Ms Suzuki, why didn't we listen?

THis is fairly long, but what she has to say is profound for a 12 year-old. This speech would have the same impact today, with the same problems seemingly even larger. We need to find some way to deal with our society's greed, to re-establish community and find touch with our empathy again. We need to alter western society's structure, so that fiscal wealth is not our sole vision of happiness (a vision ably provided by the advertising world), but that happiness can be found through community, love and fairness.
Should we aim to alter society's structure from the top, or the bottom? How do we get to where we all, deep down, want to be? Where on earth do I start?

I freakin LOVE bamboo

I love Bamboo. Seriously. It even sounds cool when you say it. BamBOO! BAM!boo. Awesome.
My favourite floors are made from bamboo, it looks absolutely gorgeous, and is so damn sturdy. My ma has the most excellent chopping board made from it. Some of my fellow queenslanders are making beautiful furniture from it (http://www.wambamboo.com.au). It makes great paper, and now one of my friends tells me she has a bamboo cotton jumper! BAMBOO COTTON!

It makes me wonder why we chop down gorgeous, mature trees when we can use this totally renewable stuff. It grows like crazy. It's beautiful. Vive la Bamboo.

Sweet hydro ride

If I had kids, they would so be getting this sweet Hydro-powered toy car for xmas!

It apparently runs on clean energy hydro technology, using "a next-generation reversible Polymer Electrolyte Membrane fuel cell". I want to own that sentence, let alone a person-sized version of this sweet machine.

Do we really need to eat all this meat?

Sir Paul McCartney has recently highlighted a pretty big issue: that the livestock sector is worse for the environment than the transport sector. A recent united nations report found the sector generates a full 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Here are the scary bits:

» 70% of the Amazon forest has been turned to grazing for beef

» Livestock use 30% of the planet's surface

» Livestock emit 65% of our nitrous oxide output 

(nitrous oxide is 296 times worse than CO2 for global warming)

Even just going one day a week without meat would help. Not to mention the benefits to health and to the incredible cruelty of the meat industry. I still eat a little bit of meat, but I feel a bit guilty every time I do. I have pledged with a friend to go back to full vegetarianism on January 1, but I might secretly start now.

Equation for action on climate change

He waffles a bit, but makes a good argument