Guest Blog: Raised From The Alive

For this, the first in an occa­sional series of guest blogs (they’re all the rage these days), I’d like to re-introduce an old friend, a man with whom I braved the hor­rors of West­ern and Cent­ral Europe for 10 weeks of this bicycle jour­ney… ladies and gen­tle­men, Mr. Mark Maultby! Take it away…

Hello there. This isn’t Tom writ­ing. What?! Sorry, but I’m hi-jacking this space for my own agenda. Actu­ally, ‘hi-jacking’ is too fierce a word; how about ‘trampling-on’?

I’m Mark. I rode out from the home-lands with Tom and Andy back in 2007, leav­ing my friends, fam­ily and long-term girl­friend for the rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny lands of North and Cent­ral Europe. My mis­sion: to ride with the lads for approx­im­ately 3 months and then whisk myself home to said girl­friend before des­per­ate, hope­less love­sick­ness set in.

This was, in some senses, a massive suc­cess for me, I man­aged to hold-off the love­sick­ness for a good ten weeks and have some of the most mem­or­able, excit­ing and weird exper­i­ences of my young life. To this day I feel immensely priv­ileged to have rid­den this rel­at­ively small chunk of land (from Middleton to Bud­apest), and to have done so with Tom and Andy, to whom I am indebted for hav­ing the cour­age, strength of char­ac­ter and sheer bloody-mindedness that are needed to set off long on a long dis­tance cycle tour — drag­ging me along with them.

If that makes it sound like cycle tours aren’t great then it shouldn’t because they bloody well are. Get on one.

But what the thump­ing snot-burger have I been doing since? Well, in the 2.3 years in which I have not seen either Tom or Andy, I’ve par­ted brass-rags (PG Wode­house expres­sion) from said girl­friend; you’ll be ambi­val­ent to hear. Much more pos­it­ively, I spent a sum­mer car-touring for 4.5 months, explor­ing the length and breadth of Europe, delving into her cit­ies and peek­ing under her many col­our­ful skirts.

And, parent-pleasingly, in July I qual­i­fied as a primary school teacher, com­plet­ing (by the skin of my many remain­ing teeth) an absurdly demand­ing teacher train­ing course. Chil­dren, it turns out, are the future. I’ve had a wis­dom tooth removed (good Lord it was hell), watched my brother get mar­ried, and am agonisingly-slowly com­plet­ing two works of fic­tion. Amaz­ingly and amaz­ingly recently, I’ve have had some life-dreams come true (Neil Young and Radi­o­head in con­cert, a visit to Eel Pie Island, get­ting Richard Dawkins’ auto­graph, etc. etc.).

But, by now, Tom will be won­der­ing where on Earth I am going (as many of us have been won­der­ing about him), so I should cut to the chase and stop beat­ing about the bush, even if it is my bush; self-indulgently twiggy.

Cli­mate Change. Unless you’ve been else­where (tran­scend­ent­ally) then you’ve prob­ably heard of this phe­nom­ena. The sci­entific con­sensus is strong, the pro­jec­tions are wor­ry­ing, but the polit­ics is a little bit limp. I don’t want to talk about the evid­ence, nor deal with the den­iers. That’s all dealt with else­where (e.g. here, here, here, here and here).

Instead, I want to do two things with my remain­ing words: One — remind you all about the things YOU can do to make a dif­fer­ence. Two — share with you some of the very inter­est­ing ideas that are, to me, beacons of hope.

In a recent lec­ture at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics (avail­able as a pod­cast) Ed Miliband, brother to David, advoc­ated a social move­ment for cli­mate justice in the vein of slavery abol­i­tion, suf­fra­gettes, racial equal­ity etc. etc. Per­son­ally, I’ve been involved with Cli­mate Camp this year. If this is your thing – you want to kick up a big pub­lic fuss or do some out­reach work — then have a look-see at these (some­what rad­ical) organisations:

• climatecamp.org.uk
  This organ­isa­tion camps in cli­mate criminal’s back­yards fre­quently to do direct-action and to make lots of hub­bub about weak-kneed cli­mate policies and busi­ness as usual polit­ics. It is a large and grow­ing organ­isa­tion with a strong all-for-one atti­tude and a heavy social­ist agenda. It’s spec­tac­u­larly easy to get involved with this group — simply turn up to a meet­ing and get involved; their is no lead­er­ship. I’ve been involved, doing out­reach and help­ing at camps, includ­ing Tra­fal­gar Square.
• risingtide.org.uk
  Rising Tide UK is a net­work of groups and indi­vidu­als ded­ic­ated to tak­ing local action and build­ing a move­ment against cli­mate change
• www.stopclimatechaos.org
  The UK’s largest group of people ded­ic­ated to action on cli­mate change and lim­it­ing its impact on the world’s poorest com­munit­ies. Their com­bined sup­porter base of more than 11 mil­lion people spans over 100 organ­isa­tions, from envir­on­ment and devel­op­ment char­it­ies to uni­ons, faith, com­munity and women’s groups.
• www.climaterush.co.uk
  Cli­mate Rush is inspired by the actions of the Suf­fra­gettes 100 years ago, who showed that peace­ful civil dis­obedi­ence could inspire pos­it­ive change. They are a diverse group of women and men who are determ­ined to raise aware­ness and affect change, using ima­gin­at­ive methods.
• www.planestupid.com
  Plane Stu­pid is a net­work of grass­roots groups that take non viol­ent dir­ect action against avi­ation expansion..

If these aren’t your bag, and you’d rather heckle the gov­ern­ment and the cor­por­a­tions without throw­ing your­self at chain-link fences, scal­ing par­lia­ment­ary build­ings or dress­ing as a suf­fra­gette Innuit, then have a look-see at the below organ­isa­tions who need weight of num­bers and gen­er­ous dona­tions. These are the guys who need num­bers because they reg­u­larly lobby the gov­ern­ments of the world to act and to act NOW.

• foe.co.uk
• wwf.org.uk
• greenpeace.org
• oxfam.org
• christianaid.org

If you’d rather con­tact our lead­ers for yourselves, then may I sug­gest the following:

• theyworkforyou.com
• writetothem.com

Let them know what their voters are think­ing. Go on. Words in the right dir­ec­tion are more import­ant than actions…

Speak­ing of actions. If you’re inter­ested in trans­ition­ing your com­munity to a lower car­bon one the check this out:

• transitiontowns.org

And/or…

• carbontrust.co.uk

…for advice on chan­ging work­places, insti­tu­tions, estab­lish­ments to more sus­tain­able ones. Schools are vital, I think, or per­haps I’m biased.

And now. Finally. Here is a list of groups with ideas that need big­ger recog­ni­tion. These are my favour­ite organ­isa­tions right now. Long may they prosper.

• ecotricity.co.uk
  Fund a wind-turbine-filled future whilst pay­ing com­pet­it­ive rates for your electricity
• solar-aid.org
  Help poor com­munit­ies jump straight to solar worldwide
• www.yes2wind.com
  Pro­mote wind energy
• eattheseasons.co.uk
  Dis­cover which crops are grow­ing near you and when
• sandbag.co.uk
  Pay a small amount monthly for this char­ity to buy car­bon per­mits that they then des­troy, thus redu­cing the amount of ‘per­miss­ible’ emissions
• coolearth.org
  Pay this char­ity to pre­serve acres of rain­forest, or (for the smal­ler budget) indi­vidual trees (trees make excel­lent car­bon stor­age). Or pay them to provide poor com­munit­ies with the means to green sus­tain­ab­il­ity (sup­por­ted by David Atten­bor­ough and Ricky Gervais).
• www.solarcity.org
  Build a solar world
• theconvergingworld.org
  Fund renew­able energy pro­jects in India
• msc.org
  Pro­tect the oceans and buy your fish sus­tain­ably (look for their label)

And, if anim­als are your big thing (they are mine) then may I sug­gest this organisation:

• fauna-flora.org (sup­por­ted by Stephen Fry and David Attenborough)

I’ve tried to just give a cross-section of worth­while causes and dir­ec­tions for fur­ther research, which is by no means exhaust­ive. If any­one would like any more inform­a­tion or wants to dis­cuss any of the ideas I’ve presen­ted here then feel free to leave a com­ment or email me dir­ectly.

Some­times it’s easy to get very bogged down by the depress­ing stat­ist­ics and polit­ical fail­ures; I’d like to stress that I remain vehe­mently opi­tim­istic about humanity’s capa­city to solve this dilemma. If you’re at the right place, speak­ing with the right people, then you can start to believe that there’s enough people out there with their hearts and minds in the right places, who admon­ish greed and growth at the expense of the truly valu­able. I like to be amongst those people, des­pite not agree­ing with them on everything, because it’s import­ant to remem­ber that we’ve put these sys­tems in place and it is we who can do some­thing about them. Yes, there are enorm­ous chal­lenges, but they are polit­ical rather than tech­no­lo­gical or eco­nomic. As such, it requires that people lobby their respect­ive gov­ern­ments for change. If those gov­ern­ments don’t show cour­age and com­mit­ment don’t vote for them, cri­ti­cise them, build your own trans­ition com­munit­ies. I am for­tu­nate to live in coun­try with lead­ers that are press­ing for change, and that listen to the sci­ence. I hope that they mean it and I hope they are successful.

My apo­lo­gies that this may be very UK-centric. I hope and trust that all of these links will lead to inter­na­tional web pages or other groups.

Mark

P.S. Per­haps you’ll hear from me again…

…and maybe you will, if I suc­ceed in my ongo­ing email cam­paign to con­vince Mark to ditch Lon­don for a few weeks on the road in 2010!

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

• A Little Video About Cyc­ling In Yerevan
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