emails

Revamped website! Widgets! (And an update on the email hoarding situation)

The Everyday Radical2 Comments

Web design and technology is not my strongest skill – I like writing and researching and thinking, mainly. But I’ve had a sneaking suspicion for a while that the Everyday Radical website was looking a bit rubbish. Like all writers, I would love more people to read my work (I think some of it at least is a valuable contribution to the eco issues debate, and people keep telling me it’s quite good). But having a super basic blog home page doesn’t help with that mission. So I am learning VERY SLOWLY how to use WordPress to its full potential. I’ve got a long way to go, and very limited time these days, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve redesigned the blog so it looks a bit sexier. And also, WIDGETS! (These are little WordPress features that you can add to your site to aid navigation, provide links to your social media etc.) I thought they were very complicated, but actually they’re quite straightforward.

New on the blog page, down the right hand side – over here >>>>>>>>

You can click to like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter. The “follow my blog” button is easier to find and there’s a list of recent posts, and an archive menu by month too. And categories! So if you read a post about washing up, for example, and you want to read some more of my ramblings about kitchen-related eco switches, you can find the category and find all the blog posts. This was pretty fun to put together, sorting through the archive. Weirdly, the dish washing posts are some of the most popular posts I’ve written. My readership must be washing up liquid geeks.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about the new look, and the new features. Let me know what you think. More to come when I learn how to create pages – not the same thing as posts, it seems!

Briefly too, on the subject of technology. I wrote about my email hoarding tendencies back in January, with a promise to change my ways due to the carbon footprint of storing thousands of emails. Also there was a significant mental load of having 5500 emails in my inbox, it felt like a massive to do list that would never get cleared. I promised you guys I would get it down to less than 100 by the end of March.

So as of today, it’s at 302. Which feels like progress… I also deleted a massive amount of archived work emails form years ago which I will never need. But I also have to confess that I moved a LOT out of my inbox into sub folders. I’m not going to tell you how many but I’ve just counted them up and I’m a bit shocked, as there’s still an enormous bunch of stuff sitting on servers whirring away because I’ve got some odd hoarding disorder and I can’t bring myself to delete them. Most of them I am saving for a reason (quite a lot, for example, are idea leads for this blog), but the reality of how much I still have left is a bit of a wake up call. I am really interested in the psychology of hoarding, so perhaps I need to have a bit of a closer look at myself! (Digital hoarding is a thing, by the way – not much studied, but definitely a thing, which is probably on the increase).

Back to the climate impact point though. Sending and receiving emails and storing files on the cloud all has a carbon footprint, due to the servers that it’s all held on and the power they use, the energy used to run computers themselves and send and receive messages. Sure, per message it’s microscopic, but it all adds up. So I repeat my challenge to you all, folks – use your lockdown downtime (if you have any!) to clear out your mailboxes and your saved files and unsubscribe to mailing lists that you’re not really reading (they just encourage you to buy stuff you don’t need anyway). You will feel mentally cleansed, I promise you, and help to save the planet too. Every little helps, as they say (and I bet you’ve got some emails in your archive from them too!)

Fabulous February

The Everyday Radical4 Comments
Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

Joyless January is over. The bad news, of course, is that Brex-shit happened and the General Election was not in fact a bad dream after all. The good news, though, is that it’s nearly spring, there are crocuses out in the park, and we BROKE EVEN on the household finances in January, and I feel pretty proud about that. Stuff coming up soon on food waste, batch cooking and other things which save money as well as saving the planet. (I also haven’t forgotten about “how to green your cat”, but I’m waiting for some critical information on this first.)

But first. I’m a bit slow off the mark on this, as it’s a New Year’s Resolution sort of thing. I am very bad at New Year’s Resolutions. I usually write myself a massive list of unachieveable things, then don’t manage to achieve any of them and feel like a massive failure. So I haven’t made any this year. But this is an easy one, because I feel like I’m working on my big three every day anyway. (not being a shit parent, trying to save the world, and getting thin, I think in that order. Plus, read more books. Always read more books).

I signed the Friends of the Earth 2020 climate pledge, and I think you should too. If you’re reading this blog, you will most likely know all this stuff, but the climate crisis is happening now – it’s not a distant future thing, or a far, far away thing, it’s affecting communities around the world already. I wrote about the bushfires in Australia a while back, and whilst they’re not in the headlines much now, they are still happening, and 11 million hectares of land have been affected so far.

This is the wording of the pledge:

“I pledge to join millions of people across the world and fight the climate emergency in 2020.”

440,000 people have signed it already, and while that in itself won’t make anything change, it does send out a signal to our government and corporations that the tide is turning and people want to see radical change. It will also get you onto the Friends of the Earth mailing list and they will send you information about local climate groups and Friends of the Earth’s 6 point climate action plan, which is the starting point for their lobbying of MPs and the government. (They’re not like 38 Degrees, they don’t email you every day asking for money, which is a bonus).

Because, fundamentally there’s a limit to what individuals can achieve. We can reduce meat and dairy intake, avoid single use plastics, drive less, stop flying, switch to a green energy supplier. Locally, community groups and councils can take meaningful action on climate breakdown too. But it’s the government who really need to take action to make transformational changes to end the climate emergency. But it’s so, so clear to me that they’re not doing enough.

There’s a link here to contact your MP and ask them to sign the climate pledge. I think this was initially an election thing, but I think it’s still worth doing. I wish I knew more about the most effective ways to lobby governments, and I wish I was more optimistic that the current government will actually take the climate emergency seriously. But I suspect that Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, among other organisations, know exactly what they’re doing and will exert pressure in the right ways, so I encourage you to support them and get involved where you can.

Here ends the lesson.

I wrote to Greenwich Council today about their new wheelie bin proposals to improve recycling rates, so more on that when they reply… #WatchThisSpace.

P.S. I deleted about 1000 emails today, as part of the great email purge. I didn’t really need Pinterest notifications from 2017, did I? If I suddenly get excited about elephant-themed nursery decor, I can look it up again, can’t I? I’m honestly not panicking about this, really I’m not.