First things first: I love the EU. I love what it makes possible, and that it slowly, slowly brings us all closer together. The Euro has made things a lot easier (though it was certainly bad for my currency conversion maths-in-my-head skills!), and I think it's the only way forward.

That said... the EU and its politicians do some really stupidly weird things. Such as moving the parliament once each month from Bruxelles to Strasbourg. For a week.

Here is a video (in German, sorry) about this insanity:

 
This is absolutely, utterly crazy. It's an insane waste of time, money, and resources that could better be spent in other ways. Such as helping people who had to "travel" without wanting it (aka refugees). Such as financing more sustainable technology for travel and energy. Or a hundred other things.

I'm really, really taken aback by this. How on earth can this still go on, while everyone in the EU parliament (hopefully) is aware of the climate change, and of the need to work on a more sustainable lifestyle for all of us? Why have the green parties in the parliament not protested this again, and again, and again, until it stops? Or, if that wasn't possible for them on their own, why isn't this made more public so more people (like me) can get really upset, and think about how to change it?

Aaaaaargh. Can we please, collectively, all have more brain power? To use for making the world better, instead of more crazy, more hateful, more fearful and more insane?

While bicycles may be a modern thing, and thus a modern solution to the sustainable transport issues, overuse and sustainability are not a modern thing or concern. This shit has history. Lots of history.

Case in point? Overfishing. This was already done in medieval times, and there were counter-measures taken - this article in The Atlantic is a nice read about the topic.

While ruining our environment may have a long tradition, though, it doesn't mean that we should not strive to do better. (War, after all, is a very human thing too, and has a long tradition. Yet nobody in their right mind would say that war is a good thing. Or at least I hope so.) Unfortunately, making things better, and protecting the environment, often needs some kind of rule, or law, or regulation, or making it really pricey - because, let's face it, we're all only human, and if someone dangles a shiny tempting thing in front of our noses and offers a really good price, it is very hard to resist and not give in and snatch the shiny, whatever it might be. If meat is really cheap, a lot of it will be eaten. If cars are cheap and convenient to use, people will take the car instead of public transport or human-powered transport. If flights are really cheap, a lot of people will fly without a second thought.

And now we've arrived at the real reason for this post: Flights. Full disclosure: I'm not a strict non-flier. I've done plane trips in the past both for job reasons and for fun reasons. I will fly to Dublin for WorldCon this summer, not travel there by train, and when I am going to NESAT next year, chances are rather high that I will fly to Finland instead of taking the train. In both cases, a train trip there would take several days - either because I'd need to do an overnight stop, or because I'd have to factor in at least one additional day after arrival to recover from having little to no sleep on the trip. (This would look very, very different if there were still night trains with sleeper cars, by the way. I'd love to use those instead, they were a wonderful thing!) Spending an extra day or two travelling time will up the total cost of the travel, which - going by train - would already be significantly more expensive than going by plane. So that's a number of things prodding me to choose the plane.

And, obviously, I do. I book those flights with a bad conscience, because yes, I do believe that every flight is one too many. Being an inconsequent human being, I'll also look for the best deals in terms of flight length, start or arrival time, and price. (No use taking a plane instead of a train if I still end up with a sleepless night.) However... if all flights would cost double or triple the amount, making a long train trip with an overnight stay, maybe to enjoy a little city sightseeing on the stopover point would become much more attractive.

And there's actually a way to make flights more reasonably priced. Reasonably, in this case, being higher priced - and thus more in keeping with what flying actually costs us, as living beings on a planet, in terms of social costs and environmental damage. (Aviation emissions have risen 21% in the last three years.) One of the reasons flights are so cheap is the tax exemptions that are granted: There is no VAT charged on airplane tickets, and the kerosene used as a fuel is also exempt from taxes. That is unfair, especially seeing that public transport, including trains, is taxed both for fuels and for tickets.

There now is a European Citizens' Initiative asking to remedy this, with a registered petition at the European Commission. You can read more about the background for the petition here, or you can go straight to the petition, fill in your details, and sign.

It needs one million signatures, and it currently has close to 19.000 - so please go, sign, and spread the word!

I've been writing about bicycles in our Western space yesterday - where the bike is not necessarily the first choice of transport.

Usually, the more urban the area, the more prominent the bike, as it's harder to find a parking space, and more annoying and time-consuming to get through the traffic jam. People who live in rural areas often think of the car first when planning to go somewhere - and as the car is rarely really not a possibility, it's the mode of transport used no matter if the trip in question could also be done on foot or on a bike. Taking the bike instead, though, has a lot of positive effects, as this German article outlines: less nitrogen dioxide and dust emissions, less noise and space consumption, less carbon dioxide emissions (and therefore good for our climate). You've certainly heard about all of these before.

What really surprised me, though, is that there is also a sociopolitical and socio-economic factor in this. There's been a survey by Stefan Gössling from the Uni of Lund, who calculated the costs of a kilometre done by car as opposed to the costs to one by bike - including secondary costs due to climate change, subventions, noise, infrastructure, time of travel, traffic jams, the user's life expectancy and accidents. The result? One kilometre per car costs about 20 cent. One kilometre per bike generates 30 cent. It generates money, folks.

That is... stunning.

What I really wanted to get at when I started writing this post, however, is the immense amount of positive impact that a bicycle has in non-Western countries. For us, using the bike sometimes feels like a step down - it's slower over long distances (even if you drive your car like a gran on tranquilisers, like I do), it's less comfortable as you may have to exert yourself a bit, or as you might get wet when it rains, and it has less transport capabilities than a car (though with some of the modern fancy cars, there's not so much difference anymore). It's also less of a status symbol thing, which surely also plays a role in how we grade our vehicles internally, knowingly or not.

In countries where there is no abundance of cars, though, and mobility is at a premium; where walking is the standard mode of transport, because there's nothing else available? A bicycle will make a world of a difference. And this is where World Bicycle Relief comes in.

World Bicycle Relief is a charity that empowers people by developing a special bike, called the Buffalo Bike, and making it available to those in need of mobility. Such as doctors, nurses, or other healthcare practitioners who need to visit their clients. Girls and young women who can get to school safely and much faster with a bike. Farmers who need a way to transport their produce to a market. The bike is not only robust, sturdy, and easy to repair, it also has a large payload capacity - the carrier in the rear can take up to 100 kg, and it is large enough that it's possible to transport a second person if that is necessary.

Even better, the charity goes for local assembly, it makes sure that there are spare parts available in bike shops, and they also train bike mechanics to make sure the bicycles stay in good working order. So these things not only help the new cyclists, they also create local, sustainable jobs.

Along with MSF, this is definitely one of my favourite charities. If you are looking for a place to do some good with your money, consider donating to them - they are currently running a campaign called "Racing the Sun" to get 5000 bicycles to people in need.

One of the last old forests in Europe, the Hambacher Forst, is currently in danger of being razed.

The Hambacher Forst is about 12 000 years old. Yes, twelve fucking thousand. Its earliest mention in written sources is in a document by Otto II, Emperor, dated 973. The oldest trees currently standing there are 350 years old, and more than one hundred fourty highly endangered species live in that forest. You can read more about the forest on Wikipedia.

Now, if you are wondering why something like this is going to be felled... because RWE is of the opinion that the thing that we all need much more than a historic forest and really important habitat for endangered species of plants and animals is... brown coal. Yes. Brown coal. That dirtiest, most stupid source of energy that you can use these days.

Currently, the federal government of the substate of Germany the forest is in uses the police to clear the forest of activists, who are protesting against the raze. RWE plans to fell trees starting on October 1. The protests of countless people who want the forest to stay remain unheeded.

Yet.

There's still hope, and I hope that you are willing to help! Maybe, together, we can save the forest.

So what can you do?

Sign the petition on Change.org.
Send a letter protesting the forest raze via the BUND website.
Visit the Facebook page of the local government and leave a message there telling them you cannot believe they are doing such a thing.
Send a tweet to @ArminLaschet and/or @inascharrenbach with the same message. It need not be long. It need not be elaborate - it just needs to be another voice, and another, and another. (You can use the hashtag #hambibleibt if you like.)

And, of course, spread the word so others join in as well.

I'm here. I'm hoping. Please help.

...and the living is easy...

I really like this song. I also like summer (though now the best part of summer, the holidays and summer break, are over, and it's back to work for me). What I don't like, at all, is the time switch to summertime and back. It's stupid, it's annoying, and it always takes me a considerable chunk of time to adjust to the new time, making me less productive than usual for a few days at least, more like a week.

So you can probably imagine my delight at finding there's an EU survey going on about what citizens think of the summertime/wintertime switching, and whether it should be abolished or not. The survey is still running for a few more days, until August 16, and you can send in your opinion via the questionnaire here.

And now I'm hoping enough people will chime in and ask for this stupid time switching to be stopped once and for all!

I've written about Amazon and its shitty work ethics before, and I've been not ordering things from there for years now. But I was totally and utterly flabberghasted and shocked when I heard that Amazon is flat out destroying returned goods. The reason behind this, it seems, is that it's more lucrative for them to not sort returned goods ordered online back into the warehouses, but to just throw them away. Period.

This really floored me. I'm in the lucky situation that I very, very rarely get a return of goods (though you have the right to return stuff bought online, of course, if it does not meet expectations, based on German law), but I'd never have dreamed of throwing things away due to this. Admittedly, my "warehousing setup" is very small and very easy to keep track of... but, well.

It seems that the Big River Store is not the only one throwing away things that are returned - a study by the EHI Retail Institute shows that 55% of the retailers questioned destroy returned goods.

And there goes my happily ordering things online mindset. From now on, I'll always wonder what happens if I return something... and I used to order things in several sizes when I was not sure about which size would fit me.

If you want to read more about this, here's an article about it in German, and here a similar one in English. Also, Greenpeace is running a petition to illegalise the destruction of new and als-new goods.

 

The elections here are over, and the outcome is worse than I had expected or hoped for - the AfD is third strongest party in the Bundestag. That is a definite step to the right, and the right is not something I want to have in German politics. Hell, I don't want a right in any politics.

We're all human. We live in one world. There are problems enough already that we should occupy ourselves with, and that we should try to tackle - our overboarding use of energy and natural resources, the resultant changes in climate, flora and fauna, our not very sensible allocation of goods and resources and, yes, riches. I'm not saying that we should go to full-fledged communism (oh, no thank you, I don't believe in Utopia any more than in Santa Claus), or giving everybody a heap of money no matter what, but I also believe that if you are working full-time, you should be earning enough money to have a decent home and decent food, and that there's a limit in the amount of money that one person can really need. Also - we're destroying our planet with our lifestyle, and we're not even doing it slowly anymore. Yes, it's not easy to change things up and maybe have to compromise, or have a little less convenience here or there, or not take the car for a change, or re-use things. But we only have one planet, as far as I know interstellar travel has not been invented nor has a second Earth been found for us to waste.

So yes, I firmly believe that there are more important things than who is white, or black, or red, or yellow, and whether it's better to be from this country or the other. All countries have their own character, and their own pros and cons and differences, and that is what makes things so interesting - but you can find very, very different types of people and social interaction when you go from one part of Germany to another, and more similar types of social interaction when you go from a certain part of Germany to a place in a totally different country.

And you know what? That is fine. That makes travel interesting. It makes our world a nicer, more interesting place. And like having a large enough genetic variability in a population, it means that humans, globally and overall, might have a chance to face and conquer all kinds of problems at some point. Which, as I mentioned, we have more than enough of - poverty, stupid and unneccesary wars and squabbles, hurricanes and other natural catastrophes, and our wasteful ways of life, to name just a few of the biggies.

We are diverse. As individuals, as regions, as countries, as cultures. Finding and building an union with and inside our diversity is what makes us strong. The right-wing people falsely think that an union means you need to narrow down what may be inside, and then you need to protect the union by letting nobody else in and fencing yourself off from the outside. Yes, it takes more work to find and build a union from diversity, but it will also make it a bigger, better, smarter thing with more resources and a wider spectrum of thoughts and ideas.

One big thing in German food culture is the Döner, which was invented or at least popularised in Germany by Turkish immigrants for Turkish workers who needed something that could be eaten in a short lunch break. German Döner is a distinctive thing, and it's immensely popular. It also wouldn't be there if we had no Turkish immigrants. There's so many things that people coming from other places can bring, and it makes life interesting, and gets you to think, and talk, and find different perspectives. It makes you realise that there might be different ways to do things, different tastes, different combinations of things that will also work, and possibly even better than what you are used to. Yes, it can also cause problems - but so can home-grown, home-brewed stupidity.

We don't need that step to the right. Not in Germany, not in any other place. The Brexit shenanigans should have been a clear signal that union is better than separatism, but oh, well, the capacity for stupidity in human beings just remains immense.

I'm just hoping that the AfD will be faced by enough people with a spine from the middle and left-wing fractions. 340 seats, according to the current preliminary numbers, will be filled with politicians from the middle right to far right. May the other 369 have mercy on us and do a good job in keeping that step to the right as small as possible.