Afristar (along with Seed and funding partners) have produced a great series of 13 permaculture posters that every household, school or greening ngo should definitely not be without.

The posters cover key permaculture concepts or techniques, from making compost, keeping worms, recycling greywater et. al to talking stick circles! The illustration is superbly detailed, eye catching yet conveys the message simply - a picture tells a thousand words.

The posters are free to social welfare and educational organisations, otherwise they cost R 60 each incl postage. The planting calendars are available in a laminated retail version for R 80 incl postage.

Check out the entire set of posters on or .

Here is the list of posters available (comments by urban sprout). Contact Afristar for more details.

Companion planting
Lists the good companions (plants that have a positive effect, like increasing the yield or deterring pests) and bad

Ron Mader: Responsible Tourism in Cities mini-conferenceKudos to Responsible Tourism Cape Town for recording and streaming their Responsible Tourism in Cities Mini-Conference on Fri 6 May ahead of the Tourism Indaba hosted in Durban.

I tuned in for a few of the sessions and found Ron Mader's presentation, Why We Suck @ Collaboration, especially worthwhile.

Ron is based in Oaxaca, Mexico and started a responsible tourism website - planeta.com - back in 1994. Ron Mader visited SA to be part of Friday's Responsible Tourism in Cities mini conference.

In his talk Ron provided some examples of FAILed collaboration - with accompanying images of

Peace demonstrators hold a rainbow peace flag in Venezia Square, Rome, 15 Feb 2003.: One million ordinary people gathered to protest the US led war on Iraq.Need to create more peace in your life and the world surrounding you? I thought this was a great list:

1. Be generous with your smiles.
2. Commit daily acts of kindness.
3. Respect the Earth.
4. Walk in a forest.
5. Plant a tree.
6. Contemplate a mountain.
7. Don't pollute.
8. Live simply.
9. Skip a meal each week, and donate to an organization helping the hungry.
10. Erase a border in your mind.
11. Teach peace to children.
12. Read Chief Seattle's (or was it a Hollywood screen writer's) Letter to the US President.
13. Be honest.
14. Demand honesty from your government.

Earth Day (22 Apr) is not widely celebrated in South Africa, our major national environmental day being World Environment Day (5 Jun). But then who needs an excuse to celebrate the Earth. Every day should be Earth Day! Earth Day was originally started in the US of A, back before a lot of us were born (:-)), in 1970 by a US Senator Gaylord Nelson. Over the years since then it has grown into a global celebration, not tied to any one government or country.

Last year we noted the Earth Day Network's Billion Acts of Green initiative and this year the call is the same: make a personal commitment to sustainability.

We've already celebrated Earth Hour and we have World Environment Day and Arbor Day to look forward to. If we make one new lifestyle change or commitment to an environmental practice on each celebrated occasion we'll quickly be living much greener lives.

22 Apr 2011 happens to also fall on Good Friday, so for a change we're not in the office, and could use the occasion to enjoy some quality time with our families and reflect on how we can improve things for ourselves and the earth.

Ideas for this Earth Day
If you are not already doing so, why not make a commitment to starting your own composting system, recycling your waste, reducing

flat screen monitors, office plants, smiling workers... it's green office week: pic - green path guideGreen Office Week (GOW) [18 - 21 April 2011] is an initiative started by Dictum, a South African specialist publishing company, in 2010 (incidentally they also initiated National Bosses Day back in 1990).

Focus days
This year Green Office Week has four focus days, which I think is a good idea:

Mon 18 - Make it happen Monday
Monday is all about printing and paper use.

Tue 19 - Choosy Tuesday
Focus on getting and using greener office supplies and equipment.

Wed 20 - Wattage Wednesday
How to reduce your energy consumption

Thurs 21 - Thoughtful Thursday
Think about how to use technology to reduce your environmental impact. You can of course think about other non-technocentric ideas on Thursday too!

Great office greening resources
There are some excellent resources for greening your office. One of the best we've come across is the Project 90x2030 Green Your Office Toolkit, a 48 page (3.8 Mb PDF) download, with case studies and local examples. It provides action sections covering Energy, Water, Waste and Travel and P90230 have also developed an online office audit tool which you can use to record your impacts and view actionable suggestions.

The Green Office Week website has a really good, concise 8-page Green Office Action Plan (GOAP) download (355 Kb PDF) which has many tips and ideas spanning seven areas: Paper, Energy, Water, Green Purchasing, Waste, Carbon Footprint, Green Events. There is also a download by GOW outling the aims, simple tips for each day, getting buy-in from co-workers, and info for the boss.

In keeping with the focus days, here are urban sprouts top tips for Green Office Week for Printing, Office Supplies, Energy and Technology.

Printing (or not)
If you're going to download the resources above (they're worth keeping close at hand) you'll want to consider the best way to print.

Rethink
The average UK office worker prints out an estimated 1500 sheets of paper each month, most of which is discarded within 2 days and some of which is reprinted. When it comes to printing, the first thing is to

Thirteen nuclear reactors sited within 130km of the epicentre of a seismic event measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale. It's got to be a recipe for disaster, right?

That 53 nuclear reactors were constructed on an island with a history of seismic activity will probably stun and amaze our grandchildren. The Darwin awards provide many testaments to human stupidity, but who are the real fools for letting politicians gamble away our future by allowing the construction of nuclear "facilities"?

A sobering thought to think that Milnerton, the centre of it's own seismic event in 1809 is a mere 12 km away from Koeberg.

There are three operating nuclear "facilities" (pending disasters: de-pending on timescale for them to become disasterous) near the epicentre of the Sendai Earthquake (Japan's worst earthquake, and apparently of the five most powerful in the world since modern records began in 1900):

• Fukushima I (Fukushima Dai-ichi) complex comprises 6 reactors, run by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in the town of Okuma.
• Fukushima II (Fukushima Dai-ni), is 12km to the south in the town of Naraha and Tomioka, comprises 4 reactors, and is also run by TEPCO.
• Onagawa nuclear power plant is located in the town with the same name, operated by Tohoku Electric Power Company, and comprises 3 reactors.

Together, these three plants with their 13 reactors, have a capacity of 10 298M MW (nearly a quarter of SA's total electricity capacity). Koeberg by comparison has a capacity of 1800 MW).

whiskers, locked on cat mintWe have a neighbourhood cat (Whiskers) that loves to frequent our garden and increasingly, our home. She's a juvenile kitty and quite entertaining at the best of times. This morning though, she was seriously amped, intoxicated by the Cat Mint I bought for her over the weekend.

Is this stuff legal for cats? Should there be any limit to the amount we give her? She's going crazy for it.

Too late. The Cat Mint is gone it's been totally ravaged, plucked from the pot it was bought in, nibbled, chewed and digested. She looks fine but is behaving weirdly... eyes have a far off gaze, rolling on her back, licking my fingers...

The Catnip wikipedia article makes interesting reading:
Catnip and catmints are mainly known for the behavioral effects they have on cats, not only domestic cats but big cats also (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) When cats sense the bruised leaves or stems of catnip, they may roll over it, paw at it, chew it, lick it, leap about and purr, or heavily salivate. Some will growl, meow, scratch, or

Pravin Gordhan - SA's Finance Minister1. The levy on non-renewable (including nuclear) electricity, will be used to... fix potholes!
Well, partly. A portion of the levy applied to electricity generated from non-renewable and nuclear energy sources, which increases from 0.5c/kWh to 2.5c/kWh from April 1st, will be used to fix the roads that have been damaged by coal hauling trucks.

Huh?! So the money intended for renewable energy projects will be used to fix the potholes created by coal fired energy! The irony is going to kill me...

Another example of full cost accounting not being factored in to the price of dirty coal electricity - the cost doesn't include the cost of dirty air, the cost of treating lung diseases, or... the cost of repairing potholed roads. For that, thank you Eskom and your complicit big business users, the tax payer will foot the bill!!

2. A carbon tax is now firmly on the table
Not quite a fait accompli, but the government is considering a carbon tax. A discussion paper entitled Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Carbon Tax Option was published for public comment in December 2010. Comments are due by the end of February 2011 and the features of this proposed tax and a schedule for its introduction will be announced in next years budget.

3. An energy-efficiency institute will be established using money from the world cup
This is good news! Many people have been arguing how Eskom

sustainable.co.za calculatorI've been looking forward to the launch of sustainable.co.za's online calculator since I first heard that it was in the pipeline a few weeks ago.

Online calculators of the carbon variety have been around for quite a while and vary in their suitability to the SA energy scenario and ease of use. It seems like quite a tricky piece of software to nail down properly and I still think there is room for SA's carbon calculators to improve.

That said, the sustainable.co.za calculator is a bit different to a carbon calculator. It measures how much electricity you can save by calculating the energy expenditure of your old high-consumption lighting and

philip morris: named and shamed in Greenpeace's Private Eye awardsVote for the top corporate offenders in this year's Public Eye awards:

Organized since 2000 by Berne Declaration and Friends of the Earth (in 2009 they were replaced by Greenpeace), Public Eye reminds the corporate world that social and environmental misdeeds have consequences - for the affected people and territory, but also for the reputation of the offender.

Whether exploitative working conditions, environmental degradation, intentional disinformation, or other disregards of corporate social responsibility: the most evil offenses appear on the shortlist of the Public Eye Awards 2011.

Top offenders this year include South African mining house AngloGold Ashanti, here is the list of the perps to be named and shamed.