My nine year old daughter loves puzzles. She's got a book full of them, including some of those where you have to follow a jumbled thread to see which bird eats which food. If life were like that, all we'd have to do is follow the thread to find our answers.
Yeh, but, no but - I hear you cry. Drop the false Essex accent and trust me when I say life can sometimes be that simple. We all get stuck in our bunkers or 'silos' to use a bit of management speak. However, I want you cast off your preconceptions and look afresh at the world.
Consider a UK Government that imposes a 2.5% target for all road fuel sold at our garages to be from biofuels by 15 April, extending to 5% by 2010. Now think where all that fuel will come from. Can UK farmers grow it? Many of them would have to stop what they're growing now to do it. Maybe we just buy it in from abroad instead and transport it here? Evidence to date shows that vast acres of land are being ravaged to create space to grow biofuels. This destroys the homes of wildlife, pushing some species close to extinction. You can see where it leads can't you. It doesn't matter how tangled that thread becomes, the links are still there. So I can only assume that the Department for Transport is so focused on reducing emissions that they haven't considered the knock-on effects of pushing biofuels over crude oil. It's knitting the threads while home farm burns.
My children are doing more to reduce emissions by unplugging the telly after watching a programme, not leaving the tap running when they brush their teeth or putting on a jumper instead of turning up the heating of an evening. Simple but effective actions. You can help demonstrate just how effective simple actions can be this week.
This Wednesday evening at 6pm we're launching E-Day. It's a real chance to see minute by minute what a difference we can all make by switching stuff off. Everything except your battery or solar powered laptop. You'll need that to see on our dedicated website how demand for energy falls as we all switch stuff off. E-Day, or energy saving day, begins with a candle-lit vigil at St Paul's Cathedral on Wednesday evening and we're urging people to keep electricity consumption down as much as possible for a mere twenty-four hours.
Consider your actions on E-Day as a seed that you're sowing now that will germinate and grow in to a mighty unstoppable green monster. A hulking beast of a monster with special powers to untangle government policy threads using magical knitting needles. We'll call it Ethel. Ethel will lead us into a brave new world where land is used to support the earth's inhabitants sustainably. A world where all government policies are linked together effectively, without threatening the wildlife we saved from the carbon age.
After cleansing your conscience you can switch a few things back on, but do try to remember to switch stuff off again after you've used it. Then this weekend you switch everything off and come and visit us at One Life Live at Olympia to discover what else you can do to improve your life. Ethel, the policy-detangling beast, will not be there.