What If Coronavirus is a Dress Rehearsal for Something Way More Sinister?

Some thing’s been nagging me for a while. Kind of an itch really. And it’s been growing since before the Covid-19 nightmare. Like deja vue in reverse. That what we’re living through now is just a dress rehearsal for something much bigger. Maybe we’re experiencing the appetiser. You know, the precursor to a scintillating, jaw dropping main course – a goddamned Big Mac and fries!

What if Coronavirus is just the first step to something way more sinister? What if it’s like an early skirmish in a much deadlier war. And what if that war’s lurking just around the corner. What if Donald Trump was right and all the thousands of scientists were wrong about climate change but not in the way that we might expect. What if their predictions for climate catastrophe are actually too cautious.

What if we only have a few more years before we get hit by another global catastrophy – you know like another deadly virus or massive droughts, endless rainstorms, flooding, coastal collapse, or a combination of the above leading to huge population migrations, starvation and a devastating world war.

What if the world’s wildlife get so pissed off that they finally turn on us – lions and tigers roaming the streets of New York or London randomly attacking people. Snakes in our showers, tarantulas up our pj’s. What if aliens drop in to nuke us because they agree with the wildlife and have had it with watching us from afar while we fumble with the planet like a bunch of 3 year olds. Or what if, way, way scarier than any of the above, what if Donald Trump wins the next US election and we get another four years of his friggin twitter account.

ENOUGH!! ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!! ENOUGH I SAY!!

What if we DO SOMETHING. What if we stand up and fight back. What if I didn’t have to write this domesday crap of a climate nightmare that’s starting to make me wanna find the next cliff and nose dive it like a kestrel. What if my rantings were about our progress defeating Corona and climate change and inequality and obesity and all things neo-con, er Liberal, er fascist.

What if we all just wake up one day and decide that we’d had enough. Enough of just waiting around watching storms get worse, public health get more viruses, forests get more fires, politicians get more useless and ExxonMobil make more money. What if we act now to survive our extinction – to roll back global warming. To save the planet.

What if we decided that Donnie and Bolsonightmarearo were wrong and Jacinda and Greta were right and that the way to attack the Corona consuming every inch of our daily, increasingly Netflix driven lives, was to kill it by waging war on the real problem – the climate thing. Getting all the public money flying around to go on green, healthy, climate friendly initiatives including walkable, bike loving cities, green spaces everywhere with rewilding verges, parks and commons.

What if all national treasures, reserves and crown lands were rewilded, what if every country started a major national tree planting campaign, what if the politicians and business leaders went all in and insisted on 100% renewable energy by 2035. What if us citizens stopped eating meat before dinner and shopped on foot to local stores and walked to work and to school and got on aeroplanes way less. What if we invested more in universal healthcare systems. What if our carbon emissions starting decreasing on an annual basis, what if pollution became an old desease we eradicated like malaria, what if national pride was restored by living in the greenest, healthiest and happiest place on the planet. You know, like Disneyland or the Playboy mansion or New Zealand.

And then again, what if we don’t. What if we do nothing and we have another five years of Corona 1.0 and Corona 2.0 and Donnie and Bozzer and heat and rain and fire and bedlem. What if we do nothing and the planet swallows us up and spits us out like a bug in a Big Mac. Or what if China and America decide that nuclear war is easier than tackling climate chaos and more fun than the endless twitter back and forth. What if Xi Ping Pong and Donnie end up being the last men standing – you know like a same sex Adam and Eve. What if these were like our least few years on this earth – like EVER.

You choose and God help you.

I’m emigrating to New Zealand.

If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.

10 Steps to Make Your Business Climate Friendly & Achieve Net Zero

As companies reopen with new Covid-19 regulations, nearly all will be making some fundamental changes to how they do business given the new landscape and changing consumer sentiment. Things are going to be quite different. Further, all businesses have a requirement to achieve Net Zero – i.e. your overall business activities need to be carbon neutral.

Employees and customers not only require higher standards of public hygiene but they will also be turning to businesses that are environmentally conscious. Being an environmentally responsible business, with environmentally sound practices, products and services will become the new norm. Try and get ahead of it.

We have created a simple action plan to help businesses adopt some simple steps to getting climate ready and to achieve NetZero.

Here are our 10 Steps to Make Your Business Climate Friendly:

1. Switch to renewable energy in your office, factories, vehicle fleets and tools. There are a growing number of green energy suppliers so finding the right one for your needs is quite easy. Also, electric vehicles and tools are becoming much more pervasive.
2. Hire on-site employees who live within a cycle commute – the rest could work from home. Help keep pollution down and fully embrace the new ways of working. Now that you have had a few months to put in place successful home working routines and processes during the Coronavirus lockdown it’s time to lock those benefits in.
3. Minimise waste and recycle everything you can. The Zero Waste movement is starting to pick up some steam – try and adopt what is practical in an office setting. Become a single use plastics free business.
4. Lease an eco-office, warehouse or factory with a zero carbon footprint. At a minimum make sure your office is as well insulated as possible for the winter and allows as much sunlight, for natural warming, during the late spring and summer. That way you will use less energy heating your offices.
5. Train employees in DSP’s 10 steps to Help Solve the Climate Change Crisis.
6. Rewild your green areas. Plant trees, shrubs and wild grasses – the combination of the three provides the basic habitats for wildlife and insects. Place benches in nature to support employee wellbeing.
7. Train your company leaders in the methods and approaches to developing environmentally conscious behaviours, practises and products. 
8. Source eco materials and local supplies wherever possible from environmentally conscious suppliers. 
9. Organise team meetings and away days at eco-friendly hotels and venues. Try to set up outdoor meeting spaces and actively support outdoor meetings when employees, suppliers or customers are at your offices.
10. Measure the improvements and accomplishments you are achieving on the road to becoming fully climate friendly on a 6 monthly basis and communicate your progress to employees and customers.

Building an environmentally conscious organisation is an exciting process and one which will prove highly satisfying for you and your organisation. Done right, it will also add considerable value to your products or services as well as your brand. Include all your stakeholders in the journey – it could prove quite empowering and motivational.

At DSP we help organisations and individuals to become more climate friendly and adopt healthier living approaches. We offer a cost effective online app, DSP Online, to help you better understand how to become environmentally conscious with simple actionable techniques gleaned from the day to day approaches and learnings at DSP’s center of excellence in the UK southwest. Sign up to DSP Online today – CLICK HERE.

5 New Long Term Consumer Trends from Coronavirus

It is clear that the Coronavirus crisis, the lockdowns and the new sets of behaviours required to survive it have brought about a number of short term changes but, perhaps more importantly, Covid-19 will usher in a number of new, longer term trends. We believe that there are 5 major trends that will establish themselves as more permanent global shifts.

We should not forget that the massive societal adaption currently in process is profound for it is lasting, it is global and it has extreme structural economic consequences. We will have to adapt to another 12 – 18 months of social distancing across our societies and businesses while also accepting that a once in a century great depression has started and will take many years to work itself through.

How we adapt to these changes as consumers, as businesses and as politicians will prove to be a vital barometer of our likely success in the coming years.

Here are 5 New Long Term Consumer Trends from Coronavirus:

1. Healthier living – our attitude to food, exercise, wellbeing and the environment will be fundamentally altered by Coronavirus. A growing body of evidence, alongside a once in a lifetime lockdown experience, should give rise to a grand awakening of our combined consciousness around a more frugal, a more natural and a healthier existence. This, in turn, will accelerate the shift towards more sustainable and eco-friendly products and services and a greater need for in-home enhancements and experiences. Expect to see wider adoption of vegan diets, plant based cuisine, organic foods and drinks, eco-fashion, eco-tourism, eco-DIY, books on climate friendly behaviors and activities, greater focus on energy and health efficient homes and offices, less international travel and an accelerated shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles and tools. We should also expect to see a greater demand for nature based experiences, gardening in general, wildlife gardening, rewilding, vegetable gardens and foraging.

2. Homeworking – perhaps one of the biggest single economic behavior changes coming from the Coronavirus lockdowns has been the global adoption of home working. This is a trend that has been building for a decade or more but has now cemented itself as the new way for companies to organise themselves post Coronavirus. Every company has had to figure out how to do it and now that they have made the complex shift they will not want to give it up. Indeed, economic necessity will drive its further adoption particularly given the ensuing economic shock. Continued social distancing requirements post lockdown will force companies to redesign offices with fewer desks per square foot meaning fewer employees in the office and more working from home. Employees will also push for continued home working as they will have discovered how much time and stress was wasted on commuting. Home working is logical given the wider shift by businesses to move their organisation online and is a natural consequence of the trend towards knowledge based business and the outsourcing of manufacturing and distribution. After all, if you can serve your customers online why can’t you organise your workforce to work online as well?

3. eServices – as Coronavirus has accelerated the shift to ecommerce it will also create far greater demand for online home services. After all, if you can use a video and perhaps even a remote engineer on Zoom to explain to you how to install the new kitchen sink, or washing machine or simple plumbing fix and it is cheaper, then why not? Particularly as we will remain concerned about allowing tradespeople into our homes for some time after lockdown. We should also see a shift towards online plumbing services, simple electrical, gardening, DIY, car repair and more. Indeed this falls into a growing demand for wider automation across industries.

4. Online Sports & Culture – thanks to social distancing guidelines we will have spent a good portion of 2020 avoiding going to sports events, concerts, live performances and theatres. Instead we will have learnt to consume sports fixtures digitally possibly fused with gaming, watching live concerts on YouTube and enjoying theatre on Netflix. Indeed with the rollout of 5G more immersive, higher-definition digital experiences supported by a new generation of inbuilt and stand alone speakers will make consuming sports and culture from our living room or dining table more enjoyable than ever. Content creators, sports professionals and artists, like any product manufacturer, will have used the Coronavirus crisis as a trigger to shift more of their professional endeavours, content and communications online.

5. Digital Healthcare – for governments to continue to offer universal healthcare at scale but in a more financially sustainable way they will have to shift to digital healthcare. Coronavirus will show us the power of education and communications online using WhatsApp, Zoom or LinkedIn to deliver any kind of business, research or educational meeting. This has made it more than possible for the digital provision of basic healthcare so that doctors brick and mortar surgeries and hospitals can be reserved for a potentially higher number of more seriously ill patients and the future pandemics which are bound to hit us with greater frequency like severe weather events have become a part of our new reality. Indeed, there are a number of all digital healthcare platforms gaining traction across the western world. We should not forget that Covid-19 is just the latest in a regular series of public health crises we are dealing with as a consequence of global warming. Until we start tackling the climate crisis, sustainably removing carbon and other pollutants from our atmosphere while halting the destruction of key habitats for wildlife and natural plant life, we will have to get used to a steady stream of public health crises whether from pandemics, droughts, flooding, wildfires or industrial and urban pollution.

How industries and specific solutions are shaped to address the above 5 trends could have profound implications on our movement, privacy and civil liberties. The right balance, particularly with regard to civil liberties, will need to be maintained. Choosing the right politicians, policies and organisational leaders through this shift will be a greater focus of debate.

But there can be little doubt that the consumers, businesses and politicians that are the quickest and best at adapting to these changes will find the greatest success in the new world. New industries will be born and we should think hard about how we develop our skills so that we can work in the climate industries, eco-product manufacturing and eco-service delivery, healthier living industries, renewable energy and climate science, homeworking product manufacturing, design and consultancy services, digital home services, online professional services, online sports and entertainment and digital healthcare.

If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.

Patience During the Coronavirus Lockdown

As a number of countries reach the mid point of the harsh (we hope) version of the Coronavirus lockdown I thought we should examine patience. After all, we’re gonna need it.

Patience is something we have to relearn cos let’s face it none of us have it any more. We’ve all pretty much gotten the saintly virtue bashed out of us by, well, life. I mean, how in Mahatma Gandhi are we supposed to remain calm and zen like and mr mystic-yogi-go-round-like-an-anorexic-loony-in-a-loin-cloth when we have to put up with CNN 24 hours a day, emails banging at our smartphone like a friggin woodpecker on coke, the bosses ragging on us like we never dumped the parents all while the debts on those damned pay day loans have us perpetually charging around at 3,000 goddamned miles per hour just to keep up with the blasted interest rates/debt collectors/online bank manager avatar and perhaps worse of all – the wife nagging. And all of that acts merely as the day time precursor to a hell bent sleepless night (I wish I was in Seattle) with the twin toddlers blaring away in my left ear like a Harley Davidson with a sawn off exhaust.

So now, like the invisible crack hand, along comes Covid-19 solely to add yet another (like we needed it) stress tanker of fuel to the manic wildfire (sorry Australia) of our clearly non patient lives – even if for one second we put aside the minor, miniature, irrelevant reprieve from the debt collector who’s gone strangely Corona quiet and my Damian like bosses who shut my frigging smartphone email up right after they delivered a warp speed, Harley sized, boot up the ass trip to benefits town presumably so the owner-likes of Philip Green/Richard Branson/Mike Ashley can just keep living in the style they’re so entitled er accustomed to. But heyho, who cares, certainly not Donald or Boris.

I do, though, have some good news for you and let’s face it we need a little cos so long as the above dynamic duo keep managing things as they are we’ll all have the curve flattened on our life expectancy meaning a swift goodbye to us (which is not the good news) but might also mean bye bye debt collector’s, bosses, bankers, CNN news presenters or whatever (and this could be the good news). Saying that, if this doesn’t come to pass then no worries at all cos we’ll just get back to good ol’ life as usual stressed and miserable as hell. What though, say you, is the good news if the latter kicks in? Well der, it’s obviously that the second wave of Covid-19 means it mutates to the point where it only targets rear-line workers like debt collectors, bankers, bosses and the dynamic duo. Tara!

Saying all this, I still believe there could be another way. There might be a more cosmic, karmic, saintly, dare I say even God like solution to this whole Coronastress life bouncing right back at ya to shitty normal thing. Cos one day, as if by some hand of acid taking fate, Coronavirus might wake up and get fed up to hell being stuck in our slightly pathetic, manic, hyper wired, last person on earth to actually still shop at the Gap, self-centrico, Kardashian watching bodies and sod off to another planet where the inhabitants are less, well, like us. You know, where marijuana’s legal. And if for some bizarre reason that doesn’t happen we can just go and get religion/foraging/yogic/a life/rid of the Donnie and Boris act or an oven to stick our heads in.

I think I’ll go download that podcast on the three minute guide to wellbeing by the Kardashians.

If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.

Wellbeing Survival Tips for the Coronavirus Lockdown

I was watching one of those popular news channel shows when they ran a section on wellbeing tips for surviving the Coronavirus lockdown. It got me thinking (which is generally a dangerous thing).

Here are some of the wellbeing tips from the nice lady: 1. Don’t gorge on Coronavirus news and get info overload. And to be honest she kinda had me at that one. I mean how in Ted Turners sake are we supposed to dodge Covid-19 news – it’s friggin everywhere. It’s plastered all over the TV, Internet, email inboxes, Whatsapp yacks, social media, telephone chats with ANYONE and family chit chats. So I guess where she was heading was we should dump the broadband, TV, cable, satellite, mobile phone, land-line AND conversations with the family – OK, now I’m kinda listening. It would also sure take social distancing to a whole new level and presumably leave us talking to the dog which I noticed I was starting to do in any case – I mean how in the world else am I supposed to dodge the inane socio-babble with the teens. It may also prove just how clever this wellbeing lady might actually be. Or maybe not. Take a look at her second piece of wellbeing advice.

2. Make sure you have as many virtual social interactions as possible. Which probably means she’s an investor in Zoom. Or maybe not given we’ve already taken her first piece of advice by now and have no phone, broadband, Skype or Whatsapp. Which is though saving us a tonne of money and reminding us just how powerful ‘the sound of silence’ actually is and how wellbeing smart those Simon and Garfunkel guys really were and maybe they should be giving us wellbeing advice instead or maybe they already have and we just need to listen to all their songs which of course I can’t friggin do as I dumped the goddamned broadband. Mind you thanks to her advice I have at least gotten really good at hacking into the neighbours Wi-Fi and cable box.

Anyhoo, her next piece of wellbeing advice went a little like this: 3. Go out into nature as often as possible. Which is a real kick in the pants for pretty much everyone as let’s face it luvvy we all live in shoebox apartments with windows jammed shut thanks to the smog thing and the closest we get to outdoor space is the cats litter tray. So I guess that means get out onto the streets and parks and hit the yoga mat to meditate which leads straight to getting arrested for ‘sunbathing’, getting ass dumped in jail for kinda screaming that I was actually yoga mat exercising and go catch Coronavirus in jail cos let’s face it it’s kinda hard to do the social distancing thingy in there.

The last titbit I remember was wellbeing tip number 4. Gather as a family as often as possible to generally chat, play and meet. You’re friggin joking right. Have you met my Damian family?? I mean a chat has some friggin way of always turning into some whine or winge or teenage-style-endless-friggin-list-of-reasons-why-friends-are-bitchin-Netflix-ain’t-ever-got-enough-shows-my-buddys-all-have-the-iphone11x-so-where-the-frig-is-mine-oh-and-school-is-just-as-lame-online. So the only possible reason for this last (thank Damian) piece of well(not)being advice is presumably cos the nice wellbeing lady doesn’t have a family or she doesn’t have a brain or she’s hard of hearing and keeps that hearing device handily turned off. Well I can tell you, not in this house. Here we pray for the moment our ears get stood on by a buffalo so we get hearing devices and make sure they’re permanently shut off.

But thanks for those wellbeing tips. Really. Oh, and for the family wellbeing meeting bit see my last post.

If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.