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Monthly archives: July 2010

Time for those longed-for tomatoes

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I am floating around in the 30 degree summer weather, which is almost a shock after last week’s cold nights in the north of Sweden. Another change is from eating freeze-dried food cooked on a camping stove. Now I’m able to to go to my local supermarket and find Swedish vegetables. That’s a true luxury for someone who tries to keep one’s food miles’ account low.

fresh-tomatoes

Finally in season. Photo: Kicki/Flickr.

Now is the time to gorge on fresh tomatoes, tender carrots and crispy salad. And they taste so much better when it’s actually the right season for them, instead of the pale copies we get during winter, grown in greenhouses heated with fossil fuels and transported across a whole continent.

Lately the interest for climate adapted and, not least, locally produced food has grown dramatically. Now strawberry growers report that it’s gotten so popular for costumers in the area to come and pick their own berries that they have to close down for a day once in a while to give the red delicacies time to grow.

At the climate magazine Effekt we have an excellent food writer, Maja Söderberg, who is right now working on her second “climate food” book. She has five principles which make it easier to eat in a way that minimize the burden on climate and environment. Here they are:

  • Use products of the season as your starting point
  • Buy locally produced, or fair trade
  • Choose organic products
  • Reduce your meat consumption, chose locally produced organic meat and try meat from wild animals or lamb
  • Choose fish types that aren’t threatened

Together with Ecoprofile, which is a Swedish web community for green transition, Maja is now collecting recipes to make a climate food calendar, with weekly menues. A good help for people like me, who are hit with a sudden lack of ideas as soon as I enter the supermarket…

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 12, 2010

Midnight sun and a melting mountain

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Lake Ladtjojaure, on the way to Kebnekaise mountain station.

Lake Ladtjojaure, on the way to Kebnekaise mountain station.

On-my-way-up

Stunned Swede. On my way up to the Toulpagorni mountain top (the one on the right at the midnight photo below)

I have just come back from my “Swecation” to Kebnekaise in the very north of Sweden, and I must admit I am stunned. Having lived in Sweden all my life I have heard people talk a lot about the midnight sun, but used to think that the light summer nights in the southern parts of the country were something similar.

After having spent one week living in a tent in constant daylight I know it’s not the same. Going to bed at 2 am, watching the sunshine paint the mountain tops in gold and a few clouds passing over a perfectly blue sky – and waking up seven hours later to see the same sight (only with the sun lighting up another mountain) is something quite extraordinary.

But despite being a very remote place where Nature seems to reign, human activity does reach even to Kebnekaise. The top of the mountain’s South peak, which is Sweden’s highest point, is made up of a glacier. Looking at it from the valleys below, it rises its white silhouette slightly above the other peaks. But with climate change warming the atmosphere the glacier melts and the peak shrinks. Last year when the maps were revised, the height of Kebnekaise’s South peak was changed from 2111 to 2106 metres, based on its average height during the last decade.

The peak is measured once a year by scientists from the Tarfala research station. They have kept a check on the glaciers of this area ever since 1946, collecting what is now the world’s longest continuous series of glacier mass data, providing knowledge about how much these glaciers are shrinking.

Drinking-water

No need to carry water around.

One day we took a walk to the Tarfala valley, where the research station is situated. Watching the glaciers covering the mountain slopes, wandering over the giant field of stone blocks and reading articles in the mountain hut about winds up to 81 metres per second, tearing biuldings into pieces, makes lots of used clichés run through my head. But it is a fact: facing those majestic mountains humanity does feel very tiny.

reindeer

Reindeer in the Tarfala valley.

Midnight.

Midnight in the valley below Kebnekaise. Notice the sunshine on the mountain top to the left.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 8, 2010

Brown dystopia or green hope?

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“Brown dystopia or green hope?” was the question that scientists from Stockholm Environment Institute asked themselves, when gathering to discuss the future.
Their message was that the world has been focusing too much on climate change and thereby missing another immense challenge that we’ll soon have to face: Peak Oil.

Either we want it or not we will have to deal with both energy shortage because of decreasing resources of cheap oil and climate change caused by the fossil fuels that we nevertheless burn. How something can at the same time be too little and too much is a tricky thing to grasp. But the answer to both these problems are actually the same: We have to get out of the fossil fuels era.
There are different ways in which this can happen, though, which was SEI’s expert on scenarios Carl Hallding has tried to describe in four different scenarios:

Green hope: Neither rapid climate change nor oil crisis
Green strategic behaviour. We all take action and do what’s needed, to provide a planet which is safe for all. Urban food production, alternative energy, green technology.

Brown dystopia- no oil crisis, but rapid climate change
Authoritarianism and a fortress world. Hallding describes a society where coastal areas are wiped out and only the richer countries can cope with the situation, and leave the poorer world to itself.

Is small beautiful? Oil crisis, but slow climate change
High energy prices, end of globalisation, dramatic agricultural impacts. A future where we will have to go back to a way of living that was more common historically.

Wake of the flood
Reduced populations and islands of survival. Hallding call it “a kind of Mad Max future”, with wars and a hunter and gather society – for those who can make it.

These scenarios are of course stereotypes, he emphasizes. But it’s a way of showing where we could be heading. Choosing the most desirable one isn’t difficult, but will we take the action needed for that? Watch the full presentations.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 5, 2010