GreenAsh

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Thoughts filed in: Environment

The bicycle-powered home

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The exercise bike has been around for decades now, and its popularity is testament to the great ideas that it embodies. Want to watch TV in your living room, but feeling guilty about being inside and growing fat all day? Use an exercise bike, and you can burn up calories while enjoying your favourite on-screen entertainment. Feel like some exercise, but unable to step out your front door due to miserable weather, your sick grandma who needs taking care of, or the growing threat of fundamentalist terrorism in your neighbourhood streets? Use an exercise bike, and you can have the wind in your hair without facing the gale outside. Now, how about adding one more great idea to this collection. Want to contribute to clean energy, but still enjoy all those watt-guzzling appliances in your home? Use an electricity-generating exercise bike, and you can become a part of saving the world, by bridging the gap between your quadriceps and the TV. It may seem like a crazy idea, only within the reach of long-haired pizza-eating DIY enthusiasts; but in fact, pedal power is a perfectly logical idea: one that's available commercially for home use by anyone, as well as one that's been adopted for large and well-publicised community events.

You're part of this world... aren't you?

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For the past century, humanity has fallen into the habit of wreaking ever-more serious havoc upon the natural environment, and of conveniently choosing to ignore any and all side-effects that this behaviour may entail. Our daily lives are a crazy black comedy of blindness: each of us is like a blind butcher who carves up his customers, thinking that they're his animal meats; or like a blind man in his house, who thinks he's outside enjoying a breeze, when he's actually feeling the blizzard blowing in through his bedroom window. Finally, however, more and more people are taking off the blindfold, and realising that they do actually exist in this world, and that closing the window isn't the answer to stopping that breeze from getting warmer.

The river without a river-bed

All things in nature are like a river: they flow from their source, down their long-established river-bed, until they reach their destination; they then journey until they once again reach their source, and so the cycle continues. Is humanity a river that has run astray of its river-bed, and that now follows its own course, for better or for worse?