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Monthly archives: March 2010

An hour in the dark

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Laleh-playing
The artist Laleh playing in light generated by the Swedish national cycling team. Foto: Germund Sellgren,WWF.

This Saturday people all over the world turned their light off for an hour, during the annual Earth Hour. 
More than 200 Swedish municipalites had announced their participation and in several cities Earth Hour was celebrated with artist shows, snow board contests or ghost tours. In central Stockholm the park Kungsträdgården was filled with people, listening to a concert by artists as Laleh, Darin and Andreas Johnson. The stage was softly lit up by a power generator pedalled by a group of cyclists from the national cyclist team.
A group of artists has been working on a very imaginative cycle project, which resulted in a cycle caravan led by a three-seated bike winding its way through the city to the concert. (read more about the art project here)

All about awareness

It is clearly not about the energy saving in itself – during this hour in the dark several Swedish cities report that the electricity consumption went down about five per cent – but more about the awareness effect. Especially the cyclist at the end of the stage caught my mind. If you need several cyclists to generate the power required for lighting up a small stage, then imagine how much we would need to work our muscles if we didn’t have the access to cheap energy that we have today.

Political pressure

The organiser behind Earth Hour, WWF, says this manifestation will serve to put pressure on politicians after the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December. As a moment to think about climate change , what it could lead to and how dark it will actually get if we don’t do anything about it, I think Earth Hour is a very good idea. Let’s just hope it does not stop there.

On this short video you can see people counting down before the unplugging, and how dark it actually got in the centre of Stockholm.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

March 29, 2010

Simple ways to save lives

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bangladeshi-girl-fetching-water
In the world there are still almost 1.1 billion people without adequate access to water. Photo: Uncultured/Flickr.

Earlier this week, at the World Water Day, the winner of this year’s Stockholm Water Prize was announced. The American microbiologist Rita Colwell has spent decades researching and fighting water-spread diseases like cholera, which every year takes around 120 000 lives and infect millions according to Stockholm Water Institute.

– The biggest challenge is for all human beings to get clean water. Until now there has been too much focus on high-tech solutions, Rita Colwell said in an interview with the Swedish radio.
She also says  there might be too much focus on curing cholera through vaccines and medication instead of preventing people from being infected in the first place.
One of the simple measures that Dr Rita Colwell has used is pieces of old saris, which are used by women in for example Bangladesh. By folding the textile a few times and filtering the water through it, the number of infected could be reduced by 50 per cent.

I think it is somehow relieving that these problems can be helped in such simple ways. At the same time it can be frustrating; if the solutions are available and on top of all very cheap, there is no reason that cholera should kill and infect so many.
Hopefully the findings of Rita Colwell will change this.

Read more about her work here.


Dr Rita Colwell. Photo: Stockholm Water Institute.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

March 25, 2010

Are we too many?

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Hans Rosling showing his “bubble statistics”. Photo: Stefan Nilsson.

Last week was one of a long-lived and sometimes infected debate: Population growth.
In a polemical article in a daily newspaper a group of scientists argued that in order to avoid conflicts over shrinking natural resources, the governments of rich countries must work on good ways of keeping our population growth at a low level.

Planetary boundaries

Among other they pointed out that although most people agree that the global population cannot grow much more without crashing into the boundaries of this planet (that I have mentioned on this blog before), on the local level population growth is by many still seen as something important and good. Cities strive to get bigger, and many countries celebrate rising population figures. It’s a strange contradiction.

Sensitive debate

The population issue has many sensitive turns and complicated aspects. Some people run into the trap of xenophobia and protectionism. Another thread is the argument of fast growing populations in the South being a problem, clashing against the argument that it is actually the high consumption levels of the fewer in the rich countries which is the problem. Womens’ rights over their own bodies and access to safe abortions are other aspects.

Better conditions give smaller families

One person who has thrown himself into this debate is Hans Rosling, who is professor in Public Health Science at Karolinska Institutet.
His presentation of statistics is quite extraordinary. And his point is that when people get access to family planning measures, have more equality and fewer wars, lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancy – people actually tend to have smaller families.
Hans Rosling was recently rated one of the World’s 100 top thinkers by the magazine Foreign Policy for his ways of shattering stereotypes of rich and poor countries. Watch his presentation here:

 

What stops population growth? from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

March 22, 2010

Art for reflection and understanding

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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.

 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

March 18, 2010

A plastic bag with great potential

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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.
 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

March 15, 2010