Sustainababble

Epping Forest, or "Effing Forest" as it's known to the locals, is at the heart of Luke Turner's wonderful 2019 book about sexuality, trauma, god and personal recovery.The forest, Luke says, hums with an energy of people both enjoying the place but also getting up to things they can't do, and being people they can't be, in their normal lives. It's a human landscape, and kinda always has been - in contrast to the hippified, somewhat problematic idea of 'untouched' woodland.And despite all its undeniable loveliness, it's not necessarily a place which magically 'cures' your ills, no matter what forest-bathing evangelists might claim.We natter to Luke about all this, covering off grumble mags, Throbbing Gristle, Peter Lilley MP and the soullnessness of St Albans along the way.As you may have gathered, this week's episode features what prudes describe as 'adult themes', so you might want to avoid it if you're listening with kids and don't fancy trying to explain what a jazz mag is.You can find Luke's article about the pandemic and inequality of access to nature here.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

The babble, it must be said, has a problem with authority. Probably cos of our upbringing or something. But this week, The Authority – specifically the Advertising Standards Authority – shot up in our estimation after it said NO, PURVEYORS OF SH*T LAWNS, YOU CANNOT CALL SH*T LAWNS ECO-FRIENDLY.Huzzah!BUT, they simultaneously stamped on vegan ads, so The Authority is firmly back in the bastards column again. We think.Also this week, Joe ‘Hey! I’m still alive!’ Biden gets all militaristic about heat pumps and Dave gets all heat pumped about Rishi Sunak.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

If you were until recently, say, sustainability overlord at IKEA, should you be viewed as a suit who slapped green respectability onto a company that flooded living rooms with unnecessary tat? Or, perhaps, as a radical, transforming one of the word's biggest businesses into among the greenest while bringing veggie balls to the masses?Well, Steve Howard is said person - currently boss of sustainability at Singaporean investment fund Temasek - and as luck would have it he agreed to come on the babble and be asked about all things 'business' and the planet. And he doesn't even have a book out.Because if we're totally honest, for so many of us greenies, the 'B' word alone gets our babble antenna pinging. But, y'know, should it?Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

Bring out the bunting, close the streets, give everyone an extra holiday! No, not for the Queen's platinum wotsit, for the fact that the Aussies have voted out another massive inhofe!Yep, believe it or not, this week we say cheery bye-bye to former PM Scott Morrison, purveyor of weapons grade bullshit and world-leading climate inaction. And, it must be said, Olympic standard inhofery towards anyone who isn't Scott Morrison. To understand how and why ScoMo got the heave-ho, and to avoid an entire episode of Dave and Ol yelling HA HA HA HA and doing a silly dance, we natter to noted Aussie climate guru and politics wizard Ketan Joshi.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

The night sky, it seems, is getting brighter. At least according to some not-science we got sent by some not-scientists. But whether it's true or not (it almost certainly isn't) the question of light pollution got us thinking. So this week we rattle off all the ways in which the simple act of making sure we can see where we're all going is in fact abysmally bad for life on earth.Here's to another 250 episodes eh.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

We live in a desperately cynical world - christ, the Babble should know - but a few public figures remain untarnished, standing tall as beacons of trustworthiness while our shared consensus collapses around us. The O.G. Big Dave is perhaps the most trusted of them all, the mere idea of him lying too horrible to comprehend. Which is perhaps why, when *he* tells us the planet is on fire and it's all our fault - unlike, say, every climate activist - the message is heard, listened to, and believed.It's also why he must never be allowed to retire or, frankly, drop off the perch.So to celebrate his recent 96th birthday, we ask: who really is this nonagenarian newt nuzzler? What did he do before he was climbing mountains of bat shit on telly? And do his dodgy views about birth control mean he should be a permanent resident of Inhofe corner?Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

You might think being dead is when you can finally stop worrying about your impact on the planet. You'd be wrong.Be it burrying, burning, or buggering off to space, there are myriad options for dealing with one's remains, and not all of them particularly courteous to the living organisms you leave behind.So, inspired by an email from the intriguing sounding www.earthfuneral.com, this week Dave quizes Ol on the different ways people (or at least, Americans) have come up with to dispose of the recently departed.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

In a rare bit of good news for the nation's youth, a new natural history GCSE means 16 year olds might one day appreciate fauna as much as they do Fortnite.Author & conservation goddess Mary Colwell is the driving force behind the 10 yr + campaign to persuade the UK government to introduce this new qualification, no mean feat given the introductions they prefer to make are between plutocrat A and party fundraiser B. ALLEGEDLY.We natter to Mary about how on earth she got this campaign over the line - featuring Bond-style train chases, among other things - as well as the spell-binding power of the natural world, and why she's cur-razy about curlews [sorry, ed.].So strap in for an immensely heart-warming chat with someone to whom future generations may owe a significant debt.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

Kelp. That's what's gonna save the world. Not trees, kelp. Or seagrass. Or some other form of wibbly algae that lives in the sea and isn't a plant.Bingeing carbon; hoovering up chemical nasties in the water; being home for the ickle fishies; being turned into non-plastic plastic - seaweed does myriad very important jobs without so much as a sniff of inhofery.And, lest we forget, it can be damn tasty, especially if you're the Welsh.So why don't western countries pay attention to the stuff? Why aren't we farming it at any meaningful scale? Is it really the green Jesus some people claim it to be, or is it just... green?And why, WHY, would anyone put something as unattractive as laver bread in their gob?Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].

Keep Out. Two little words that carry such unquestioned authority. But why are we so well behaved when what we're kept out of is often the thing we're all lacking - green space, the beguiling attraction of the natural world, things that aren't manicured and sanitised? How did England's green and pleasant lands come to be so hostile to most of us plebs? We quiz author and illustrator Nick Hayes, who has literally written the book on trespass. Two in fact - the latest, The Trespasser's Companion, being the follow up to his mind-expanding 2020 effort The Book of Trespass.Head to https://www.trespasserscompanion.org/ for more, including the opportunity to contribute to the Trespass Tripadvisor by uploading pictures and notes from your own transgressions.And join the Right to Roam campaign, demanding far better access to the countryside for everyone in England.Sustainababble is your friendly environment podcast, out weekly. Theme music by the legendary Dicky Moore – @dickymoo. Sustainababble logo by the splendid Arthur Stovell at Design by Mondial. Ecoguff read out by Arabella.Love the babble? Bung us a few pennies at www.patreon.com/sustainababble.MERCH: sustainababble.teemill.comAvailable on iTunes, Spotify, Acast & all those types of things, or at sustainababble.fish. Visit us at @thebabblewagon and at Facebook.com/sustainababble. Email us at [email protected].