Carbon offset weddings. Ho hum.

Several months ago I received this email from a very nice sounding women introducing another carbon offset calculator, this time for weddings, and offering me the opportunity to be an affiliate for the scheme.

"I'd like to introduce Brighter Planet; we help people and businesses reduce and offset their carbon footprint. We have developed a simple carbon offset calculator for weddings that is fully embeddable, and will be featured on The Green Bride Guide's new website. Our affiliate program (through LinkShare) would automatically pay you a commission when people visiting http://theethicalwedding.blogspot.com/use the calculator and offset their wedding. You can see our calculator at the bottom of this page: http://brighterplanet.com/products/event_offsetting
Please let me know if you're interested and we can easily set this up, and help your couples make an ethical AND climate-friendly commitment to the future."

Now, there are dozens of different carbon footprint and offset calculators out there now, although this one may indeed have a USP in being wedding-specific. The problem is, of course, not in the generally well-meaning people setting some of these little enterprises up, but in the broader concept and practice of carbon offsetting itself. There are the ideological objections - that planting trees or paying for technological developments in Majority World countries doesn't challenge the fundamental necessity that we re-think our own ways of living. And there are the objections in practice - that many of the projects being paid for are at best well-meaning but vague and at worst deeply corrupt and destructive. There have been monoculture forests planted on stolen land in Mexico, hydro dams that go to power factories and smelters that just churn out more consumer crap for our wasteful society, and fraudulent double-counting of carbon credits that mean that a lot of money goes into a few pockets and bugger all happens to help the environment.
For a more comprehensive critique of, and information on, the problem see Dan Welch's report for Ethical Consumer.
Needless to say, I won't be signing up for the affiliate scheme, but I have put in the link above in case anyone out there does want to use this service.

Ethical Wedding stories

Yes, I know I've been shamefully poor at posting all that background material that was meant to go up ages ago. Events, dear boy, events. But just quickly, here is a link to OA and my wedding story on Katie Fewings' Ethical Weddings website, along with lots of case studies of other ethical weddings to inform and inspire.

Ethical Weddings Fair

This is just a quick mention of the Eco Chic Wedding and Home Show 2009, being run in Birmingham (at least it's not in bloody London, like practically everything else on the universe. Sorry, I'm bitter at my so-called union, the NUJ, whose women's conference was announced in London at less than a month's notice, making it prohibitively expensive for anyone outside the South-East. Typical).
Anyway, I've never been to one of these big consumer shows, and the part of me that thinks that generally speaking less is more is very scared by the whole idea of them. But on the basis that people do want to buy nice things for their weddings, and it's better that those things are made fairly and in more environmentally sustainable ways, I guess I'm giving it a bit of a plug. So it's on Sunday 8th March, and details and booking information can be found here.

Wedding photos 2

And here's another one - the ten quid dress plus a scarf I bought about ten years ago for Arabic dance classes and grabbed about five minutes before we set off for the registry office.

Wedding photos

Having finally gotten around to sorting out some of my wedding photos - very kindly taken for me by my friend Ruth - it seemed appropriate to post a couple of the ten quid wedding dress. Hope you like it...

Info on ethical weddings, eco-weddings, green weddings...

Over the eighteen months or so I've been planning our wedding and writing this blog, I've come across innumerable articles, websites and groups offering insights, advice and perspectives on how to plan weddings and how to introduce ethics into that process.
This post tries to list some of those I found most useful.
Firstly, there are loads of articles just giving advice on some of the main issues to keep an eye out for. Friends of the Earth's lifestyle section's feature lists specific bits of the wedding process – like rings, presents, confetti and honeymoons – where ethical options are easy to find. Not strictly about ethics, the 'Planning a Wedding' page of the Guardian's money website is useful because it has lots of features on the eye-popping cost of many weddings and how to cut it – which often means reducing consumption and consumerism as well, which is definitely a good thing. Wales Online did a general feature on eco-weddings, as did ethical shopping website Getethical.com and Hippyshopper.com has a number of features on ways of making your big day a bit more environmentally friendly or doing some good in majority world countries alongside having a wonderful time yourself. Most mainstream wedding sites or magazines have been fairly clueless on the idea that a wedding might be about more than spending as much money as you possibly can on the biggest frock ever, but Bridalwave.tv did have a small article with some handy links.
Interview articles can be a great help, because they often include real-life accounts of how people went about finding and sourcing ethical supplies for their weddings. Grown Up Green interviewed Katie and Jamie Fewings of the Ethical Wedding directory, while their website has whole collection of 'real ethical weddings' to take inspiration from. I'm also going to flag up my own interviews for a Big Issue Cymru feature on green weddings. And there are some good blogs out there giving individual accounts of planning ethical weddings, including A Low Impact Wedding, the collection of blogs on ethicalweddings.com, My Ethical Wedding and GreatGreenWedding.com. Having a quick search on hosts like Blogspot and Wordpress will find up-to-date and new blogs.
Katie Fewings' Ethicalweddings.com website is also a terrific and increasingly comprehensive range of links and features on everything from wooden rings to making your own wedding favours, green venues to organic chocolate cakes....

Bicycle weddings (1)

A while back I posted requests for stories about weddings that incorporated bikes on various Facebook bicycling groups. I've got a bunch of fun tales stashed somewhere that I need to post, but here's a very belated one that just came in from a gentleman called Albert:
"I had a post ride coffee with a guy in Tucson, Arizona who told me he had his wedding midway through a ride. He, his bride and the wedding party (minister included) began their ride at the foot of Mount Lemmon in Tucson. Approximately 26 miles later at the summit (7-8,000 foot elevation gain) they exchanged their vows. Their cycling jerseys were custom made as tux and dress. Their rings? Titanium of course. Very dangerous by the way as trauma and swelling of the finger necessitates removal of the ring. Well, with a titanium ring? That means removal of the finger as well. But I digress."