'The Independent' has moved offices. No difference for you, but for us hacks who toiled for years in the concrete wasteland of South Quay, in the tatty outskirts of Canary Wharf, on the windswept backwater that is east London's Isle of Dogs, it's nothing short of life-changing. Where once we worked on a road whose brightest outlets included NatWest and a branch of Office Angels, we have now shipped due west across the capital to High Street Kensington, home to things called restaurants, shops, parks and real people. I can only imagine the feeling is like that of early Italian settlers sailing into Manhattan past the Statue of Liberty. Well, almost.
When it comes to environmental sustainability, the prognosis is grim: Britain is "winning battles, but still losing the war".
Last week I blithely ended my column by saying that to be fashionably ethical what we need to do is to buy fewer clothes.
A new lightweight hydrogen-powered car, capable of speeds up to 50mph, was shown off in London today.
Picture a fluorescent-lit barn of a supermarket, marooned in an ocean of a car park, staffed by listless 19-year-old part-timers, its shelves crammed with groceries packaged to within an inch of their irradiated lives. Wait a minute, you don't have to picture this at all ? there's a supermarket near you just like that, isn't there? Well, shoppers, it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the future of the supermarket is already here; the problem is that it's 5,300 miles away under a motorway flyover in California.
It's silent, it's pollution free, it's nippy, and it'll get you round town for £2,500 a year, fuel and maintenance included. So, is it the car of the future? Maybe.
When I started the Green Belt Movement [an NGO that combats deforestation by training rural Kenyan women to plant trees] in 1977, I was starting a small project. But it moved from one step to another. We've since planted more than 30 million trees [earning Maathai a Nobel Prize]. It's been very surprising.
There's a lot about Finisterre that seems too good to be true. The British surf-clothing company, proud owner of a stack of ethical and environmental awards, has a sickeningly wholesome image. With product descriptions that read like Greenpeace guidelines and a website full of lifestyle photos of the team (plus dogs), smiling and leaning against a battered Land Rover, it all looks alarmingly idyllic.
Sweden has friggebods, New Zealand's are known as "bachs". To Canadians, they're simply cabins. Call them what you want, but these small hideaways in the wilds have had a recent green makeover thanks to advances in prefabrication techniques and renewable- energy technology. Few of us can justify a second home when resources ? financial and environmental ? are in short supply, but these six modular marvels, the best designs from around the world, make the idea of buying a parcel of thinking space somewhere beautifully uninhabitable, much more reasonable.
"When I was a kid, growing up in wartime London," says David Bellamy, "there were butterflies everywhere." Clouds of African butterflies have been back in Britain this May, reminding us of what we have lost. Several million Painted Ladies dropped in from Morocco for a summer stint in our green and pleasant gardens, providing a tantalising glimpse of the riches of the past.
The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban ? a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.
The garden of Eden is a beautiful place. "There is great history here," says Robert "Bertie" Eden of his adopted home in the South of France, looking out over rolling hills bright with shades of green and yellow. In this wide landscape, framed by distant black mountains, only one village rises up from the fields on a mound, still medieval with its tightly clustered sandstone homes and single, square church tower. But the history is also in the fields. Look closer and they are filled with rows of what look like black, gnarled hands, twisting up from the soil. These are the vines.
It's over a year since I drove past a little bike shop in Sussex and popped in for some socks. About an hour later I had the socks. And a new pair of shoes. Oh, and a gleaming new roadbike worth £2,000. I've cherished my Trek Madone, with its blue carbon frame and wispy wheels, but last week I was reminded of the perils of the impulse buy ? my companion over hundreds of miles is completely wrong for me.
Chargrilled asparagus and lemon tart ? that's the vegetarian menu for a glamorous cast of musicians, actors, writers and artists starting a mass movement today to limit meat eating and combat climate change.
What began as a fringe movement among Sixties peace activists and left wing campaigners has become a mainstay of the mainstream, with greenerati encompassing world leaders, eminent scientists and Hollywood film stars.
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