Neglect of Contraceptive Depression

I recently found out that a distant cousin of mine is in psych hospital for severe depression. This is not totally out of the blue, but the psychiatrist apparently thinks it was at least partially caused by her combined oral contraceptive pill.

Our minds and our bodies are closely linked. Science is gradually providing fragments of stories about how closely linked they really are.

As the public conversation about mental health is growing, and we are not so scared of  revealing our own or our loved ones' suffering with mental illness, (thanks to the tireless individual campaigners and mental health organisations over the last 30 years). I have chatted with a number of people about this idea before posting it, and most had personal stories. My friends and colleagues talked about their bipolar or schitzophrenic siblings, their mother's postnatal depression, their own past mental breakdown, agoraphobia, trychotillomania (hair pulling), bulimia, paranoia, or basic depression, A websearch brings up a range of figures - most of them probably without much evidence - that somewhere around 30% to 50% of people will suffer diagnosable mental illness over their lifetime.

The physical effects of psychiatric medications are well known to those who take them, and to their loved ones. The link takes you to a book review. The story is appaling. I am going to read the book and look at Robert Whitaker's evidence and get back to you later maybe. But this post isn't about that.

Evidence is assembling about the relationship between prescription drugs and mental illness, that heart and cholesterol and NSAID medication can cause depression, anxiety, aggression, anorexia, memory loss, and a bunch of other things in about 1% of users.

Except did you notice this bit?
The MIND article says that the baldness medication Propecia can cause depression in 10% of users, via a suspected hormonal mechanism (suppression of testosterone).
 
Given that a websearch produces about a hundred thousand hits saying the combined oral contraceptive pill causes depression, plus forums full of heartbreaking stories,
Why did Scientific American not mention the pill? Are they worried that their readers might be sensitive to lady problems? Hardly. It's because there's a gaping chasm in the literature about psych effects ofCOCP for lady problems. Maybe a dozen, maybe twenty solid studies. After hunting very hard, I found three that I think are worth quoting.

Here's a paper from a 2009 pilot study from a psychiatrist at an Australian public hospital saying that depression is the most commonly cited reason for going off the pill, and depression related to contraceptive pill use is probably significant and there's not enough research and it should be investigated.
Here's a paper from a 2012 lit review by 4 people who seem not to have ever written anything else about gynecology, saying that despite not enough evidence and confounding variables, a few large studies say that women on the pill are probably not more depressed than those off the pill. And if you get depressed, you should stop taking it.
And another 2007 paper about a large number of women, written by clinical epidemiologists (folks who look very hard at stats about lots of sick people) saying that after removing confounding variables young Australian women on the pill aren't any more depressed than those not on the pill. And the longer you take the pill the less likely you are that you will be depressed.

Here are a few of the confounding variables

1) Women everywhere are more often diagnosed as depressed than men, apparently 23% against 11%. After women go through menopause it's 11% for both genders.
2) Some of that may be because of the menstrual cycle. There is a recently invented?discovered? psych illness called Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) which basically means life sucks for the week or so before your period and you can't help but take it out on yourself & everyone else. A few pills have been marketed to dampen the hormonal oscillations and reduce PMDD. Lots of other things can help too. Pay particular attention to the diet & exercise notes because if it's supposed to be a serotonin depression mechanism, exercise is fabulous for lifting & maintaining serotonin.
3) It's not contraindicated for those already with depression or anxiety, ie women who are depressed anyway are prescribed the pill just as often as those who aren't. If a woman is already depressed when she starts the pill and she's still depressed on it - but differently depressed than she was before - how does the epidemiologist cope with the data? Remember that this can confound up to a quarter of subjects!
4) Women who get really depressed generally stop taking a pill, thus self-excluding themselves from any longitudinal studies. (What, are you going to tell a suffering woman that she should stay on it, make her & her family's life hell for the duration of a 5-year study just to give epidemiologists a statistically significant result?)

So anyway,
there's my distant cousin in the psych ward in some Perth hospital,
her 2 young kids are living at her mum's this week,
her fly-in fly-out husband is back at the mine for a fortnight,
and her psychiatrist has taken her off the combined oral contraceptive pill and substituted some juicy antidepressant. The gynecological issue she was taking it for is still around, if she can't be on the pill she may be looking at surgical sterilisation.


And Scholar only has a dozen mostly inconclusive studies since 2000.



If web-available stats on pill use are remotely accurate, about 100 million women are on the pill worldwide at any point in time. Up to a billion women may have tried it during their lives.
If 10% have mood disorders, anxiety, or depression, as a consequence of taking it (seems a reasonable guess given the testosterone-dropping hair medication above)
that's 10 million women!
some with stories like my cousin, some not so bad, some worse,
and one very fat profit margin for the usual pharmaceutical bad guys
And not enough research! 
Not enough attention!
Not enough public & scientific care for women's health!

Tonight I am a bit angry. Can you tell?

How to actually reduce your carbon footprint - Postpone big outputs

We make decisions about big infrequent emissions all the time. Taking an overseas holiday, pouring a large concrete slab, buying a new car. A simple - even banal - way to reduce emissions in a given time period is to not emit in that time period. In other words, to postpone a project and thus the big emission associated with it.

In "How Bad Are Bananas" Mike Berners-Lee proposes a 10-tonne annual CO2 'budget' per person. I think this is a good starting point for a sustainable first-world lifestyle, but will probably not be enough in the end.

Here are some examples of postponed emissions.

• A new car is more or less a 1-tonne embedded carbon purchase. If you wait another year before you upgrade your car, you postpone the carbon emission to manufacture not your car, but the one that replaces your new car in the sales yard.
• An overseas trip (from Australia) is more or less a 1-ton per capita emission. How about you go camping a couple of hours drive out of the city this year, and schedule that trip to Europe for next year or the year after. You will postpone that emission. 
• A concrete slab is, conveniently enough for counting, about a ton of CO2 per room. Putting your new house extension on posts instead of a slab, or hunting around for low CO2 emissions concrete (hey check out the Roman technology here!)
  The rest of the new room is about a ton as well. How about you let the kids share a bedroom for another year, and postpone the whole renovation. Or the new kitchen. Or the landscaping & new swimming pool. Renovating in timber is not simple because it's a carbon cost and a carbon sink.
  But if there are manufactured surfaces (like plaster) or manufactured appliances, you can bet on at least 1 tonne. 
• Professionally, can you encourage your company to get another year out of that large appliance for your corporation (the big printer, the server rack, the factory air conditioner, the big industrial pump/machinery thingo)? Can you persist in the existing premises for just one more year without designing a new purpose-built thing in a concrete industrial park?
• Can you get the fleet cars to be used for 4 years instead of 3?
• Can you think of any other 1-tonne CO2 expenditures which can be postponed without much fuss? You might surprise yourself.

Simple, obvious, and astoundingly easy (inaction is often very easy). Plus, it may have unexpected benefits for your personal or organisational financial outgoings as well.

Astronomy, mythology, and the art of teaching by telling progressively smaller lies.

I tell my kids stories at night. Sometimes they are good enough stories to re-tell here.
They can see the Milky Way at its most magnificent from their large, south-pointing, low-light-pollution 2nd-story windows. They ask about the stars.
"What's a star, Mum?"
"A star is just like a sun but a lot further away so it looks much smaller. And some stars aren't single suns, but a whole mass of suns a very very very long way away called a galaxy. And some are planets of our own solar system, reflecting the light of our own sun."
"How do you tell which one is which?"
"Well you have to learn about the skies. But if the star is in this section here (point to the bright spray of the Milky Way) it's probably a star. And if it's over there (south-west) it's probably a galaxy. And if it's really bright it might be a planet."
"Did people always know what stars were? When in history did they work it out?"
(precocious flippin' 5 yr old! *sigh*,)


Here starts the story, in grownup words this time.

The name Milky Way comes from Greek mythology, same as Galaxy comes from the same root as lactation.
Here is my favourite pre-Christian, (pre-Greek) creation story amalgum, from fragments of memory of mythology, which wouldn't hold up to any decent research but makes me smile anyway. (Come to think of it, maybe it's Hopi Indian. I'll look it up and edit this post.)

The Sky, the mother of everything, fell in love with the father Sun and they had children, the Earth, the Moon, (and the other inner planets, if you accept the assumption that this amalgum pre-Christian society had half-decent proto-astronomy)
She had so much milk for her child(ren) that it sprayed all over her dress, creating the Milky Way.
But the Sun and the Sky could not get along. The Sun was too bright, the Sky took up too much space.
Ultimately, they decided to split the care of their child Earth into Day and Night.
The Sky also helped her daughter the Earth deliver life, flowing out of the ground in a vast river and filling the land and the sea with all living things. (Can't remember which was the Earth's partner. It's not the Moon, he was her brother.)


So then a couple of weeks ago, we borrowed Carl Sagan's Cosmos ep 1&2.
There is a rather good section on the origins of life, at roughly 48 minutes.
Sagan stands next to a large glass bulb full of gases supposedly in abundance before plants evolved, took over and started messing with things.
Electrical arcs (simulating lightning) were generated through the chamber.
After an unspecified length of film on the cutting room floor, a fabulous brown sludge of proto-amino-acids started running down the walls of the chamber.
He put this forward as evidence that self-replicating organic molecules can appear on any planet with something close to the right atmosphere & a bit of atmospheric turbulence. I was convinced (enough to do a bit more reading & get more convinced, anyway).

Check out this very readable article on Google Scholar. It puts forward four theories from the body of literature for the origin of life and talks about their plausibility and likelihood. It's short but my version is shorter.

1. Exogenous, ie a "banana skin thrown from a passing spacecraft". Totally untestable, at least until we invent interstellar transport and go ask them if they dropped a banana skin on our planet about 4 Bn yrs ago.
2. Endogenous and atmospheric, from gases + electricity. like Urey & Miller demonstrated in 1953 and Sagan filmed in 1980, except that they might have gotten the primitive earth's atmosphere wrong, so on to the next theory
3. Endogenous, aquatic. Some magic around some funky hydrothermal vents, where clay or something protected the tiny volatile proto-proteins (lol) from boiling alive, or 
4. RNA from we don't know where. Possibly atmospheric. Proposed mechanism requires UV light.
   There is another one in the literature,
5. Meteorite bombardment literally vibrating some replicating organic molecules of life into existence. Also hard to test & probably not necessary since 2, 3, and 4 are quite plausible enough for me. Anyone got a spare planet to propel some meteors at, and we can see if you get a nice brown amino sludge?

It all sounds complicated, but truly, consider the endogenous theories alongside the miscellaneous mythology story above. I propose that the longer scientific language tells largely the same story, just a little differently.

• The Sky (atmosphere) interacted with the Sun (whose heat & light generated the required atmospheric turbulence, and also sent UV radiation if that turns out to be necessary) 
• and this interaction seeded RNA on earth (atmosphere, hydrothermal vent, who's pickin?)
• which then flooded simple replicating RNA from a few discrete places to fill the entire Earth, evolving into the life we know.
• The Sky had enough milk for all of her children, in fact her breasts were so full that they sprayed it right through the galaxy. (Sagan's film proposes highly probable extrasolar life, arising from similar mechanisms on other planets). 
• The stars in the sky are there to remind us that the Sky (both in terms of our Earth's atmosphere, and the whole galaxy & visible universe) is probably a very fecund place.

My two older kids loved that story. They told me I should write it down.
I hope you liked it too.

Sleep well, my invisible readers.
Lexskigator

Why I buy yarn - Energy Conversion (Part 1)

I don't really buy yarn.

I buy potential energy. I buy a tight little bundle of what might become something beautiful. I buy the promise of many hours of happy activity and a sense of satisfaction and achievement afterwords.

I buy energy storage. I store any extra optimism, imagination, and anticipation in my yarn. See, I know that sometime in the relatively near future I will be bogged down in mundanity, or stripped of enthusiasm, or curled up on the bed exhausted and about to lose the plot with many many hours to go before any backup arrives. I know that if I place the new yarn just there within view of my bed, I will be able to see it in my time of trial, and I will tap into that stored potential energy, re-ignite my imagination with what it might become, re-ignite my hope and my optimism and get enough energy to keep at it.

I buy a place to store love. There are many people who I love, but who I can't say that to - because of context, or history, or simply the limitations of the English language. So I knit something for them and give it to them and both of us know that its sole purpose is to say "You are important to me and I love you". A special ball of wool or alpaca earmarked for some specific person - or intended for some generic project but knowing that I'll probably give it away when it's made - is a ball of love.

I buy threads of connection between people in time. Knitting connects you to all those knitters in prehistory and history, dust and bones under the ground or sitting in suburban yarn and coffee shops or (like me) in front of the TV with a thread coming out of the coffeetable drawer, subcontinental slum workers finding time to work on a child's jumper after a 15 hour shift in a toxic environment, or an adult orphan crying from grief trying to concentrate on a garter-stitch scarf to take their mind off their mum's death. Everyone knows a knitter- their nan or aunt or their gay uncle Brent (hi Brent!). Knitting also teaches your fingers a skill and technique which your mind doesn't need to know. This skill was passed on orally, then stored in pattern books and old items, copied and re-invented again and again, now it's carefully filmed onto YouTube and discussed interminably on forums. I buy the necessary ingredients to connect with all those people in all those places and times, just by holding some sticks, moving my fingers, and waving a bit of string around.

I buy hope - for myself to be able to make something, and when it's done for me or someone else to love it.
I buy just a little bit of fear - that I will never be able to do the yarn justice. That it will languish on my shelf and be forgotten and eventually eaten by moths or taken to the tip by some callous and uncomprehending future daughter in law. That I will end up a crazy old lady with sausage-swollen legs living on beans, and a house full of clever home-storage-solutions embarrassingly stuffed with yarn. Maybe this is what stash anxiety is about. I have to be careful not to buy too much yarn.

I buy interpersonal energy in a compact, dense form. I aim to convert into other forms of energy - anticipation energy, work energy, finished energy, gift energy, generosity energy, gratitude energy, lasting and meaningful human energy. I don't buy it because it's yarn. I buy it because it's energy.

Additciton, and the urge to 'finish it'

I've been reading Stephen King "On Writing" and I've come across an idea which is sticking with me. Here's the extract.

"A friend of mine... went to a counsellor and said his wife was worried that he was drinking too much. 
'How much do you drink?" the counselor asked.
My friend looked at the counsellor with disbelief. "All of it," he said, as if that should have been self-evident. 
I know how he felt. It's been almost twelve years since I took a drink, and I'm still stuck with disbelief when I see someone in a restaurant with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell "Finish that! Why don't you finish that?" into his or her face...."

Reading this chapter has coincided with my eldest asking all sorts of difficult-to-answer questions about what is alcohol for, and why do people smoke if it's bad for them, and why don't you ever buy us lollies at the checkout anyway, mum?

And I've been watching and fretting a bit about some of those I know and love, and their habits? / addictions?

SO my first, somewhat rhetorical, question is: how do you know if it's an addiction - in yourself or another? Am I addicted to knitting? Can someone be addicted to working late? to massage appointments? to running downhill fast? to the high moral ground?
Addiction seems to have 2 parts:
1) Persistence of a behaviour or substance use despite deleterious consequences, and
2) A neurochemical/physiological response to withdrawl of that behaviour or substance.

It is accepted that addiction exists on a specturm and there's a lot of grey in the middle. I guess you can be hooked on lots of things but we (family, community, society) just don't worry about it if it's not totally messing up someone's life.


What struck me about the description of "Finish that! Why don't you finish that?",
is that my grandmother, who survived a 3-year Soviet-sponsored holiday in Siberia in 1946-1949, used to say that to me about the food on my plate. "Finish your broccoli." "You can leave the table once you've finished your plate." "Why don't you finish the potato cakes?" "Who is going to finish the last lamb chop?"
These days I am congenitally incapable of leaving food on my plate. I am barely able to stop myself from eating the 'good bits' left on my kids' plates. I have started serving myself smaller portions, knowing I'm going to eat part of theirs anyway. But I am happy to leave a pile of chips, a half piece of cake, or the last third or a glass of wine unconsumed.

I think the urge to 'finish it' is related to the perceived quality of 'it'. "Don't waste the good stuff", my starving refugee ancestors cry out to me from their hiding spot in my epigenetic code. "Don't waste anything which would have kept the infants alive in that gulag". they cry. Cake and chips aren't real food, not like lamb chops and broccoli. Cake and chips can be left uneaten without psychic consequences.

I also have the urge to finish a row, a pattern repeat, a section of knitting before I go to sleep. Often I set myself a knitting target at the start of an evening as I sit in front of the TV, and I get grouchy if I don't get to that point before bedtime. I fully acknowledge that I may well be on the addiction spectrum with my knitting at the moment. But it's cheaper and has relatively minor deleterious side effects.

My second, less rhetorical, question to you, my reader, is:
Do you ever have the compulsion to "finish it"?
And what is "it"?  Food? Drink? Work tasks? Craft? Not to leave the TV in the middle of an episode or wait until an ad break? Not to stop fishing until you've caught dinner?

Does that mean you might be on the spectrum of addiction?

Scrutiny: the effect of the gaze of others.

For almost all people, scrutiny changes our personality. 

Modern neuropsych (like my new favourite Daniel Kanemann) holds the view that a personality is a cumulative picture of how a human being acts in context, rather than something core to a psychological being. Change your context and your personality changes. You may not like this idea, that the 'you' reading this is as ephemeral as the things that come and go around you. But I bet you've asked yourself, and been unable to answer, questions about how you would be in a radically different context. How would you deal with being a prisoner of war in Changi in 1948, or do you think you would be one of the 80% of people who would have turned the dial up to 'fatal' if you were participating in a Milgram experiment?

Being watched changes how a human being acts. 
Human beings in aggregate also moderate our behaviour under scrutiny in statistically measurable ways. For example, crime is more effectively deterred by whether or not you are likely to be caught than the severity of the punishment (you can Google Scholar it yourself cos I'm not enthusiastic enough to link it.)

Not changing under scrutiny is considered a failure of empathy. The DSM IV (don't have a V around) also contains a selection of psychological disorders (autism spectrum etc) and personality disorders (narcissism, psychopathy etc) which include this as a feature. Also, one of the key features of paranoid schitzophrenia is the opposite; you feel like you are always watched, always under scrutiny. The 'watchers' and the 'followers' and 'everyone knows all my bad secrets'.

How good is your calibration? 
How much do you think you are under scrutiny, compared to how much you are actually under scrutiny? Most of us assume a much higher level of scrutiny than is real, especially for social contexts that you care about.("Oh god, everyone saw me trip on the way into the formal!"). We also assume scrutiny from above, not from below (people in senior management are statistically more likely to be corrupt - and psychopathic too - than those in middle management. Ought to find the link to reference it but I do want to get to sleep.)

The nature of the watcher also has an effect. 
Consider these:
Would you speak the same way in a meeting if the CEO - or equivalent person with a very big hat in your context - strolled in and sat quietly in the corner? Or if the cleaner was dusting around you?
Would you change the way you rebuke your kids if another parent came to the playground? Or a policeman? Or perhaps you wouldn't if you noticed a homeless lady with a shopping trolley on a park bench within earshot. Assume scrutiny and change behaviour from those socially above, not from below?

How much do you watch others? 
Do you watch and judge other parents at a playground? Do you think it's amusing when juniors squirm and stutter when you walk in and sit quietly in the corner? Do you care whether your partner's clothes are neat and stylish or scruffy?



I've been thinking in particular about the effect of scrutiny in my own context and thoughts have been swimming a bit. Specifically the following:

• How will the 'right to privacy' will work in the internet age, given the ease and availability of data mining and individual profiling for targeted marketing (Thanks, Google) among other things.
• What would have happened with greater transparency in banking (w.r.t. the GFC), big business (I reckon my CEO is a bit corrupt and I don't think that's unusual), politics (federal election pork barreling coming up) and specificl lobby groups (US senate, petrochemical industry, guns lobby, secret service etc) 
• What's the mental/emotional impact of both greater and lesser scrutiny, combined with the fragmentation of social structures w.r.t. previous generations (which used to provide nice easy rules about who to watch, who to be watched by, how much to care etc). 
• How easy it is to live well in isolation and in a ! Social media allows us to blurt every last 150-char thought on Twitter to a squillion other motes in the prokaryotic swamp of electrons and web pages, and how many people's time and life energy is wasted scrutinising others. How do you tell who is worth your scrutiny in the swamp? How do you tell if you are worth scrutiny? How do you shut out the scrutiny and comment of a troll - can you even shut it out of your brain the way you would shut out an obnoxious 7 year old in the shopping centre who yells at you "Hey lady, you're a smelly poo!"
• The constant relentless mind-crushing cross-referencing and cross-scrutiny of my new favourite lab rats, the school pick up parents! God they dress up and put makeup on for the pickup. They check and cross check each other. Who's in gym clothes? what brand? how new the shoes? does her body show evidence of actually going to the gym? Who is in which designer clothes? which shop did she get them? can she match jewellery to an outfit?
• How do I feel about WikiLeaks running for the Australian Senate with the philosophy that universal scrutiny of everyone important, and thus almost total transperancy of almost every powerful organisation is: (and all of these are contentious)
• inevitable in the information age
• ultimately a good thing
• a good reason and purpose for a widespread political & social campaign.

Increased scrutiny can do wonderful things.
It is one of the easy ways to improve the quality of a company's output (you will write better doccos if you know that person X is going to read them, you will manufacture better thingums if you know there is a quality control).
It is one of the easy ways to reduce corruption and misbehaviour (that's what journalists are for
It is one of the easy ways to connect with people (he noticed that she was watching him across a crowded room..... ) but not just romantically (Mum, did you see me jump?)

On the other hand, scrutiny can be a weapon.
 Do you remember Year 8? Specific kids were always the target for scrutiny and ridicule. There's a particular tone that girls use on the sacrificial scrutinee, regardless of the substance of the taunt: "You've got your socks up!" "Can you believe it, she's pulled her socks right up!" "Socks-up socks-up Josie's got her socks-up"
Boys - as is often the case - use very direct language, making scrutiny a clear threat. "I've got my eye on you, Smith. You put one foot out of line, and ..." or "Look at him. How pathetic."
Also crushing is invisibility. You do your best: change your clothes, take up the right sport, modify your language, and the cool people don't see you, don't look at you, and apparently effortlessly exclude you from everything. The message is, you're going to be a bag lady in a park when you grow up and I refuse to direct my gaze at you.
Here's a paradox - year 8 was awful for just about everyone. Super cool kids ended up targets for ridicule. The nasty teasers and threatening kids were struggling to fight their own invisibility - either in the yard or in their out-of-school context. Your own calibration was poorly tuned. But you learned a lot about scrutiny as a weapon and it probably gave you a healthy cautiousness about excess transparency.

Scrutiny can get to the point where paranoid schitzophrenics are accurate and well calibrated. For many celebrities, no amount of paranoia is too small. The British Royal Family are under outrageous scrutiny - cameras from adjacent mountains photographing the royal breasts; radio 'personalities' prank-calling a hospital and triggering the suicide of a nurse. I am sure they have a secret service division devoted to being paranoid on their behalf. Are they sacrifical? What about the Hollywood celebrity set? Do we make them go spectacularly crazy for our aggregated need to scrutinise? Do we focus on them, easy clear targets, in order to not have to work out who to scrutinise and under what circumstances in our disconnected but cacophanous lives?


I certainly don't want all my deepest darkest secrets or less-than-perfect actions blasted open to everyone whose opinion I care about. Especially where I don't think they were my fault, or I don't think I could have done better without structural change to the system at the time. For example, I don't want my wonderful husband to have seen what happened when I raised my voice at our kids at 7PM last week after too many days on shift. I wasn't at my finest and I am embarrassed. Nobody is going to catch me and sanction me for getting a little upset. I will try not to, but I think I will probably end up doing it again.
I also think we all need space for secrets in order to keep a sense of ourselves, our identities, independent from the context imposed by the others that watch us. That tiny voice that says "my secret is my own and nobody can see it" might be the thread in a mind that stops it from becoming paranoid.

Finally, the watchers need to be paying attention to watch. Anonymity and hiding in large numbers has always been - and will continue to be - a very effective individual protection, for people in a population and for pilchards in a school.

And so I hope, for the sake of your brains, that there are enough times in each of your lives that nobody is paying attention. Campaign for scrutiny and transparency and accountability, but keep your secrets - choose carefully, go for small ones, ideally legally and morally clean ones - but keep them and treasure them! Plus I strongly recommend that you keep them off electronic media.
If you are one of the few under constant scrutiny, good luck. Your mind is being bent out of shape by it, but it is probably a sacrifice for the common good.

How to actually reduce your carbon footprint 10: Put your money where your carbon reduction is!

Many of my friends feel like there's no point in even trying to reduce their personal carbon output in the Western world (as I mentioned last month) What can one person change in the face of all of those kilo mega giga tons? 

Consider that even if you only have the same number of arms and legs as any of the other 7 ish billion people in the world, you have a massively disproportionate amount of financial resources and the flexibility to put it where you see fit - if you choose to use that power.

Consider the following ideas.

Carbon neutral/renewable superannuation. 

Clever thing I heard on the radio (which was in the SMH first) which I am going to enact this weekend.
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition website has an article (good lookin' mob they are, too!)
I'm going to ring my super provider and pester them to see if they can send me some better info, otherwise I'm moving.

Fund Renewable Energy in Developing Places

Another one that went past my inbox and sparked my attention led me here, to the old EWB
They seem to have pulled back on camping trips to East Timor to install water filters (which was good but not particularly strategic)
and they've aligned themselves with Nicholas Stern (Stern Report/ Blueprint for a Safer Planet)
who says that the most important way to pull back global greenhouse emissions is for the developing world's demand for energy to come from something that's not carbon based.
This is a good Google search if you want to find your own NGO or project to support.

Support Local Renewables

The easy option is green power - but the list of providers is short and few are bigger than 100mW.

but I like walking up my street looking at all the happy solar panels pointing at the sun and will get some on my roof next renovation.

Talk your mum into it. Sign up your brother in law's company. If you're going to set up a big marquee on the lawn and have a massive party, stitch up event green power.


Anyway them's my thoughts for the night. More next time.

Cheers,
Lexskigator