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.