see their first Virtual Gallery exhibition, featuring the photographic series Nomadographies, which explores themes of how humans relate to each other and to the environment.

Photo: Peepoople.

Going to the toilet is an easy thing in this part of the world. Your flush and – it’s gone. In many places globally, though, it’s a different business. Four out of ten persons on the globe haven’t got a toilet and in slum areas the absence of sanitation is a huge problem, causing diseases and deaths.
Thanks to a small plastic bag this can now be changed. The idea for the Peepoo bag comes from the architect Anders Wilhemson, who has developed this “personal single use toilet”. The bag contains urea, which reacts with the excrement and after 2-4 weeks all pathogens have been inactivated.

Good fertilizer

The bag will be affordable, costing about 6 cents of a US dollar, but one other big advantage is that after the dangerous bacteria have died, the bags and their contents can be used as fertilizer in people’s garden plots, helping to grow their food. The bag, which makes its contents stay odorless for 24 hours, is also biodegradable. Next step is finding a way to produce it without using fossil fuels, which today is needed as material for the bag.

Haiti next stop

The Peepoo bag has been tried out in slums in India, Kenya and Bangladesh. It will be especially useful in schools, where the lack of safe toilets makes many girls quit school when they have reached puberty. Now the bags will also be introduced in Haiti, where the earthquake has made sanitation a problem.

Criticism towards the water toilet

In an article in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter Anders Wilhelmson says his next project might be the toilets of the West. The water closets we use in this part of the world certainly aren’t the most sustainable ones. Using good water (at least here in Sweden mainly drinking water is used) to flush down our excrement is definitely wasteful. And according to Wilhelmson only ten percent of the sewage in the world is actually treated properly.
 

Photo: Gary H/Flickr.

There are few things that engage the public debate as much as food. The reason, I suppose, is simple: We all use it, and we can’t live without it.
Every now and then there is a food alert about the risks of something we eat. But right now a series of programs on the national radio has stirred up feelings in another way. The series is called “Matens pris” (The price of food) and examines the hidden costs of our food.

Eating more for less

Now the ordinary Swede spends just a little more than 10 percent of his or her housekeeping budget on food. And our consumption continues to rise. Never before have we eaten so much and paid so little.
But as the programs show this has consequences in other parts of the world.
Two reporters have gone to Brazil to more closely observe how soy beans are produced. The beans are then sold to Sweden and become protein rich food for milk- and meat cows. The reporters found that many pesticides that have been banned in Sweden for 30 years are used in these plantations, causing diseases and deaths of thousands of workers.

Reacting on the internet

This has made many radio listeners react, and call for Swedish importers to make greater demands on good production conditions. For example a Facebook group called “More expensive food now!” has gathered over 1000 members in a short time. – It’s all about making it obvious what consequences our choices have. This is not a knowledge that people are born with. We have to be informed about how our food is produced, says the founder of the group, Linus Källander, to the agricultural business magazine ATL.

Report about the links

At almost the same time as these radio programs, the organisation Swedwatch that writes reports on Swedish business relations with developing countries, has come with a new report about the links between Swedish importers of Brazilian meat and soy beans and producers that cut down the Amazon rain forest. The English summary of the report can be downloaded here.

Lots of skiers in Mora. Photo: Vasaloppet.

Yesterday around 16 000 enthusiastic  skiers pushed themselves along the 90 kilometres long ski race Vasaloppet in Mora, Dalarna.
Participating in a race like this must be exhausting in many ways – not only thinking of the physical challenges, but also the fact of organising all the participants and their spectators into Mora, which normally houses about 11 000 inhabitants.

Registering in advance

One way of not filling the whole city with cars is to encourage people to share their rides.
Before the race lots of travellers have been registering at a web service called Samtrip which connects people who are going to big events, or just need a lift or someone to share their car space with.

One person per car

According to a report I recently read the average number of passengers carried in every car in Sweden is 1,2. So, there is a huge potential to make these travels more energy efficient.
Now there are also several rideshare services, like for example Pendlarservice (partly in English) that companies and organisations as well as private persons can use to let their employees who take the same way to work find each other.

So, hopefully all of those who have taken their cars to Vasaloppet have at least one more person to chat to when they are returning home.

Combating the snow with alfalfa sprouts.

The winter continues to wrap its white quilt over Sweden. I am writing an article about urban food growing and doing my best to recall the budding summer feeling I had following a group of “guerilla gardeners” who planted a fruit tree in a centrally located park in Stockholm last June. But with snowflakes dancing around outside my window, digging and planting seems all too far away.

Easy food-growing 

To drive that feeling off I have started growing sprouts in my kitchen cupboard. It’s a brilliant way of making your own fresh, delicious and enormously nutritious food. And far cheaper than the ready sprouts you can buy at the supermarket. There is a whole variety of seeds that can be used: alfalfa, mung beans or sunflower seeds just to mention a few. And – it's easy.

DIY

If you haven’t tried yet, here is how to do it:

• Use a wide-mouth jar.
• Pour some seeds in it. Remember that the seeds will grow several times their own size, so don’t use too much. Normally I just cover the bottom of the jar.
• Place a fine-meshed net (a nylon stocking works very well too) over the opening of the jar and put a rubber band to hold it in place.
• Leave the seeds soaking in cold water for a night.
• Then rinse the seeds two-three times a day by pouring cold water into the jar and leaving it upside down for a while, so the water can drain off.
• After draining leave the jar in a dark kitchen cupboard until it’s time to rinse again.
• When the sprouts are the length that you want (for alfalfa or mung bean that takes around three or four days) they are ready to eat. To give them a greener colour you can leave them in the light for a day, but otherwise keep them in the refrigerator.

Enjoy!

Knivsta train station, a bit more summerlike than when I visited it. The railway is a great advantage to the municipality in its work to become less dependent on oil. Photo: Knivsta Kommun.

What would life look like with a lot less oil than we have today? How would we organise our lives, transport ourselves, heat our houses and provide cities with food if we were in short supply of energy? 
Right now I and my colleagues are waiting eagerly for the new issue of our climate magazine Effekt to come from print. One of the themes in this issue is oil. According to more and more of the experts, from scientists to the International Energy Agency , oil production will peak in the close future, or have already peaked.
This does not mean that we will be out of oil from one day to another. But when oil wells peak, energy won’t be as easy and cheap as before, which puts most parts of the world in a delicate situation since we are all very dependent on oil.

Wind turbine

To get a sense of what a society which prepares for Peak Oil looks like I went to the municipality of Knivsta, where some of the local politicians have taken this issue very seriously.
For example Knivsta has already bought a wind turbine which produces enough energy to cover the electricity need for the municipality’s own activities, from lighting up the streets to powering ovens in school kitchens. Knivsta has also built a special parking for commuters, where they can park their cars or bicycles to continue to their work places by bus or train.

Local workplaces

Most of these preparations are still on the idea stage, though, and part of the energy plan that the municipality is setting up.
If energy would get much more expensive commuting to work will eventually be a big cost. One of the ideas is to provide local offices where companies could rent places for their employees. In that way the employees can cycle to work and not sit at home in the middle of dirty dishes and other things stealing the attention, and also get all the technical convenience they need, such as video conference rooms and good internet connection.
Another problem with rising energy prices is food production. In Knivsta these enthusiastic politicians have made calculations and realised that it would actually be possible for the municipality to be self sufficient on food. I was shown a big field close to a residential area, where people could have their own plots. Another idea was to start a vegetable market, where local producers could easily sell their crops.

Mental changes 

Apparently there are lots of things to be done. But what I found very interesting was that these politicians do not only focus on the practical changes. One of the most important things, they told me, is the mental changes. Giving up some of the things that cheap energy has got us used to can be tough. But there are advantages to a less rapid society as well, a reduction of stress just being one of them.

The closeness to nature and outdoor life is one of the greatest things about Stockholm. Photo: Henrik Trygg/Stockholm Visitors Board.

2010 Stockholm is appointed Europé’s Green capital and seminars about different aspects of this are held all over the city. Yesterday I attended one of them, listening to Ulla Hamilton who is vice mayor and responsible for environment and traffic in Stockholm.

Less than 300 meters

She pointed out that Stockholm has quite a long tradition of working with environmental issues and presented a whole lot of figures to be proud of. We have a unique access to large green areas inside and close to the city. In fact, 95 percent of the population here is said to live less than 300 meters away from a green open space. A new urban district is planned with special environmental consideration and for 2050 the goal by the city council is to be wholly independent of fossil fuels.

Statistic lottery

But statistics can be tricky, though. One of the figures used a lot to describe how green we Stockholmers are, is the per capita emissions of CO2. The average in Sweden is about 6 tons/person and year, but in Stockholm we are down at 3,4 . Although people are good at using the public transport system and cycling, I couldn’t quite understand that. So I asked a person from the city council how this was calculated and he explained to me that that all the activities in the municipality are counted, but not what happens above 100 meters and not what we consume which is produced elsewhere. That makes it advantageous for us, since only the start and landing part of our flights are counted, and since the municipality doesn’t have a lot of heavy industries.

In that way I must admit I feel a bit like having been given the right lottery ticket. Worse, though, for the inhabitants of Oxelösund, where a lot of heavy industry is situated. In the statistics every person in their municipality accounts for 134 tons/year…

Muffins I know every ingredient of, since I added it myself...

Feeling tempted by a guacamole containing only 1,5 percent avocado? Or a bread spread which is made of fat hardened with hydrogen gas and nickel?
A few years ago the journalist and writer Mats-Eric Nilsson wrote a book called “Den hemlige kocken" (The secret cook), which shocked many readers. The book contains the stories about what we are actually eating when we put what we believe is “farmhouse bread”, balsamic vinegar or strawberry jam in our mouths.

Not automatically bad

The debate following the book has definitely made many consumers in Sweden more conscious about additives and now more and more companies use the absence of additives in their products as a sales argument. One still has to be aware of that an added ingredient does not automatically mean something bad. I find it difficult to be roused to indignation by a bit of salt or by pectin, which you can find naturally in apples and is used to stabilize marmalade. But there sure are things that are more difficult to categorize as food.

Glueing the meat

The latest discussion on this theme is the “meat glue”, which has added a new word to the Swedish vocabulary. The European Union recently took a first step towards approval of the coagulation protein thrombin, which can be used to stick different small pieces of meat into one. The decision has caused a lot of debate and on a blog about “pure food” 1 800 persons have signed a petition against the meat glue in one week.

DIY 

I suppose one way of knowing what you are eating is making it yourself. As a city dweller I’m not at all there, but buying simple raw ingredients and cooking and baking on your own works quite well too. As the local transport system is paralysed by heavy snow falls I have spent more time in my local neighbourhood, baking muffins. Buckwheat with apple and cinnamon turned out to be a nice combination.

Ready to be lended.

Earlier I have written about how people have started to swap things with each other instead of buying everything new. But this weekend Stockholm experienced another phenomenon in this genre: the clothes library. As Stockholm Fashion Week has been going on, the concept of borrowing clothes has been tried out at the Ecoteque in the cultural centre Kulturhuset.

Trying on the evening gowns

Fifteen minutes after opening the Ecoteque was already full of people crowding around the clothes stands, flickering through both new, designer outfits and vintage garments. In the fitting rooms people were trying on everything from neat shirts to fantastic evening gowns and after filling out a form they could take the garment home for one week. I spoke to two Finnish visitors, who had just arrived in Stockholm for the art fair Supermarket and wanted to complete their light luggage with some sensational clothes for going out Saturday night.

24 kilos of textiles

I find this an excellent way of renewing one’s wardrobe without overusing resources. Faster and faster changes in fashion have led to a situation where the average Swede buys 24 kilos of textiles every  year. That is 9 kilos more than in 1994. So I hope this idea has come to stay. And why not extend this concept to other areas, so that we can borrow tools as drilling-machines at the library instead of everyone getting their own and using it once a year?

Comparison of a short distance in Lund.

Ever wondered what difference it makes if you go by bike or by car to work? Now the municipality of Lund in southern Sweden has launched a service which will provide its inhabitants with good arguments to think their transportation choices over. The travel comparer (only in Swedish, though) lets you point out departure and arrival addresses and then calculates how long it would take you to get there by walking, cycling, by car or by bus. Not only that, it also calculates the price of the trip, how much CO2 it will emit – alternatively how many calories it will burn, if you are using your own muscles as fuel.

Everyone can contribute

One nice thing about it is that it uses OpenStreetMap, which is like a global Wikipedia for maps. The idea is everyone who lives in the area and uses the roads can share their best routes. One of the developers of the service says in a press release that it took just a few hours after the launching of the site before someone had added a new route.

The bike won

In the example above, where I just chose to go from a random spot to the central station in Lund, you can see that the fastest alternative is actually to go by bike (The column at the top is time, after that distance, price/trip, price/year, CO2 emissions/trip, CO2 emissions/year, and calories.)
As someone has pointed out, the calculations do not take into account for example steep hills, which would make cycling a bit harder. But maybe the OpenStreetMap will have functions for that as well, in time.