DIYtastic!

I've recently got really hooked on green living ideas, OK I was already feeling rather pleased with myself over my jams and soap-making, but now I'm getting completely sucked in, making it yourself is so much fun! This is all since I stumbled on a pattern for rag rugs on a great website the Little House in the Suburbs(LHITS), they have a huge array of easy home sustainability tips, and just recently they've published a great book. Last week I made my own home-made deodorant stick (beats stuffing aluminium in your pores) and talc, now I'm thinking a bit more about making my own cleaning products rather buying the seriously toxic stuff from the store - our septic system drains into the garden just meters from the sea, so it's worth considering. I made cream-cheese over the week-end and have a host of other interesting projects to mull over like bee-keeping and goat milking, and why not a mud-brick home with lime rendering while we're at it!

Baby steps!

It's been two months now since Rurutu started collecting recyclables to send on to Tahiti, for eventual recycling, we now have our own green bins. It's a small but significant step for us, a result of the mayor's office's efforts and a little bit of pressure from our association. Every time the cargo boat arrived you saw it unloading crates of bottled water and fizzy drinks, but the rubbish stayed here and was either being buried or burnt, quite simply unsustainable on a tiny island like ours! Now we just need to convince people to use the green bins!

Where are they now? Amy

Amy now lives in Nottingham, she and Dave have just bought a house and are busy renovating.

Amy is working for Nottingham University as a Community Scientist on the OPAL (Open Air Laboratory) project. Which aims to get people aware of the natural environment and improve peoples' skills in naming and classifying common organisms.

Amy and Dave were at our wedding. Dave put together our truly excellent wedding video, pretty much single-handedly, and Amy was one of my blue ladies! Since that memorable day Amy's been on an expedition to the Antarctic.

In August 2008 she and Dave got married, and I was able to be there as a matron of honor, it was a really beautiful occasion (see blog entry). So she's keeping busy!

Where are they now? Mandy

Continuing on with news of my maids of honor.......

Mandy's had an exciting few years - after leaving Bowling Green, in 2008, she headed to India, where she traveled through the Gujarat region, working in environmental education. It's wonderful to be able to follow just a few of her adventures and thoughts on her blog.

Now she's back in the UK, training to become a teacher of the International Baccalaureate.

In August she heads to Thailand to a dream job at Patana School, the British International School in Bangkok. What an amazing life!

Journée de la Mer

The day after the tsunami was international Ocean Day! Our environmental association put on a display of posters and went into the local schools to talk about why it's important to protect our oceans, we also had Elie and Frere Maxime here with us to help spread the word, they are environmental activists from Tahiti and are here to help us get the ball rolling.
In particular, we're concerned about the whales here in Rurutu, French Polynesia is one of the few places where you can actually swim with whales, and as Rurutu is particularly well blessed with whales, the island attracts a fair number of visitors who come especially for the whales, but the activity is not regulated (or at least the rules are not enforced). It's both important from an economic and an environmental perspective to protect the whales, to insure that they continue to return to our waters, year after year. This year has been a rather disappointing year for the whales, they weren't so numerous and kept leaving for several days at a time - this coincides with heavy work being carried out on our harbor, it seems quite likely that the vibrations caused by the pneumatic drills could have scared the whales. Likewise the fact that the whaleboats themselves do not respect the rules of approach (you should cut your motor at 50m distance and never approach within 30m), they often approach the whales to within a few meters without cutting the motor, which is a great experience for the visitor, but could easily be upsetting our whales. But as no one really monitors the whales, we don't really know why some years are better than others.

World Earth Day!

Help celebrate UNEP World Earth Day - take a moment to think about your environment, and in particular try to adopt a few simple gestures (conserve, reuse, recycle) that conserve energy or just make the planet a better place to live in!

Here in Rurutu we have our own little battle going on with the local authorities - the Works department are putting down a cement road in our little community, and are mercilessly hacking the vegetation at the side of the road as well as illegally extracting sand from the beach to make the cement, which will eventually impact our shorelines as well as making ugly holes in the beach,

the local district has also been 'clearing' overhanging vegetation along the side of the road leading between our village and the next.

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....while I can understand that they need wood for a lime oven, there are more respectful ways of obtaining it, aside from being an eyesore it is extremely irresponsible to cut all these beautiful old trees, as this will certainly increase soil erosion and runoff into the lagoon.....

Think global act local

Today we headed up into the mountains here in Rurutu, with the committee members of our new society, 'Association Te Aru Ora' which aims to protect and promote respect for our environment. Getting this society going has probably been one of the most satisfying achievements of my time in Rurutu, so far. So many people were sitting around voicing their concerns about many issues on the island, but without actually doing anything about it, it was just a question of getting everybody to sit down together and agree that something needs to be done. So, in July we had our first 'unofficial' meeting and since then we've been working on getting registered and official! Now we can start planning our first fund-raising and outreach projects. We have A LOT of work to do here in Rurutu, the islands' population is growing, as is the appetite that the community has for imported foods and electrical goods - but we don't have any good way to deal with our waste. At the moment we are using landfills, but on small island like ours landfills are not a solution, we seriously risk contaminating our drinking water supply, and quite simply there is not enough room. Burning is also a possibility, though again hardly environmentally sound. Increasingly we've been seeing bags of rubbish and broken cars or washing-machines dumped by the side of the road or off the edge of steep cliffs, which is really sad, as the inhabitants of Rurutu have always been so very proud of how clean and tidy their island is. In the past the to'itu (committee of elders) regulated these kinds of things, but as we've become more developed and westernized the committee holds less and less sway with the community. One of our big projects is to get a recycling program going - part of our problem is that it's really not that easy to figure out the best thing to do with all of our rubbish, we can't recycle paper, plastic, glass or aluminium, which accounts for a huge proportion of the waste in our landfills, or at least not at the moment. While it will never be economically viable for us to recycle here in Rurutu, it's probably worth the expense not to be swimming in our own garbage! The great thing about living in a small close-knit community on a small island is that it's actually very easy to change things (for better or worse!), so I'm hoping that with a bit of support from the mayor we can get things moving. Once we've started to recycle the obvious bits and pieces the next step would be to reuse our organic waste, by starting a composting program, at the same time to also try and reduce the needless use of chemical fertilizers, which again risks polluting our drinking water and lagoon.....
Anyway today we went up into the mountains, to discuss the possibilities of establishing a managed natural area, around our highest mountain ridge - including Manureva (below far left), the highest peak in Rurutu, a whopping 384m high! It's beautiful up there, and we were all buoyed up by our great intentions to get things moving......only time will tell.......