Happy Earth Day!

This March marked the tenth anniversary of the BTCV Green Gyms. These gyms were not something I was aware of until I heard a report about them on Women’s Hour over the Easter weekend, but they seemed such an eminently good idea. Being a mild environmental pioneer, recycling as much as possible and encouraging / bossing / guilt tripping my housemates to do likewise, I decided to look into this a little further. I’m now thinking that I would like to attend one of the London green gyms with some of my colleagues, who, like me, are on our company green team.

The idea of the gyms is to incorporate exercise and becoming a little fitter with a worthwhile environmental task, be it clearing a woodland path, slashing weeds, or trimming a hedge. The free gym session starts with some basic warm up exercises, followed by instruction on how to use the tools at your disposal and information about the conservation task you’re going to do. To finish off, there are a few cool down activities. The whole “workout” lasts approximately three hours.

There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment for these dual-serving positive initiatives of encouraging a healthy lifestyle, whilst also promoting going green. A new swimming pool in Harrow is to be filled by rainwater alone. Reuters News and The Times have both recently focused on the need for town planners to create environments that encourage walking and cycling, rather than driving. This is so obviously the way we have to go, if we’re avoid to becoming obese monsters who use up all the earth’s resources and drown in the icecap meltwaters… which may serve us right, but would not be very enjoyable!

It makes so much sense to create as many initiatives as possible that promote a healthy lifestyle (fighting the current obesity “epidemic”) and environmental awareness (encouraging us to think about our lifestyles and how they impact upon the planet). So much of healthy living is, by its very nature, green. Walking or cycling as opposed to driving, eating natural and locally grown produce, which has not been transported miles, pumped full of conservative agents and heavily packaged. I look forward to being inspired by the next such initiative.

News and views

First thing’s first, given my last, rather old now, post, I guess I should mention how very sad it is that Shannon’s stepfather, Craig Meehan, has been charged for possessing indecent images of children. However, for all those who contributed to her search, I still think it was so wonderful that she was found alive and well.

And, despite Zimbabwean elections (when will Mugabe be got rid of – it’s so close now and yet still feels so far away), BA PR disasters (what were they thinking?) and pro-Tibet riots when the world is supposed to be “uniting” around the Olympic torch (the riots being a really good and important statement); there are still bits of news that show human nature in its most positive light.

One of these last week surrounds the tragic air accident, when a Cessna jet crashed into a house in Farnborough, Kent on Sunday 30 March. The owners of the house which the aircraft destroyed, Ed and Pat Harman, were so admirable when they visited the wreck of their house. All they could say was how sorry they were for the family and friends of the accident’s five victims (David Leslie, Richard Lloyd, Mike Roberts, Christopher Allarton, and Michael Chapman) and how grateful they were to be alive. Hardly a word did they mention about their – not comparable to the victim’s family and friends – but definite loss, the house in which they had spent the majority of their married life and brought up their two sons. I find this selflessness in the light of a general horrific tragedy, which was in a small part theirs, incredibly impressive and reassuring about the good and resilient side of human nature.