Brian Pollitt worked in Cuba from 1963-68 as Technical Director of the Commission of Social Studies, carrying out rural surveys and appraising the socio-economic conditions of the Cuban peasantry. Subsequently, he carried out frequent periods of fieldwork, focussing on the economic and social history of modern Cuba with special reference to the sugar economy. From 1995-2015, he was the principal organiser of the charity ‘Scottish Medical Aid for Cuba’, He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University.
Trees are an absolute essential to human well being. They aren’t just pretty, trees supply us with oxygen, keep our cities cool in summer, absorb pollution, act as a wind break to keep us warmer in winter, help reduce soil erosion and reduce noise. Yet Scotland has just 4% of its indigenous tree population left. Mature trees are the most beneficial to our environment, yet we are losing them at an alarming rate.
Luckily, there is loads you can do to help this festive season.
Reduce
You can start by reducing the amount of paper you use. We know that’s easier said than done this time of year, but it is possible. Consider using boxes instead of wrapping paper – they can be reused for gifts next year, or used as toy storage throughout the year, and children will often have more fun with them than the toys you’ve put in them! if you’re a creative type you can decorate the boxes using last year’s Christmas cards or personalise them with paints or pens.
If you do give in and buy wrapping paper, look out for the ones made of recycled paper. it can be a little more expensive, but is usually more durable and thicker so you use less of it, and it isn’t made of virgin tree pulp. Keep hold of the cardboard tubes in the middle too – you’ll be needing those tomorrow.
If you treat yourself to a takeaway coffee regularly, you’re using a lot of trees with the cardboard cups and sleeves, and it often isn’t recycled. Ask santa to buy you a plastic or ceramic takeaway cup to use instead. Often big coffee chains will give you a discount for bringing your own cup.
Don’t use paper napkins this Christmas – cloth napkins look so much prettier, and you can throw them in the washing machine and use them year after year. The same goes for kitchen paper. It may seem like the easy option when you’ve it a house full of people spilling things, but a cheap pack of muslin cloths or jaycloths can be thrown in the washing and used all year round – for spillages, window cleaning, keeping in the car, even as emergency hankies.
Switch to paperless bank statements and bills. Every household that switcheshe to paperless bills saves a tree per year. If we all did that, the results would be phenomenal. plus it’s all less paper to have to shred and recycle or file away- and that means less housework.
Switch to e-books. It took an estimated 8.4 million trees to print every copy of the seven Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. (Yes, someone actually calculated that). Most books don’t do as well as the Harry Potter saga, but the Green Press Initiative and Book Industry Study Group claim that paper companies harvest as many as 30 million trees annually for the books sold in the U.S. alone. The number of trees used for newspapers is uncertain, but must be in the millions, since 24 billion copies are published a year, and only 30% are recycled. Then there are the 350 million magazines; again, the tree usage is uncertain. Needless to say, purchasing digital copies of your favorite books, magazines, and newspapers for your e-reader is a great way to save trees, and one of the easiest aspects of going paperless!
Eat less beef. The production of meat in general requires tons of resources. Factory farms need space, water and food for animals they raise for food. Beef products are particularly hard on trees, since Amazonian rain forests are being cut down to make way for cattle ranches.
Reuse
Encourage your children to draw on both sides of paper. You’ll have less “artwork” cluttering up your house, and you can flip pictures on the fridge over for a new look.
Is your Christmas decorations box full of last year’s Christmas cards? Cut round the designs on the front and you have unique, ready made gift tags with no added paper waste. If you didn’t save last year’s, don’t worry, just save this year’s and you’ll have all your tags ready for next year.
The average household uses at least 1 roll of toilet paper per week. Don’t panic, we aren’t about to ask you to reuse that! But recycled toilet paper is available, and isn’t a lot more expensive. One roll of toilet paper per week adds up to 52 cardboard tubes per year. You can use these for all sorts of things, including using them to grow and transplant seedlings, for craft activities like making your own Christmas crackers, and you can even sell them on eBay for crafters, gardeners or those with hamsters, gerbils or other rodent pets. If you have a few already, hang on to them. You will need some tomorrow!
Recycle
Most councils now recycle paper and cardboard. You can shred paper with personal information on before recycling if you’re concerned (or you can add shredded paper and newspaper to your compost heap). It has never been easier to recycle paper products from home. You can find details of your councils recycling services here
Donate/Volunteer
There are lots of charities working tirelessly to help protect our trees, and they need our help. Check out the work of Stand for Trees
Or look at the many varied ways you can help the Woodland Trust
The Rainforest Action network aims to educate people about tree conservation and help everyone find a way to be part of saving our forests.
And Greenpeace has projects around the world aimed at helping preserve our trees.
You can also check out Volunteer Match to find local ways you can help.
The United States, with the consent of the United Kingdom as laid down in the Quebec Agreement, dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, during the final stage of World War II. The two bombings killed at least 129,000 people, and devastated the cities.
Many of the survivors have recorded their memories of those days. Fujie Urata Matsumoto, relates this scene:
“The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman’s head. I looked at the face to see if I knew her. It was a woman of about forty. She must have been from another part of town – I had never seen her around here. A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out…She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned.”
Even decades after the bombings, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered abnormally high rates of leukemia, birth and tumours. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum states,
“The question of how to inform young people about the horror of war, the threat of nuclear weapons and the importance of the peace is therefore a matter of passing concern. The citizens of Nagasaki pray that this miserable experience will never be repeated on Earth. We also consider it our duty to ensure that the experience is not forgotten but passed on intact to future generations. It is imperative that we join hands with all peace-loving people around the world and strive together for the realization of lasting world peace.”
Yet, 72 years later we still have a stockpile of 160 nuclear warheads in the UK. Each of those warheads is eight times more powerful than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima. And they are just 25 miles from Glasgow.
Despite fierce public opposition and prohibitive expense, MPs voted to replace trident this year. You can arm yourself with facts about trident on the CND briefing page before contacting your representative and letting them know what you think of that. You can find their contact details here.
You can support the CND in a variety of ways, by becoming a member, getting involved with their campaigns and petitions through their site, or by doing some of your Christmas shopping, including christmas cards, through their shop.
A loaded gun wont set you free…” -Lyrics in the context of my growing up in Northern Ireland that had meaning beyond the meaning Ian Curtis perhaps intended. As a young man I was continually questioning all that was going on around me. Growing up in a mid-Ulster market town, answers were difficult to come by. At 14 I joined CND and around he same time I read Cry Freedom and had my address included in Christian Aids anti apartheid (snail) mail list. I found out about racism in Australia by sending off for a report on the plight of the native Aboriginal people and the organisation I sent away to had the genius idea to include a report on Ireland north and south and the inequalities within the two states. A year later I stole a book about Marx from my “non-denominational” Proddy High school. I stole it, rather than borrow because Marx/the Cold War was associated with Republicanism and Nationalism by those around me. I really could not see anything within its pages that I disagreed with.
All of these things made me think.
I’ll come back to New Dawn Fades in a minute.
Of course other things made me think… challenged me… Made me realise that lots of these beautiful, wonderful, in other ways open, friendly and rational people were saying and supporting the most unreasonable things. Their entire house of bigotted cards was supported by an imaginary being I could not twist my belief system to believe in. And I tried! When seemingly reasonable, funny, kind people say that They had been found by God; were born again; found God; seen the light; were saved and so on, I tried to find what that meant. I looked at ways to think of God that wasn’t this beardy Marx like figure… to no avail. The house of cards of loyalism and unionism seemed equally irrational. “Directionless, so plain to see… The loaded gun wont set you free…” lyrics that could be applied to both sides in the war going on around me.
All around me, death and mayhem drove the engine of our personal and economic society.
And death and mayhem was being cited as a solution by all sides including a Government not elected by Northern Irish people. Thatcher’s solution stepped up the killings and brought bombs closer to me. I saw mushroom clouds, broken, mangled buildings, cars and people and the aftermath of death and revenge and the hatred it perpetuated. The people around me, including me, were in the midst of an undiagnosed trauma. A violated people. And seemingly all of those in charge were out of control… On one hand saying death and murder were wrong, but on the other hand arming more people, and sending in SAS death squads to bereave more people and to harden more and more hearts.
“I’ve walked on water, run though fire, just can’t seem to feel it anymore.” And the denial by all of us within the North of Ireland about the effect of the fire engulfing us, the numbing of our feelings for those around us, was plain to see by any outsiders who came to visit.
Political music influenced me a lot. From the Specials, The Police (yes they did!) and Fun Boy Three through to Peter Gabriel And even Bono (who breeched the dam of Bloody Sunday denial). But the anger, stark, monochrome, industrial hopelessness of Joy Division did even more. It allowed me to realise that those around me might not have solution. The politicians and those they targeted with their biting, bigoted or rationalised violent solutions through to the preachers preaching difference through an imaginary, patriarchal deity were pulling us in ever decreasing circles of murder and hatred.
The track that sums up my freedom from the narrow minded sectarianism was not written with this in mind… But it was part of the freeing of my mind. “Different colours, different shades, over each mistakes were made…” and the shoots of hope I see at home beyond the marches and ire of some politicians as ordinary people reject triumphalism and violence as a solution give different meaning to Curtis words than he intended, once again.
We drank our tins of Satzenbrau shivering on the school roof looking across the streetlit mid-Ulster valley that was my hometown of Banbridge. Another Friday night without a care.
Out of the six of us, I was the only one working. The others were all still in High School. We all loved the new found freedom of youth, drink and music- and some weekends, before we hit whatever pub we wanted to go to that week- or whatever youth club or nightclub, we listened to music from a mono battery powered tape-recorder and debated the merits of the synthesizer and its impact on guitar music.
Alex had eclectic taste- BA Robertson, Rod Stewart and chart stuff. Colin was into Jim Steinman in a big way. I was into my post-punk stuff, Joy Division, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cabaret Voltaire… The Mod was into the Jam, The Kinks, The Who and the likes and Roger and Jackie, the only girl with us that night, were into Punk. We took turns with tracks, but it was The Mod’s stereo. The Jam blared through the cool night air. The noises of the town wafted up to us, inviting us to join the laughter coming from the streets where the Rollerdrome, smoke filled and full of the confused noises of disco and Donkey Kong, Space Firebird and Defender vied for our attention with The First and Last, Campbells, The Coach, the “big church” youth club, Gowdy’s or just hanging about on the streets “gaunching” with people… asking about unseen pals; gaping, stuttering at girls; feeling inadequate as Lutton took to the dancefloor and never stuttered once. Or playing snooker.
My favourite part of the night was the carryout. A few cans of beer and a bit of craic, usually freezing in a hedge, at the side of a gable wall or a school grounds.
The music was my freedom. It promised much. A world before us. A world we would change. The Mod dressed in his mod clothes, “target” on his back. Roger in jeans and grey denim jacket. Colin in a burgundy bomber, Alex in a fleecy, furry tartan jacket, me in black baggies, boxer boots, a flaming cross teeshirt and long trenchcoat- fashion victim extraordinaire- and Jackie in her forbidden makeup, pvc trousers and punk top she stashed in a bag in a friends house so her ma and da wouldn’t see.
We were ready for a new world- or at least a few more beers, a chip and gravy from the chinese and another box of fags.
Then it was Roger’s turn to play his tape.
The music didn’t thrash out in the way his choice usually did. It wasn’t California Uber Alles or Pretty Vacant. The guitar sounded almost like a sitar. The opening vocals almost whispered.
“It was nothing like that in my day, not here in my town
We didn’t get things all our way till we were full-grown
Now they go into pubs and you’re gonna get mugged in my town…”
We stopped speaking over the music.
“It’s SLF’s new one.”
We knew of SLF of course. Alternative Ulster. Suspect Device. Barbed Wire Love. Wasted Life. Tin Soldiers.
Loud shouts about the shite of our wee world. This world we knew. One that visited this valley from the outside now and again. Driven in deliveries of mayhem that couldn’t and didn’t differentiate between catholic and protestant children, women and men. A world in which music had been a “legitimate target” when after playing our local big venue, the next big thing, The Miami were blown to bits and shot to death.
This was music that told the truth about murderous “sides.”
At the time through my rejection of the local version of rebellion- hard rock; meaningless Billy Idol lookalikes and Doctor Martens that did nothing to Kick Over the Statues, but instead marched to them to salute, I rejected punk.
Outwardly. To suit my image.
My “post punk” *self* image, because no-one here really gave a shit about how I looked nor did they care for the hopelessness of Joy Division or the inaccessibility of the lyrics of The Bunnymen.
Secretly, though, SLF touched me through the nonsense of being told, about my best friend, “but do you know Mickey’s a catholic?” And through the fear of the threatening phone calls my joiner dad got from paramilitaries for doing his job in their territory, SLF comforted me that others thought “sides” where nonsense.
Mickey’s mum’s Sacred Heart pictures on the wall were no reason to hate. And my rejection of religion didn’t make me a protestant for others to hate.
“So you read about it every day, in the headlines
How they take and take and drive away, sex and late nights
And it’s gotta be wrong, because they’re so young…”
My childhood was happy. A mother and father who worked hard to give us Blackpool once a year and a great Christmas. A childhood my society tried to steal. The big men who forced my father to hand over the few quid “protection money” from the corporation he worked for. A low paid worker forced to be the middleman between the multi-million pound rehousing project in Belfast and the Shankill Butchers.
After the cartoons, I watched Gloria Hunnyford tell me why my da’ might be late… “incidents” in Belfast, Lisburn or the Maze.
Our family were not outwardly “kissy,” but we loved each other. Our livingroom curtains could conceal me as I stood behind them looking down the road, waiting. And on seeing the yellow Farrans van drive down the road my heart would leap, but I would control my relief and shout into the kitchen where my mum kept the dinner warm, “he’s home!”
“They’re only bits of kids, they’re only bits of kids
It’s always bits of kids today.”
“This is class, Roger.” Jackie loved it, so we loved it.
I wished we drank slower. But out of booze it was time to hit the town and to try to make the fiver stretch to a few more beers and a chinese.
“Where do yiz fancy going?”
We climbed down from our sniper nest and walked down the leafy lane to the main Newry Road. A road that took everyone from this end of town to work in Belfast, Newry, the Shoe Factory or the town. I looked up the hill towards the factory where I would end up working in a few years time- a place in which there were sectarian quotas which were met through predominantly catholic offices and predominantly protestant offices; catholic run lasting lines and protestant run sewing machines. All controlled by English General managers sent to oversee us.
Roger and Jackie walked on. Jackie oblivious of the fact she had legitimised this meeting of nerds by her presence. Roger, Embassy Regal hanging from his mouth, and Jackie disapeared to somewhere cooler than The First and Last.
We walked passed the nursery school where I had been painting Humpty Dumpty’s for the wee ones on the windows when the bomb went off; passed the empty shell that was once Stevey Shepherd’s motorbike shop, across the bridge under which the controlled explosions were executed; past the shop the eleven year old boy died of shrapnel wounds and through the side door into the lounge.
A “catholic bar” where both religions relaxed, played “Crazy Climber” and snooker, and we were never questioned about our age. A few more pints into a world of gaunching with our mates.
” Broken cities ‘n’ broken hearts, bits of people who fall apart
In my town
It’s always bits of kids today
Bits of kids, we’re always, here in my town.”
Stiff Little Fingers are a band I have loved since. A band under valued. A band who, along with their rivals The Undertones and the others from the Good Vibrations camp and along with The Miami and The Shankill Butchers, bomb sales, parades and catholic and protestant quotas, shaped me.
Even if you try to avoid news coverage of it, you must have seen the horrifying pictures coming out of Yemen. A year ago this month, conflict in Yemen escalated, and today more than 80% of the population – some 20 million people – are in need of humanitarian assistance. More than 2.4 million people have fled their homes, and more than 14 million are unable to meet their food needs. We’ve all seen the pictures of skeletal, starving babies and mums for whom all hope has died. We can’t begin to imagine enduring a year of watching your children starve, against a backdrop of chaos, poor (or no) santitation, and endless violence.
The United Nations and humanitarian organizations are working to get aid to families in crisis in the country, and the UN has made an appeal for $1.8 billion for food, water, health care, shelter, and protection issues, but only 12% has been funded to date.
There are lots of agencies working tirelessly to help and you can find their details at the end of this post. All the tiny donations add up, so maybe forgo that extra bottle of Bucks Fizz this Christmas and donate that fiver to a humanitarian organisation instead – the feel good factor will last far longer.
If times are hard for you, as they are for so many this year, and you cant give cash to help, dont depair. There is still real help you can give.
This week MPs held a vote to stop supporting Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, at least until the UN can carry out a thorough investigation into whether the Saudi regime has broken international law. Despite the fact that the bill didn’t cover UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, it was still defeated by a majority of 90, with over 100 Labour MPs abstaining from the vote.
This is not good enough.
The UK are already the second biggest arms dealer in the world. Most of the weapons being used against a starving and terrified population in Yemen are supplied by us.
Please write to your MP or MSP (you can find out how to write to them here and whether they voted to withdraw support here) and let them know that this isn’t acceptable. Let’s ramp up the pressure on our representatives to stop turning a blind eye to evil in our name.
If you’d like to donate to help humanitarian organisations working in Yemen, you can find their details here:
– The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) mobilizes resources and technical support to assist Yemenis in need. As a coordinating body, OCHA works closely with the Red Cross, Red Crescent Movement, UN agencies, and local non-governmental organizations. OCHA also provides funding to NGOs and partners on the ground working in hard-to-reach areas.
– The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)and partners provide for a number of resources for Yemeni children and their families, including access to clean water and sanitation, child and social protection, and education. UNICEF has vaccinated over 4.5 million Yemeni children under 5 for measles and polio in 2015, as well as provided nutritional care to over 4 million Yemeni children in 2015.
– The World Food Programme (WFP) has three main goals in its Yemen response: 1) To deliver food to people affected by conflict, malnourished children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers, 2) to provide emergency food assistance, and 3) to help the humanitarian aid community by transporting fuel into the country. Every month, WFP assists millions of people through in-kind food assistance.
– The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) works to safeguard displaced families who have fled violence. UNHCR and partners have delivered household items and emergency shelter, such as tents, mattresses, and blankets to more than 740,000 internally displaced people.
– The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and partners are providing sexual and gender-based violence treatment and counseling services, hygiene kits, emergency obstetric care, ante-natal care, and other services. Yemen is an important area for UNFPA since 2.9 million women and girls are of reproductive age, with an estimated 500,000 pregnancies.
– The World Health Organization (WHO)works with partners to provide medical aid and supplies to Yemenis in need. WHO’s program areas in Yemen include emergency preparedness and humanitarian action, health systems development, reproductive health, and violence and injury prevention.
– The UN Development Programme (UNDP)is working with partners in Yemen to promote development, clear mines, restore basic services, and provide livelihood and job opportunities, among other efforts.
We have a super easy one for you today – you don’t even have to get off your sofa, it will take around a minute, and it won’t cost you a single penny. But you can literally save the lives of eight people, and improve the lives of up to 120,000 more.
It takes moments to sign up to the organ donor register. 90% of us think being an organ donor is the right thing to do. But only 30% of us sign up to the organ donor register. There are nearly 6500 People currently waiting for organs. Many of will never get one.
One of our contributers, V, wanted to share her personal experience on this:
My son was born with congenital heart defects. Thankfully for us, two rounds of surgery and years of meds was enough to “fix” him, and he is now a very happy, healthy, sporty child with no lasting issues.
Spending time on the children’s cardiac ward really opened my eyes to how many children are desperate for an organ. The staff do their best to make their lives happy, comfortable and stimulating, but no child is happy spending their life in bed.
When my son was in surgery, I got speaking to the young lady in the next bed. She was sixteen, almost seventeen, and excitedly told me about how her birthday was coming up, and she was looking forward to getting driving lessons. She was determined to travel, see the world. She wanted to work with children in developing countries.
She was born with an enlarged heart, and, as she grew, it was causing more and more problems. By the time I met her, her heart was the site of a basketball. It had pushed her lungs out of place, causing them to protrude from her back, making it look like she had a hunch. She couldn’t sit, lie down or breathe without extreme discomfort, and was too breathless to stand. She needed a heart and lung transplant to survive. She was certain she would get one.
She never did.
A week after our conversation, that bright, articulate young woman, who was determined to help make the world a better place, had died.
She never made it to seventeen.
By signing up to the organ donor register, you can help stop not just one family going through that kind of pain, but eight. If you consent to donating your tissue or your eyes, you can improve the lives of up to 120,000 more.
You can be a hero, in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea. And you don’t even need to leave the house.
Don’t forget to tell your next of kin what you’ve done, as they can override your wishes. Maybe you’ll convince them to sign up too, and you’ll save twice as many people.
Its that time of year where we get through more plastic packaging than ever – plastic wrapped around wrapping paper and christmas cards, all the usual plastic packaging around our fruit and veg but supersized because we have to get enough food to feed an army, just in case. And dont get us started on plastic toys imprisoned in plastic packaging with plastic cable ties all wrapped in cellophane. Do toy manufacturers think that Barbie is going to escape from her box and run off with Darth Vader or something?
Having so much packaging is annoying for us, but it is deadly for our marine life. There’s currently over 5 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans. It’s poisoning our fish, choking sea turtles and being ingested by dolphins who can’t digest it, so with their stomachs full, they starve. Festive, huh?
Luckily, there is lots you can do to help. From the simple things like taking a reusable shopping bag out with you, reusing or recycling whenever you can and even giving up rubbish bags in favour of tipping your waste directly into the wheelie bin to save on plastic getting into landfill sites.
If you have children you can reuse plastic bottles in all sorts of ways, by making them into bird feeders, bath toys or using them for junk modelling. If you don’t have children, pop into your local nursery or primary school and ask if they need any donations of clean bottles or boxes or plastic tubs for their arts and crafts lessons.
Luckily there is a fantastic organisation called The Ocean Cleanup which is working tirelessly to remove the plastic from our oceans and protect our marine life. Visit their site for info on how they are fighting to protect our oceans, and scroll to the bottom of the page to see how you can help, and where to donate to the organisation.
For nearly six years Syria has been in the midst of a civil and growingly international war. With hundreds of thousands of lost lives and tens of millions of displaced people, the conflict seems to not be nearing any closer to an end.
From barrel bombs, chemical weapons, parachute bombs and conventional ballistics, the people of Aleppo are caught in the middle of a deadly war zone.
There is a hashtag movement to #EvacuateAleppoKids since the last children’s hospital in the city was destroyed, and more lives snuffed out, buried in the rubble of their last refuge.
Volunteers in the city still run towards the blasts and potential further dropped bombs. Regardless of whichever side is buried in the rubble, they will dig them out. More often than not the most impacted are civilians and children.
They will fight fires, stabilise buildings, save lives. They are brave, they are the White Helmets.
This Christmas think about these heroic folk. Spare a thought for those who cannot escape these horrors. Check out the charities gathering aid for the poor people left destitute from war.
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