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Tag Archives | sustainable

Meet your meat

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You might question whether Sonya Blan is qualified to write about meat, being vegan and all. But Sonya has a long past with meat-eating, and she wants to share what she found. Whether you’re the kind who likes strips of bacon on your veal sandwich, or you eat an organic, free-range chicken but once a fortnight, if you haven’t already – meet your meat. 

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How to get off the grid with solar energy

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It’s now more achievable than ever to go “off the grid”. In the sustainability world, going off-grid means becoming self-sufficient power-wise, independent of the mainstream energy system, and severing your ties with fossil fuel electricity, in some cases making money along the way by feeding power back into the gridEven if you don’t own your own home, more options for home solar are now available, thanks largely to recent developments in battery technology.

Michael Mobbs of Sustainable House owns what is arguably Australia’s first truly sustainable home. In this post, he takes you through his solar set-up, reviews the performance of his gear, and makes recommendations.

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Voting with your dollar: Otter’s guide to boycotts

By Tony Ryan. 

We owe the word “boycott” to Charles C Boycott, but Charles didn’t stage the first boycott in history, or popularise the practice – he copped the boycott that gave boycotting its name. An English landowner in Ireland, Boycott was economically shunned by his entire community in 1880 after he evicted tenants who couldn’t pay.

[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Boycotts can be personal affairs, as with my own (mostly) steadfast refusal to eat fast food (12 years running, if you don’t count one regrettable, alcohol-soaked lapse).[/pullquote]

Charles may have been incensed that his name was borrowed that way, and, being an old-timey member of the landed class, he may have been the kind of bloke to be equally angered that boycotting caught on as a popular mode of activism – the most popular form, if you ask George Monbiot. Since Charles’s day, boycotts, mass refusals to patronise a company – or even a whole country – on the grounds of its behaviour, have been many and various: they’re prompted by concerns ranging from animal welfare and workers’ rights to environmental degradation. They can be well organised, as with the famous Delano Grape Strike of the ’60s, in which over 14 million Americans refused to eat grapes produced by the labour of underpaid workers in the States, or they can peter out with a whimper. They can span hemispheres and beyond, as has the decades-long fight over Nestlé’s sales of baby formula to developing countries, and they can be personal affairs, as with my own (mostly) steadfast refusal to eat fast food (12 years running, if you don’t count one regrettable, alcohol-soaked lapse).

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