Today I was given another shot of hope. I went along to Blackheath Golf Club again to talk to the manager and staff about the golf club becoming organic and growing food as part of Blackheath’s food security for the future. They were all really amenable to the idea and the manager gave me a copy of this month’s Club Life which is full of articles about the stewardship role of clubs and how they need to work with communities and tackle issues of sustainability! There was even an interview with Tim Flannery. Yeeha. Pat, my permaculture teacher also came along and provided suggestions and we were thrilled to discover that Blackheath Golf Course uses 15% less chemicals than all Sydney Golf Courses and that water in the creek, when tested, is cleaner than when it came in … it’s clean enough to drink. The staff were fantastic … they are keen to do anything in their power and are providing me with a list of all the nut trees they can plant. I’ll source advanced trees through community donations and we’ll have them planted this winter. They’re keen to do organic food gardens around the restaurant, they’re putting in water grants to harvest water, they’re changing over lightbulbs and showerheads (next week with our Give Your
School A Solar Panel Project), they’re going to set up composting and recycling and down the track are prepared to do whatever it takes to become the cleanest greenest golf course in the land … oops, its starting to sound like a fairy tale. Pat was really impressed by the great conference room too so we’re already thinking of courses and lectures that we can plan to hold there.
On the personal front my best friend is turning 60 tomorrow and I’ve been racking my brains over what to get her. Decided to go to the local Antique Centre and find something she would have loved over 50 years ago … and I’m not telling what it is in case she’s reading this blog. Suffice it to say that it’s fantastic, really meaningful and because it’s “old” its obviously another example of adaptive reuse. There are so many wonderful things in secondhand and antique shops that you could satisfy all your needs there without putting huge demands on the world’s resources. And imagine how much we’d keep out of landfill. Home Depot and Ikea furniture, for example, are the main destination for the illegally logged timber that China takes out of Russia … and who knows where all the illegally logged teak from Burma goes. It’s easy to blame China but they wouldn’t have anywhere near the market they do if consumers in Australia and America started recycling furniture or even, shock horror, if everyone just decided to agitate not renovate!
Speaking of agitating, I’ve spent hours blogging again and commenting on blogs about global warming …. ah, activism lying in a warm cosy bed while the wind howls outside (yes, you guessed it, I spoke to soon about the weather being unseasonably warm yesterday … winter has arrived!)