Tag: energy

Picking your poison

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In the discussion between fabric first and fabric fifth it can often feel as though people are trying to get to the ‘right answer’ rather than looking at where the inefficiencies are, how big they are and trying to decide which is more feasible.

In choosing fabric fifth it means that there will be a need to generate more energy and increase grid resilience. All of this costs and means building more national infrastructure. It’s not the more efficient approach in lots of ways, as it means putting more energy generation in than might be optimally required. Asking people to decarbonise their heat supply is a much simpler message and one which can have the biggest impact on their individual carbon footprint. There can still be a place for other measures too, particularly if people want to fund them themselves, but if it’s hard to persuade people to take up any environmental measures, focusing on the most impactful could bring efficiencies that way. In addition to generating carbon savings more quickly, it could also help to reduce costs in trying to recruit people by using a simpler message, and cutting the costs of assessing homes as the standalone heat pump installation can be simpler than internal or external wall insulation.

With fabric first, there should be less energy needing to be generated. In practice this isn’t straightforward, with lots of evidence suggesting there’s a performance gap arising from quality issues in the install process and then a rebound effect, with many households taking improved energy efficiency as comfort savings. This can lead to an increase in energy consumption – and for those households who are under-heating their homes, with the knock-on impacts on the health of the people and the building itself affected, this can be a good thing on wellbeing grounds.

To get to those carbon savings also means trying to persuade people to take up the deeper levels of insulation it requires. This can be more invasive, with most of the ‘easy’ to treat measures done – such as loft or cavity wall insulation. There are still some remaining but these are more likely to be complicated works such as non-standard cavity walls, or perhaps they are lofts where the amount of things being stored makes it too difficult for the occupants to contemplate the work. The longer it takes to persuade people, the more carbon gets emitted along the way.

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the shape of the decarbonisation curve, what that means in terms of the quantum of carbon which gets emitted and crucially what that means in terms of how the shift feels to live through. Reaching net zero by any date by plateauing in a steady state way and then plummeting to zero, or a more gradual downward trajectory both get to the same point. Imagining the shape of those two separate trajectories, and therefore the space underneath them as a proxy for the carbon emissions, shows the amount of carbon generated is much bigger in the first scenario than the second. The first scenario increases the likelihood of feedback loops, which mean the impacts could be more significant. Thinking about the transitions and how they would feel to live through, goes to some quite different places. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, what felt like a total transformation in how we lived globally led to a c.4-5% drop in carbon emissions in 2020. It’s hard to imagine a precipitous drop which is good for humanity. Whereas the more gradual drop suggests a more managed approach which seems likely to be much easier to live through.

If we lived in a world where everything was aligned to the fabric first approach – funding, regulation, owner and occupants willingness and interest and the supply chain capacity and capability – it could still be the best option. Effective and efficient. If that isn’t where we are, which it isn’t, then the question becomes one of trade-offs. To make decisions means choosing the trade-offs rather than acting as though they aren’t there and continuing to push specific approaches.

Are there more questions than answers?

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Asking questions can be really hard. Figuring out what you want to know. Narrowing down the question means clarifying in your own mind what you are trying to understand.

Working out what you need to find out from the other person and therefore how to frame the question – both to get the information you want and also to convey certain emotions. The questions we ask can vary depending upon whether we want to be argumentative or conciliatory. Asking something that we know will bust their balls or goes into territory that’s difficult or a source of previous arguments, and likely to create another argument. Or choosing another question, another way of framing things to take a different route, elicit or create some other answers.

That all means that asking questions means choosing. In asking one question, things go down one line of thinking and opens up some areas whilst potentially also closing off others. Sometimes those questions have a short-term impact – what shall we have for dinner? Would you like to watch this film or that one? For others questions can determine a much longer-term direction something goes in. As I narrow down the focus of my PhD at the moment, that means choosing which things I let go of exploring more deeply and which things take up my days and weeks and life. A dizzying array of forks in the road, and maybe they won’t make that much of a difference overall but that sense of the power of the question to shape things feels palpable. Sometimes a delicious, exciting thing and sometimes sad at having to let go of some aspects to have something that feels manageable and coherent.

Which gives a real sense of how questions can shape or open up possibilities, the freedom asking questions brings. Would you like this? Can you do that? Questions can take you into different worlds – would you like this job, to go on a date with me, put it all on red or black? The answer only exists because first there was a question.

And that life changing potential is true if you’re the one asking the question too – something which had seemed implausible or impossible crystallises in your head or heart around a question. It might be a question to yourself – can I do this? Should I do this? What do I want? Can I bear this? How can I make things better? But when you’re feeling stuck it can feel like there aren’t any questions – because questions mean choices and being stuck can feel like you don’t have any choices. That’s not to say that asking a question can lead to an answer, or not immediately at least. Sometimes the question is just a wondering about what to do and then it can feel unclear. It opens the door to possibilities though…

That then suggests there isn’t a set number of answers. Or answers which are ready and waiting to be found. They aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered, the right question acting as a code breaker to crack open a chest to get the answers within. Lots of things become answers because first there were questions.

Reading Maller & Horne’s (2011) piece ‘Living lightly: How does Climate Change Feature in Residential Home Improvements and What are the Implications for Policy?‘ I was struck really forcefully with that sense of how we can spend a long time asking the same questions, and how that can potentially shape so much. Eventually we might get part of an answer, but maybe that can take too long and asking a different, seemingly harder question might have been better.

Part of their research was trying to understand people’s views about the environment and how important an issue it is to them, as well as finding out what environmental activities they undertake. The people involved agreed that it was a really important issue. When asked what activities they undertake they were all able to offer examples. These examples were in the realms of recycling, turning off appliances and light switches; monitoring their bills; food growing and similar. The writers suggested this showed that behaviour change campaigns had worked because those activities were all ones which people had been asked to do through campaigns over years.

So the questions that had been asked of whether people could recycle or switch lights off, had been somewhat answered in the affirmative. Yes, that is something that people can do, they can absorb those things into what Shove describes as their day to day practice. Maybe imperfectly but still, people can associate themselves with that activity and do it enough to feel like it’s true to answer that these are things they do.

Turning to home improvements people were talking about making though, those environmental views and actions didn’t translate for the most part. They lived in a separate compartment and there wasn’t really much of a shift. Some were thinking about solar or water tanks – measures in Australia, where the research was undertaken that had been increasingly discussed. In the things that could really make a difference people weren’t motivated, couldn’t see the connection, or disconnection, to their other views on environmental matters.

Perhaps asking a different question of people – can you retrofit your homes rather than can you reuse a plastic bag, wouldn’t have generated a different answer. We’ve spent decades asking smaller questions, getting imperfect answers on those, for instance in relation to recycling. We haven’t seen those answers translate into more positive responses on actions that would have a bigger impact – such as whether people would improve their homes or not. Could a long time trying to get imperfect answers to bigger questions be more impactful than a long time asking smaller questions?

In plain sight

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Always really humbling and hopefully helpful to see things hiding in plain sight that have been taken for granted that don’t quite work.

The definition of fuel poverty has changed a lot over time. Broadly speaking it’s about finding different ways to express the fact that people don’t have enough money to be able to heat their homes to a suitable temperature. There’s a separate debate about the term, and it’s not one that many people would recognise for themselves but still, those are not really for today.

There are all kinds of subtleties to that though. People’s circumstances can change for various reasons, all of which affect their ability to pay. From changes in their income – which is the main reason people move into or out of fuel poverty, to changes in the household – increases or decreases, or someone becomes unwell. There are plenty of other reasons besides but they give a sense of the fact this isn’t an absolute number that can be used as the benchmark to assess a household’s situation.

Yet when we look at fuel poverty, we look at the energy costs. This includes costs to heat the home and typically heating is the largest part of the cost. It’s not the only part of the cost. Even just looking at gas costs doesn’t allow you to separate out the heating costs, as people also use gas for hot water and potentially for cooking too.

Somewhere along the way those different aspects – assessing fuel poverty on the basis of ability to heat the home, and looking at energy costs in the round, got joined together.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. As many, including Druckman and Jackson suggest, energy costs for heating are more variable than electricity costs. Heating costs are more dependent upon the energy efficiency of the home and the need for different levels of comfort. So perhaps it’s a pragmatic proxy that avoids making life even more complicated.

Nonetheless, that sense of being shown by Walker, Simcock & Day how those two different considerations have been joined together in a way which isn’t articulated clearly was astonishing.

A reminder of how often there can be shared blind spots. Unspoken understandings and misunderstandings which then block opportunities or set parameters unnecessarily.

Things fall apart

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It’s easy not to pay attention to the different parts of our home when they are working well. Not the things that we were already wanting to change but those taken for granted parts of home. Switching on a light or a plug socket. Flushing the toilet. The buttons, dials and levers do as we instruct them. The magic happens. Home as a machine for life.

When it works it works and we don’t tend to give thanks each time we use something. The intricacies of the technology are, for most of us, something unfathomable. An accumulation of knowledge, trial and error, insights and experimentation moulded into tools which make our lives easier. Untold hours, unexpected inspiration and dedication of people who’ve come before us turned into an easier way to make tea or clean your clothes.

Modern life has then done a pretty good job of making the technology invisible. When the Victorians put in the sewer they were so proud of the technology and what it meant, they made sewage pipes visible so people could see the marvel. They built Crossness Pumping Station – a veritable cathedral with jokes in the ironwork. Now though, underneath and through the home the wires, cables and pipes are usually hidden away. Interior design magazines often edit out wires and cables to make the place look tidier, a crisper look, more aspirational.

Putnam describes those hidden sewers, cables and utility mains as forms of material life support. Home then becomes, in their view, not just a place which holds memories, or a space for socialising but a support service.

A sign of how modern, or post-modern, homes have become that these technologies are just part of how we live now. Putnam sees this shift as the second of two successive transformations of contemporary living from the traditional 19th Century models. The first shift they identify was the emergence of the modern home between c.1920-1950 when the domestic space was designed around the technical core of those underpinning material supports. They describe the second shift in the 1960s when the technical, and they suggest the economic and political, structures of modernity became part of the background for modern home life. With this shift, where basic aspects of how we are fortunate enough to live become taken for granted, ‘home becomes the supreme domain for personalization and, by consequence, of endless negotiations’.

Moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we no longer need to think about the basics of shelter and care for ourselves. Those supports are woven into the fabric of our homes and the expectations of our lucky days.

Then when something doesn’t work, well, it’s then that we notice them. We feel the knock-on impacts of that on our behaviour. Things get glitchy. We have to run errands to try and get something to fix it ourselves, or to try and deal with the impacts of the thing being broken. Searching for different approaches to fix things, or just to understand what the issue is. The hope when we try a new thing. Looking for signs that it is working. Tossing aside the new when it hasn’t worked. More and more time and money getting spent trying to fix something.

Things feeling a bit more fragile and off – that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We bump back down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. The home shifts from the background, supportive and magical, into the foreground of problems, mess and frustration. We notice when things don’t work, we feel our luck when dealing with the loss.

Opportune boiling

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Really interested in the perspective of Sovacool and Geels reflecting on past energy transitions as ones that were opportunity driven, compared to the current energy transition which is problem driven.

In the past, energy transitions – as they describe them, for another day whether what has actually happened is we have ‘more and more and more’ energy sources – were about trying to do things better, faster, easier. More useful sources of energy, or energy sources that could be more easily deployed meant an increased level of comfort – with better quality and longer lasting light sources, people could stay up later, do more activities, make more time for themselves outside of work. It also allowed tasks to be more easily done, from the home to the factory. Machines picking up and outpacing what people could do. An increase in the amount of materials or products that could be made, or making it easier to clean the home and cook.

In terms of the transition to low and zero carbon sources of energy, the driver of the change is about reducing the environmental impact. From an individual or even organisational perspective, not much would change in terms of what can be done. Most people are interested in energy to the extent it helps them do the things they want to do, as Fouquet describes it, the ‘energy services’ – such as heating, electricity, running computers, phones or the like. Changing the way in which energy is generated to low carbon sources doesn’t do anything to immediately make a change in terms of how people can use and benefit from the energy.

It made me wonder again if part of the way to engage with the shift away from fossil fuels is to try and identify the issues with the current technologies. At the moment in the UK, most homes are heated by gas boilers. So all discussion is about how heat pumps work compared to gas. There seems to be an implicit assumption that the starting point is good and fine, so then discussions about how it feels to live with a heat pump are always slightly apologetic.

There are so many things about gas boilers that aren’t great though. Ignoring for now all of the air quality and carbon emissions arguments. Purely thinking about them from the perspective of how they work in the home, how they feel – there are loads of things which don’t work so well.

Most people think they know how to use their gas boiler – there’s generally a button you can press which just sets off an explosion of highly combustible gases in a box in your home, which then quickly warms the place. It’s then easy to switch off in the same way. All very straightforward. Although that idea of how explosive it is doesn’t feel like something that is naturally a seller, yet we somehow have accommodated ourselves to the fact of the explosiveness and manage not to think about it. Not having that in the home feels like a win though.

Meanwhile, most homes don’t have their boiler set-up, or used in the most efficient way. So it’s actually not a very easy to use system in practice. Nor is it therefore an efficient system, which means people are paying more than they need for whatever comfort they are getting. Or indeed could have more comfort and warmth than they are getting for the same price or less. If people are interested in the level of comfort rather than the cost, being able to give that comparison feels like one which is of much more interest to people.

The sense of the warmth being really enveloping is one that many people enjoy and is something that’s seen as a negative for heat pumps, where that almost palpable sense of the heat doesn’t come through. It can be satisfying but then quickly feels a bit too much. Leading to a see-sew sitch where you then have to turn the heating down or off to make it more comfortable and not so stuffy.

This can be particularly an issue overnight when it’s cold. Hard to know how to get the balance of bedding and heating right so it’s comfortable. Just right, not too hot and not too cold. If you wake up in the night and need to get out of bed when it’s cold it can just be awful. Takes as long, often longer for me, to give a pep-talk about getting it done quickly as it does to actually get out, do the thing and run back to bed.

Just a few of the many ways in which boilers don’t deliver the comfort we want, yet somehow the goodness of them generally and compared to other options feels unarguable, sacrosanct. Maybe we need to start picking at that thread and finding out more about what people don’t like about their current set-up?

Friction burns?

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A recent report by Citizen’s Advice found that 72% of people would be open to making environmental improvements to their homes in the next five years. Absolute scenes – there’s the market transformation we need. 72% is just brilliant news, if we’re thinking about the Technology Adoption Curve, which of course we are, then we’re deep into late majority territory where this is just all very mainstream and normal. How do we go about getting the supply chain ready to do all of that work in that short space of time?

Hang on though, there’s a kicker. People went on to say that they would prioritise kitchens, bathrooms and other measures over environmental measures. Stand down the supply chain. Or maybe – as you were…

What I’m interested in is why people would prioritise kitchens, bathrooms and the rest over environmental measures. In some ways it seems obvious, kitchens and bathrooms are more appealing and desirable. There are magazines and shows which do makeovers and it’s all very lifestyled and lovely whereas lots of us – most of us? – find heat pumps ugly. It’s also crucial to eat and clean yourself, so there’s that. However, it’s also crucial to be able to keep warm, with lots of health conditions linked to, or exacerbated by cold weather. It’s also crucial to be able to use electricity in today’s society.

There’s more reasons besides but I’ve been wondering if there’s something about the comparative friction between kitchens, bathrooms and other aspects of home renovation, compared to energy and environmental measures. Friction on a day to day basis but maybe also societal frictions.

On a day to day basis, if you don’t like the look of your kitchen, bathroom or elsewhere, you will be constantly reminded of it. It might become a low grade hum that you get used to but this can then be amped up whenever you’re reminded of how much you don’t like it. Whether that’s visiting a friend who has a nice(r) place than yours, or seeing them on TV, in films, social media or magazines. There are potentially lots of times when you’ll be reminded of how you don’t like your kitchen or suchlike in a way that doesn’t happen so much with energy or environmental measures.

As Pennartz notes in ‘At home: An anthropology of domestic spaces‘, an aspect of a space being pleasant is how easy it is to be convivial in it. If the space makes it harder to do that, say the kitchen is designed for just one person then that doesn’t feel very sociable and there’s a friction between the desire and the reality.

There has been a shift away from gendered spaces, with men also likely to be in the kitchen. As such, that sense of friction between what people want and how the space operates affects both genders, and therefore more people, more often.

There’s also the friction in use. If a kitchen or bathroom isn’t set-up as you would want then this can catch you each day. Whether it’s a cupboard that doesn’t shut properly, a shower that doesn’t properly attach to the wall so you have to hold it to shower yourself, or whatever else it may be, there can be things which every day, sometimes multiple times a day, create friction and frustration.

Where is the friction with energy usage though? People who pay by direct debit don’t need to really engage with their bill on a daily or monthly basis, as it’s smoothed out across the year. It’s hard then to get any real time friction between the usage and the cost. Not least because, as costs continue to rise, people can reduce their energy consumption and still see rising prices. Under the current pricing structure with standing charges fixed irrespective of consumption, this regressive pricing structure makes that particularly true for those on lower incomes or using less energy.

People don’t have the social friction of not having a heat pump because most people don’t have one either. There’s also not so much of a friction around having a home that isn’t so warm. People will often choose to put the heating on when they’ve got guests, to make sure they feel comfortable.

There’s also not so much friction from the supply chain when trying to get more environmentally friendly measures – for instance a replacement boiler rather than a new heat pump. There are just over 20,000 qualified heat pump installers in the UK, compared to over 150,000 gas engineers. It’s therefore much easier to find someone who can repair or replace your gas boiler on a like-for-like basis. Homes are set up for boilers rather than a heat pump. If you want to switch to a heat pump if your boiler dies you’ll end up with friction. The heat pump can’t go into the space you had your boiler in. You’ve then got a random space you need to sort out, which might or might not be useful. Mine is in a wall cupboard with no base, so the boiler bits can disgorge themselves. If I switched to a heat pump I’d then have a cupboard I can’t use. More friction arises trying to figure out where a heat pump and hot water tank can go. This has been made easier by the removal of a planning requirement which says it needs to be at least one meter from the boundary

Is friction different to hassle though?

The ‘hassle-factor’ is often cited as a rationale for people not to do something, in relation to the home or more generally. Friction seems different to hassle in terms of the ongoing impact, particularly in relation to the visibility of a heat pump or solar. The hassle might be there to get it put in but then once in that hassle would go. The friction might remain when you see it on a daily basis and find it really ugly, or it’s taking up space and it takes a while to get used to the new configuration of the spaces and knock-on impact on the various practices. With larger properties with lots of land that might not be an issue – it can be hidden away somewhere and that friction doesn’t arise as often. For people with less space that might be experienced as daily friction which has been introduced into their lives.

Energy usage can create a sense of friction. A room which isn’t a comfortable temperature creates a sense of friction. This can be between the need for it to be warm and cosy and the sense of how it is. As expectations have increased about the level of warmth we should be feeling in our homes, there can also be a friction between lifestyles – the clothes we wear at home, and the temperature of the space. Whilst for much of history the initial focus would have been on putting on more clothes or being more active to get warmer, people are now more likely to focus on the heating to get their required level of warmth.

The friction between want and reality can also lead people to not use rooms at certain times or temperatures because they are too uncomfortable. This can also manifest in making it harder to do certain activities – studying can be more difficult when it’s cold for instance, as can other more sedentary actions like reading or watching TV.

This leads to a friction in use but most people focus on ways to reduce their energy bills by changing their tariff or provider as the way to reduce that friction. By cutting the costs of energy it’s therefore more affordable to use the same amount of energy, or more – hence the rebound effect where people take cost savings from more insulation as higher levels of comfort.

Inherently though, most people don’t experience friction when using their boilers, which is the main fuel source for most people. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that actually people aren’t using their boilers very effectively or efficiently and if they were they could cut their costs significantly. That actual friction is not visible to them though – the cost of their energy bills are hard to relate to any actual friction as most people can make the boiler switch on and off, so the fact it’s not working as efficiently is somewhat hidden to them.

This can then lead people to feel like changes to their heating system is someone else’s desire or need rather than their own. Someone else is experiencing a sense of friction between what they think should be happening and what isn’t happening. Being asked to do something about it means that people can feel they are being told to choose something that isn’t a priority for themselves, over things which are. This can create multiple frictions – between their own sense of themselves as people who care about these things and yet are choosing to put time, money and energy into other things; and on a financial level between the things they want to spend money on and what they are being told they should be spending money on. Potentially this also creates a friction which then impacts upon their voting actions – looking for those who help to reduce that friction for them.

On a daily basis then, people are perhaps more likely to feel a sense of friction by other factors in the home than energy or environmental issues. Even where they do manifest as friction they can be mediated by other actions in a less time, money and personally energy intensive way, so it’s perhaps not a surprise people don’t prioritise home improvements with environmental dimensions more often.

Calm emergencies

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Much of the work around seeking to engage people on climate change has been trying to inject a sense of urgency. Creating a catalysing moment to break through the incrementalism. 100 months until x. This is the crucial decade for climate. The doomsday clock is now at one minute to midnight.

Everything, everywhere all at once is understandable and true, but it’s not sustainable for people to deal with, or live like that, on a day by day basis. Most people, even those who agree that climate change is a massive priority, struggle to find enough time in their days and weeks to engage with the issue even briefly.

Reading ‘Fire Weather’ by John Vaillant I was struck by the little moments of relative calm in amongst the terror and carnage. I can’t think of a book I’ve read where I spent as much time clutching at my face, putting my hand to my mouth in shock, shaking my head or willing people to get out. Reading descriptions of people taking their clothes to the dry cleaner and arranging the date when it would be collected next week as they watch the fire advancing outside; people running backwards and forwards from their home to their car to get some last things that seemed somehow vital in that moment; or just standing watching the fire at the end of their road. People comparing stories at the emergency shelters they had escaped to of things they had brought with them that they couldn’t fathom. Even in the midst of that raging fire, the like of which that town had never seen before, nor had most of the firefighters, people still couldn’t grapple with the immediacy of the emergency.

In ‘Scarcity’, Eldar Shafir talks about how it’s difficult to make decisions when you’re in a situation of scarcity. Whatever the source of scarcity, whether it’s financial, time or food, the brain gets frazzled and finds it hard to make any decisions. It’s so distracted by trying to deal with the impact of the scarce situation it can’t justify providing lots of brainpower to address issues, even ones which are seemingly related to the source of scarcity.

Thinking about it now, I wonder whether those moments of seeming relative calm in the book were actually that. Perhaps they were more moments of panic that looked like calm. That people just couldn’t make sense of what was happening or work out what needed to be done, what their options were. The situation had moved from one they could understand and navigate – for the people with their dry cleaning, they could think through what they already knew of their plans and availability, how they could fit their day together to find space to collect their laundry at particular points. Those kinds of situation are ones that are everyday for many, and so the range of options is easily accessible. Even the fact it was a wildfire in that context, it wasn’t the first time they had them in that scenario – just not at that level of ferocity.

For those kinds of situation which are outside our imaginings or the day to day, even in the moment, it’s hard to make sense of them. We can overlay our reactions from the everyday on to them but they don’t fit well – responses that had seemed fine, now seem incongruous, ridiculous. Why arrange to collect the dry cleaning next week when the fire looks like it could engulf the building in the next 10 minutes? But that can be all we’ve got in those kinds of situations. The habitual response. Responding to the social cues – everyone else in the shop is talking about drop-offs and collections and pointing out a particular part of some clothing that needs special attention – so to be the one freaking out would be weird and uncomfortable, even if it might make more sense in that moment.

At a collective level, Vaillant shows how the local firefighters found it hard to understand they were in a different world. They started fighting the fire in the ways they had done with previous smaller, less intense fires and found it hard to adjust. There were indicators around the speed it was moving at, the heat and intensity of it which could have shown them they needed to recalibrate. The structures they were operating in, from the different organisations with overlapping responsibility but no clear way to agree on decisions, mitigated against other perspectives or approaches finding a way through.

And then for situations with less immediacy – the wildfire isn’t rampaging at the bottom of your street – what looks like calm on the outside, or maybe even on the inside too, if we don’t look or think too deeply, can instead be another kind of panic. Wandering along with the same responses that just don’t fit now. Organisational structures which can’t recalibrate for emergencies but keep on with the busy business as usual in the meantime.

A sense of fragility underneath all of that calm and structure and order and process. Just with less reason to sense the fragility or understand the need for change…

A manageable tragedy

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When the tree at Sycamore Gap was felled there was a huge outcry. Investigations and art work. Trying to understand why and how. Anger and shock, sadness and disgust.

Then people collected seeds from the tree and have been growing them. There were 49 saplings which have been grown from seeds of the felled tree that organisations could bid for. One tree for each foot in height that the tree was at the time it was felled. Over 500 applications received.

What remains of the tree has been protected and there are signs that the tree is regrowing. I saw it a couple of weeks ago myself when I walked the Hadrian’s Wall Path from coast to coast – Bowness to Wallsend. Along the way places I stayed often had pictures up of the Sycamore Gap tree showing one of the recognisable sights of the walk. When we got there it was being guarded and filmed by people in hi-vis with clipboards.

Should the shoots be left to regrow, which will lead to a more messy outline than what was there before? Or should it be properly felled and a new one put in place that will have the same look as the previous one? If the former, is it the same tree or not and does it matter?

What is it we are trying to do with all of this? Are we trying to protect the tree and help it recover, or are we trying to recapture the way it looked before? Making a wrong right or just trying to make sense of something that, even after the trial, seems mystifying?

The scale of interest in one tree feels high. It’s a recognisable tree given it’s location. Caught on film lots of times. Voted best tree. Boundary between countries and a marker along the way for those walking Hadrian’s Wall

The fact it’s just one tree, one recognisable tree, seems to be at a scale that people can engage with. Unlike the much larger scale environmental issues of climate change and biodiversity loss, the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree feels manageable. It was there and now it isn’t. There isn’t a faceless organisation who did it, or some weather event. Instead it’s two people. Manageable. Trying to understand their motivations. Wondering about the relationship and dynamics. National outcry. Shock and rage. Front page news and long reads about the tree and the trial – the comedy defences put forward, grainy footage of the moment the tree came down filmed by people claiming not to have done it.

The Global Forest Watch estimated that between 2001 to 2024, the UK lost 585 kha of tree cover. That’s equivalent to a 16% decrease in tree cover since 2000. Much more than one tree lost and yet hardly any coverage or action…

We forget ourselves

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‘They’ get mentioned at work a lot. I work on environmental issues, in a team of people doing the same. I’m not a lone environmentalist, I’m surrounded by people who are all aware, or should be aware, of the same things as me.

I hear lots about the fact ‘they’ need to get their homes retrofitted, ‘they’ aren’t recycling or lobbying their politicians at local or national level, ‘they’ can’t be bothered to even do the easy things. ‘They’ are hard to reach or won’t engage or only want to talk about other aspects of their home or go on about double glazing.

At work I’m constantly surprised at how people working on environmental issues forget how they themselves act. How few people are vegetarian let alone vegan – and how defensive many people can be in discussing making a change, even just for some meals or at environmental events. Most people still fly for pleasure, and do so frequently – and how little people want to engage in the impacts of that choice or do anything differently as a result. I thought I’d be an outlier having not retrofitted my home. Yet most people will do home improvements which involve spending lots of money but don’t include energy in the scope of the works.

Living lives on a day to day basis which don’t look much different to those who aren’t spending their working lives on climate and environmental issues. Not having the justification that they don’t have much of the detail or an understanding of what needs to be done – in some areas at least, even if not all of them.

Despite the subject matter we’re working on, it feels quite culturally normal to not live in a particularly environmentally friendly way. Challenging that feels very uncomfortable and mostly doesn’t happen. Some of that is understandable – if you’ve got to work with people day in, day out then most wouldn’t choose to be confrontational about things when you don’t need to be. Part of why, for me at least, I often don’t ask is because I find it so depressing when I do. It’s the same arguments as I hear elsewhere from people who don’t have anywhere near as much knowledge, interest or motivation than those I’m working with. What I’d expected to be a source of motivation can often exacerbate my concern about how much inaction there can is.

There’s also a lack of curiosity in so many people about the factors which limit their own environmental activity outside work. They are able to live with the cognitive dissonance and prefer that to trying to make changes in how they live. Giving explanations which excuse their behaviour – joking that planting a tree or two will offset the flights they are taking later in the month. A knowing joke but still ‘they’ make it and take the flight…