Environmental

Today is Earth Day, as Google, Moleskine and other companies are reminding us of. Earth Day is an opportunity to think about how to reduce our carbon footprint and ecological impact. 

Sigg recently began to sell aluminium water bottles that are made entirely from recycled aluminium. Instead of encouraging us to recycle our old bottles, they have skipped a step, and now make their bottles from recycled aluminium directly. 

It takes five uses of a recycled Sigg water bottle for the carbon footprint to be offset. Amortising the cost of a bottle takes about 30 litres, so theoretically thirty days if you drink one litre per day.  

My usual loop is around 30 kilometres but for the last two bike rides I have extended them, to reach 50-60 kilometres respectively.  I cover this distance in about two, to two and a half, hours. Cycling is good at the moment because plenty of people are on holidays so the roads feel safer as there are fewer commuters on the roads. 

View of the Jura and fields

Northern Exposure is a series about a doctor who finds himself sent to Alaska to be a doctor for a few years. He thinks that it is the middle of nowhere and he has to adapt from enjoying life as a New Yorker to life as a frontier town doctor.  

Early colza in the Canton of Vaud

Although the series is thirty plus years old it still remains relevant today with its exploration of global warming, pollution and more. The characters have existential conversations and in a few episodes we meet the man living in a geodesic dome. He lives in the dome to avoid pollution. He is allergic to aluminium, methane gas and more. 

Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.

This risk of drought is recognised. The RTS wrote about how people are getting water tanks, due to the regularity of droughts. The problem is so bad that aside from the article about people buying water tanks to store their own rain water there is another one speaking about how the underground water table is at risk. “Il faudrait donc qu’il pleuve quasiment non-stop jusqu’à fin mars pour que les nappes phréatiques retrouvent leur niveau normal”. It would need to rain non-stop for two weeks for the water tables to find their required levels.

I am going for a run and a walk three times a week at the moment. The run is set by the Garmin Coach and the walk is set by the route I have chosen to use on that specific day. By running the first part of my daily walk I increase my fitness, according to Strava, Sports Tracker and one or two other apps.

At the same time by running, rather than walking these routes I am saving time. A walk that would usually take ten minutes per kilometre is cut down to seven, or less. The runs have gone from 1.6 km, to 2.4 to 3.2 and more. As the runs get longer so the distance I cover increases, and so the daily walk distance takes less time, as it is run instead. The aim is still to run 5km comfortably, not to increase the distance beyond 5k, for now.

I go for walks, runs or bike rides every single day, whether it’s rainy, windy, snowy or a heatwave. As a result of this I often walk along routes where mud forms. Sometimes I come home from walks and my shoes are spotless, thanks either to a drought, or paradoxically due to the rain.

Recently we had snow and it was cold so my shoes were relatively clean. I could come home, stomp a few times and my shoes would be clean. Other times, like the last two days I have found that the mud is sticky and hard to remove. It’s dry enough to behave like clay, rather than mud. It gets stuck between the studs that stop you from slipping. I tried skewers, running water, snow banks and most recently a brush that I keep in the post box, in the locked section. I don’t want to come home and find that the brush has been stolen.

Switzerland is living under the illusion that the pandemic is over. If you look at the data on the RTS website and other sources of information such as Cotrack - Grafana then the pandemic is over. The number of new cases has gone done so if you look at the metrics then it is over.

There is a good chance that this is an illusion, demonstrated in three ways. The first of these is the number and saturation of hospitals now, with many of them overloaded and in a situation of crisis. The second indicator that things are not fine is the increased mortality for years, at this point. The third indicator is that people with COVID compromised immune systems might have stopped testing positive for COVID but there is a lag between when someone stops testing positive for COVID and when their immune system has fully recovered from the disease, able to combat other illnesses that would otherwise have little or no effect.

Yesterday we had a snowy day. I saw that the snow was beginning to pile up so I went and cleared the snow for fun. I could have left it as it was but I saw an opportunity to have some weight training, for free.

I regret that I didn’t set a fitness tracker to track the snow shovelling as weight training. It took a while and I got at least 2500 steps out of it, but as I wasn’t counting this as a workout the calories burned was counted differently. If I clear snow again I will track it properly.

Recently I have tried growing potatoes and onions. I had flower pots left over, dormant after basil plants died. I often try to keep Basil plants growing but they have a terrible tendency to die. The easiest plant for me to grow has been an orchid that I have had for as long as the apartment in which I live. All I did was give it water, and that was enough. I would repot it but I am afraid that will kill it.

There are times when I listen to two or three hours of podcasts a day and I learn from them. I usually listen when I am cooking and when I am walking. For several weeks now I have hardly listened to any podcasts. This is for three reasons.

The first of these is that I spend two to four hours studying a day, so when I go for my walk I think I have listened to the point of saturation and now I’m ready for a change of ideas. Recently whilst walking I spent days reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum and I learned a lot about the Gulag, about its history, it’s pervasiveness in society and more. I also learned about some of the cruelties that people did not try to stop. Cruelties such as the mass rape of women on prisoner ships.