By Sue King

Hi everyone
I have held back posting as I have been in awe of everyone else. I then realised, you know, it's ok to be the ordinary amongst the extra-ordinary. I am ordinary, I come from a working class family in Manchester. I was always told that I always wanted something bigger and better and that I was better off just knowing my place. I was supposed not to want adventure and to be content with what I had as my parents said this was the true way to happiness. I remember in the coal miners strikes in the 1970's when we went weeks without electricity as being my happiest times. We still had gas for our stoves but we talked for hours in candlelight. I have seen the happiest faces amongst subsistence farmers in Greece and in Spain, I have heard the joy of children's voices carrying over mountains in Nepal and I grieve every tree which is sliced down. 

Having an internal struggle to do the best, do the right job, buy the right meat, manage with one car, build a frog pond, buy solar, sell solar, buy organic, eat less, don't use the treadmill, walk the dog....compost the dog....should my dog be vegetarian? how many kids one or two? do I get buried in pine and be composted or do I turn to ashes in a furnace, which is the least carbon intense? and of course so it goes on

Seeing an inconvenient truth was my call to act, for so long I had been wanting someone else to make the changes, stop what they were doing...A group of six of us set up a community action group called lighterfootprints in 2006, not build on a committee, but a community group running education forums with politicians, campaigning and educating ourselves and others. People have gone on to do all sorts of interesting climate related things, some needing a spell of impoverishment for them. Bee keeping, carbon accounting training, health climate action, education in Vietnam etc. Others stay join in the action and the group is fluid, come, go, move on, share....whatever, its all good.

One simple fact remains, five people cutting 20% is as good as one cutting 100% so I set off my track of self flagellation and did a home sustainability course, to get more people to stop that 20% getting wasted in their house.I then did a course on carbon accounting so I could put this in maths. I bought a $1200 LED TV using 30% of the electricity. My son sprayed water on it, rusted the pins and it had to be thrown away, thrown away....noone even wants the parts. the carbon emissions in Nitrogen Trifluoride are 17,200 times that of carbon dioxide and it does not even feature in Kyoto - so guess want, unless its expensive its getting piffed into the atmosphere. 

I still come back to, use it, use it less, look after it, resell it, stop it escaping, share it, protect it, work round it not through it. 

I'm ordinary, I just take an interest in what moves, what smiles, what lives, whats sad, and take the view that everyone and everything as as precious as everyone else. 

I am here to find more ways of motivating people to feel they can make a difference at home here in Australia.