Neil Shaw

Live Earth had an instant impact on me, an impact beyond the initial anger at the BBC cutting away from Metallica to rerun Crowded House.
I awoke this morning and unplugged all those little adapters that usually cling to the wall, with their green or red glowing eyes, waiting for me to recharge one of my mobile phones, mp3 players or myriad other electrical devices.
When I boiled the kettle for a cup of hot, strong, organic coffee to enjoy in the early-morning sunshine, I boiled just as much water as I needed.
My shower was taken in half the usual amount of time, and breakfast was eaten in a room illuminated just by the light from the window, not from the bulb.
When I wiped spilled butter from the kitchen surface I used a sponge, instead of the kitchen towel I would usually reach for.
Now, all of this probably didn’t offset that moment I reached for the remote control and burned out the batteries trying to find the rest of the Metallica set. Or the moment I then reached for my CD player and cranked up what Jonathan Ross called “The Sandman Song”.
But the changes I made, if they are made by a million others, and if they are made every day, will shift the course of our planet.
I could say I don’t know why I didn’t realise this before, but that wouldn’t be true.
What is true is that the environmental message, the global warming warning, has been around us for years. In fact it has been around for too long, and has been too prevalent.
It quickly became wallpaper and muzak and Big Brother Eight. We saw it everywhere and so we came to take it for granted.
What Live Earth did, despite what the cynical arms of the media are saying, is make us look again at that wallpaper.
We can now see it isn’t just a meaningless pattern, it is a series of images and a tract of words that spell out our future – or lack of it. Each meaningless swirl is a picture of a species we have wiped out. Each patch and blotch is a swathe of earth burnt and wasted to provide fuel for our greed.
What we need now is for Government’s to make two or three major changes. But in lieu of that one million of us making 10 million minor changes will have the same impact.
My choice to lead an organic life was, until now, a selfish one. We ate organic produce to prevent our daughter taking in the kilos of chemicals she would otherwise be lumbered with every year.
Now it will have an environmental dimension too, as I seek to eat not just organic food, but locally-grown organic food to reduce the carbon used to bring it to my plate.
My lightblubs are already low energy, but now I will continue the new trend of switching off even the small lights that blink at me from adapters, TVs, computers and music systems.
I already split my rubbish into three, compostable for the worms, recyclable and the rest. Now I will also stop being lazy and chucking glass in with that landfill waste just because the binmen won’t take it once a fortnight with the green bin – instead I will store it in a box under the stairs and take it to the bottle bank when my box is full.
I will walk to church this morning, instead of driving.
All this, and the other changes I can make, will add up to very little. It will reduce my carbon footprint by a few microns. But we can hope that if a few thousand or a few million others take similar measures, we won’t have to put up with another global concert opened by Genesis.