 Another Saturday is here , and as some of you who follow my media know already , I have been on far away island (far in terms of distance but also far from reality and ‘normal society’) for the past week....
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 The other day I had a lapsus.
I was talking to a friend and said ‘the new ministry for economic transition’ while I meant to say ‘ecological transition’. Yes, in Italy we now have this new ministry (also France and Spain have one) - charged with the big task of spending recovery fund money destined toward the green policies (which happen to be quite a lot).. so you may forgive my lapsus, but it is evident that this is as much ecological as it is economical. To achieve ecological transition it is necessary to do some tactical economical moves. No doubt about it..  This week saw another ‘Earth day’ coming and going .
My social medias were full of great words and pledges and I myself have taken part in some ‘on the day’ activism (aka plogging and collecting quite a lot of trash in just two hours by the beach , mainly cigarette butts , cigarette boxes and sweets wrappers ...) . But I am definitely worried about the ‘carefreeness’ coming packed together with having a lot of influencers showing some positive messages of hope for the planet.  I have a confession to make:
I still haven’t watched ‘Seaspiracy’ And I don’t think I will. Simply put: I don’t have Netflix, my closest family and bubble doesn’t have it either and there is a pandemic on so, no ‘Netflix and chill’ recommendable.. If I could just buy or rent it, I would, but subscribing? No thanks.  10 selfies = 1 tree
This is what a recent 'promoted post' that came out on my feed this week stated I admit, this prompted a little 'mea culpa' as I went scrolling on my feed to calculate how many trees I should go out to plant (answer: quite a few...). Now. This also prompted some research into the effect of our social usage, and sharing (over sharing?) on emissions and climate..  Never like this year we have relied so much on online shopping , and I have already spoken about this so I will avoid redundancy..
But it is inevitable, especially these days, to look in greater details at one aspect of this: the transport of goods, and in particular shipping.  Today I would like to touch on a delicate topic
Cleaning and washing Have we become obsessed with it? Do we really need to use as much soaps? And I don’t even want to touch on the antibacterial overuse. I understand that we are scared of covid and I do see the point of keeping up with our hygiene when we go out touching things that many others have touched especially when in a global pandemic But if we ignore for a minute the global situation that we find ourselves in (go on, allow yourself that pleasure), do we really need to shower daily (and even multiple times) with lots of soap and shampoo?  We had the 10 fun facts about mussels before and wouldn’t want the oysters to be feeling left out . Plus, oysters will soon become my new study species and decided to give you a little insight into why they are cool (need to start a new #oystersarecool to accompany the #musselsarecool which I recommend you to follow if you are on Twitter)
 Last week I attended (online) the world ocean summit week organised by The Economist . Amongst many interesting talks about blue carbon, offsetting and other more economical issues , there were various debates on the future of fisheries and Aquaculture. Yes, because fish is something we came to rely on. We have a per capita consumption of fish of 20 kg per year. About 50 g a day, or approximately a sardine , if we each ate it daily. Which doesn’t sound like necessarily a lot if we think about individual consumption, but these values were an average computed by taking all of the world population. Some will eat more , some much less. But this is the average so you would need to multiply it for the however many billions that human population is, and you can see that is unsustainable if we don’t want to fish everything that is in the sea out. This is where aquaculture comes in handy . And aquaculture has suffered from a bad rep - it has been portrayed as something that keeps fish in bad conditions overcrowded , prone to illnesses , full of antibiotic, over fed, with negative impacts on the surrounding environment due to the high amount of organic material deposited . It has also been portrayed as something that creates a lot of waste . All in all - not great! But this may be an old portray. Why not try to paint a new one?  This weekend last year I was up in the mountains . I remember so well thinking they couldn’t lock people in . What were those rumours? So we went for our weekend adventure .
Then Sunday afternoon my father’s call. ‘Where are you?’ ‘On the bus getting home, coming back from a beautiful hike’ ‘you know you shouldn’t be out of the council borders right ?’. And so it began. One year of this different life One year in which our habits have shifted, some for the better some for the worse . Let’s start with bad news getting them out of the way |
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Photos used under Creative Commons from marcoverch, Pascal Volk, shixart1985
