Losing our green glow

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer of 2007 traveling around Britain. Now we're home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

While we’ve been staying in Norfolk we are acutely aware that our impact on the environment is bigger than usual whether we stay in or go out. The house has no cavity wall insulation or loft insulation and though modernish is therefore expensive to heat. We are miles from a shop and though there is an hourly bus service (except on Sunday) it is all too tempting to get in a car and drive to the farm shop, or even one of the many supermarkets that ring King’s Lynn.

Pete has really lost his good green halo this week. He had to fill up the car with his first tank of petrol (he says he did do it once before when he was 17) and ordered and paid for 500 litres of kerosene mix to heat the house. Strangely he seems to like feeling normal, but I'm miserable about how easy it is to slot into eco-inefficient behaviour. Even if I huddle up in a blanket and read the electricity is on a regular tariff too so we’re not supporting renewable alternatives either. Obviously Pete and I could do something about these things if we moved here. Generally people in Norfolk have a high environmental impact – some way above the national average. (For number crunchers in Norfolk a person uses 5.69 global hectares [gha] compared to the UK average of 5.4gha. The target amount for everyone to have a fair share of resources is 1.8gha, a figure a little higher than a person in China currently uses and a great deal less than an American’s giant 9.74 gha).
Given their (possibly) careless use of resources it is likely that people in Norfolk will have to make drastic changes to their lives sooner than if they lived in a hillier part of Britain. If sea levels rise somewhere between the predicted 27 and 80cm over the next 80 years the coastal towns, roads and plenty of houses hugging the shoreline will be doomed.