Thank you For Supporting Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical in 2022!
I hope your experience has been at least half as good as putting it together has been for me
Dear Human of Planet Earth,
I just wanted to shout out a great big thank you for supporting With Love, Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical.
This newsletter will be eight months old this month. With just 22 subscribers I’ve had 551 visits, and as a writer with no dedicated following, producing sometimes just 1 or 2 newsletters a month, I’m really pleased, grateful and encouraged.
So thank you all, whether you’ve just subscribed or been reading all along; whether you skim quickly, read occasionally or pore over your newsletter with sober and deep regard.
Has the newsletter been what you expected? Has it been useful? Has it been surprising? Has it got you doing or thinking about things differently? Have you found any of the books or podcasts I’ve recommended helpful? Come across previously unheard-of businesses you might consider visiting for the first time?
I can say one thing for sure:
Writing has reduced my climate anxiety. Either that, or my palpitations are less frequent due to peri-menopausal hormonal changes I can only speculate upon.
But is my writing of With Love, Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical meaningful work? Or an indulgent form of public therapy, stored on servers that probably don’t run on green energy?
Only you can tell me if my newsletter is meaningful to you and in what ways.
And only I can tell you, dear reader, what it’s meant for me.
It’s helped keep me more focused on the work around climate and sustainability, work that’s taking place everywhere at once, even while others toil to undermine it.
It’s helped me shift away from the superficial drone of the 24-hour news cycle to seek out more inspiring and constructive discussions.
It’s pushed me to look things up so I can report them accurately to you - as when I asked myself questions about hair extensions.
And it’s helped me create resources I can come back to. When I wanted to send a friend flowers with a low carbon footprint, I clicked on this newsletter to guide myself to the website I needed.
I end up wading into deep waters that are fascinating, but still too confusing for me to confidently write about.
I find myself much less consumed by the energy of grief, and more engaged in action and hope.
Celebrating my small actions in 2022 with you!
Small actions don’t replace the need for systemic change but they help set the mood and make our calls for systemic change more credible.
And on that note, here are my small wins for 2022, new habits I’ve been able to make stick, habits I started working on before committing to this newsletter:
I’ve switched from liquid soap to bar soap for hand washing, reducing the plastic packaging our household adds to our plastic recycling each week.
I’ve switched from liquid detergent to powdered detergent in a cardboard box for the same reason.
Why? Because I believe paper packaging has higher odds of being recycled than hard plastic packaging.
The switch took me back to previous practice, because I’d used bar soap and powdered detergent quite happily for years, till various marketing forces swayed me towards more popular consumer habits.
For the first time in 2022, I thought about whether my clothes were shedding micro-plastics every time I put them in the washing machine. Besides experimenting with buying second-hand, I weighed up the environmental friendliness of fabric choice when I bought a few new pieces.
I was surprised to find a new pair of dungarees bought from an up-market (though not high end or luxury brand) retailer was actually made from re-used material!
I’ve been more diligent about getting left-over food sitting in the fridge eaten. Someone else’s leftover porridge is the one thing I’m unwilling to eat the next day. The first and last time I tried looked like this:
I’ve been tracking my petrol use and mileage in an effort to inspire me to drive less and less. My ambition to take the bus for the morning school-run has been thwarted by a change to the school’s start time, along with increased traffic. Leaving at 7:50 to catch the bus used to guarantee we’d be very early. Now it might leave us anxious about getting in for 8:30.
As long as I can get my hands on them, I use bio-degradable bags rather than re-using plastic grocery bags as bin-bags.
I’ve started bagging my soft plastics and bringing them into Tesco Purley’s collection for recycling. I can thank my next-door neighbour’s efforts during Lockdown for training me in that new habit.
I’ve switched to Wuka Wear for my peri-menopausally less predictable ‘monthlies’.
Here’s where I hope to do better next year:
Start to grow our own kitchen herbs, hopefully a habit that will extend into growing other things.
Take the bus on mornings for the school run and not just some afternoons a week, if we can be sure to be on time with a 7:50 departure.
Use my phone and social media more mindfully, so as not to waste energy.
Confession. I never went door-knocking for XR in the end
In 2022 I attended a few Extinction Rebellion online meetings for the first time. I resolved to be part of their 3.5 project in Croydon. But my resolve soon fell away when faced with the reality of the commitment required. I’d have had to take the lead in organising the whole thing myself. Two hours a week felt like what I could spare, as part of an organised group.
If I had to do the recruiting and organising from scratch, I felt sure I’d need to give it 2-3 hours a day.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or woman. But I guess the woman wasn’t me. The hour is surely here though.
Don’t get me wrong. Croydon has lots of active XR members. They’re active in meaningful projects and maybe I can tell you more about those in 2023, but we’ll need new members who don’t already have their hands full if we’re going to run a 3.5 project here in Croydon.
So, what was the 3.5 project about anyway?
3.5 is based on some social science evidence that we need 3.5% of people to be actively engaged in an issue to move towards a tipping point where change can happen.
3.5 is about having doorstep conversations with our fellow citizens, then inviting them to a meeting to really wake them up to just where we are (not XR but all of us humans), in the climate emergency. And then asking us to join XR to help in whatever way they can.
There’s room for everyone in XR.
Most of us aren’t, would you believe it, in the business of bravely getting arrested and sentenced for the cause of humanity.
And some of us, I hear you say, won’t even drop our usual routines for a few months to dedicate themselves to raising awareness of the Sixth Extinction that’s well underway!
Ah well, I’m guilty as charged.
Even so, this newsletter is part of my effort to educate and agitate.
Allow me to ask you good readers, how am I doing?
Wishing everyone a Christmas (or a holiday season if you don’t do Christmas), exactly the way you’d have it. and a beautiful and inspired start to your 2023!
With Love,
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical,
Croydon,
London,
That patch of earth known today as the United Kingdom
Lat +51.51 Long, -0.118
Curious about ‘Compostable vs Bio-Degradable’ assurances or ‘Wuka Wear Period Pants’? Here’s some reading to help with that:
Look for the ‘compostable symbol’ on your bags BioBag | BioBag