IMPORTANT NEWS: Due to lack of online volunteers and a large backlog of office admin to deal with, the Go Green Today website (and all GGT project websites) won’t be updated until the first week in July - this also means that we won’t be able to reply to contact-form enquiries until July. Sorry for the delay. Please visit again next month. Thank you! We NEED volunteers - if you can reliably spare 1-2 hours per week to help with research, writing, photography, or other work from your home please contact us in July. Thank you.

INTRODUCTION:

Go Green Today (GGT) is a grassroots UK Registered Charity (SC037858) that runs a range of long-term projects and also pursues single issues that are all within our Registered Objectives of public education, citizenship, and the environment.

Please visit our other pages in the index to read about our projects and work. Our three long-term ongoing core projects are CEAN (Citizens Emergency Action Network) concerned with citizen preparedness for emergencies resulting from severe natural events in the UK, Climate Concern (about rural sustainability and climate change issues in the UK), and Self Sufficient UK (also known as - GIY - Grow It Yourself), which is principally about thrifty living and growing your own produce. GGT also pursues several single topic issues that you can read about on our VerdantWorld website - these topics are constantly evolving (so please stop by sometimes to see what’s happening), as although some issues such as deforestation and biofuels are long term concerns that we’ve always been focused on, there are other issues such as food security in the UK that we pursue as a result of current concerns from the public, or the news, or in reaction to authoritative reports/research.

Go Green Today doesn’t receive Government or Lottery funding and relies entirely on the good will of individuals, small businesses, and our volunteers who work for us as staff, and in their own communities, and as ‘virtual’ online assistants. ALL funds and donations go directly into working for our Objectives, and we never waste any of our precious funds/donations on fripperies such as flashy TV adverts or glossy brochures. Please go to the VOLUNTEERS page to read how you can help us achieve our aims by either donating some of your time, or your goods/services, or by giving financially - and also how you can become a GGT Member.

Go Green Today also promotes and supports the use of creative arts and crafts for all ages and abilities as a successful method helping people understand the complexities of environmental and citizenship issues; particularly their impact, and the depth of emotion behind many issues, which are often either difficult to convey in other ways, or is overlooked. It can be extremely effective to communicate deep and/or difficult topics using an image, a song, a poem, or a short film that people can connect with in a much more effective way that simply reading a report, seeing a news story, or hearing a speech. Go Green Today has always been extremely keen to promote and advance reuse and recycling as a method of creating artworks, decorative crafts, and practical homecrafts (i.e. quilts, rugs, clothes). We’re also enthusiastic about promoting and advancing sustainable countryside crafts, such as willow-weaving. We term all of the above as ‘Green Arts and Crafts’ - a major part of the way we encourage Green arts and crafts is via our many monthly competitions open to the general public. You can read full information on our VerdantWorld website.

Periodically Go Green Today presents special awards of merit to individuals and organisations who we feel have made an outstanding public education contribution within the fields of citizenship and/or the environment. Those who have received an award from us are mentioned on the project applicable website i.e. promoting home-grown produce would be on our Self Sufficient UK/GIY website. Recipients of these special awards aren’t nominated, but are chosen internally by the Charity on the basis of their work and public achievements.

Periodically we offer special GGT merchandise in support of the Charity - for example; badges, postcards, t-shirts, etc - occasionally we also offer special individual items made by our volunteers who are artists or craftspeople and who have donated something they’ve made towards generating Charity funds. If you’re interested in these items please check our DIRECTORY page when you visit this site as we’ll advertise for sale there any merchandise we currently have to offer you. Thank you.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Go Green Today upholds the ethic of impartiality and our aim is not to promote, support, or advocate any particular point of view, or any avenue that claims to be a solution to a complex issue. Our policy is to present to the public all the valid arguments, suggestions, and ideas that are available so the reader can make up their own mind about issues. The only times we don’t follow this direction is when the valid evidence pointing to only one view and/or a certain course of action is overwhelming - such as the fact that deforestation is jeopardising the global ecosystem - and in these cases we uphold a particular direction.

Go Green Today believes that the needs and lives of people, animals, and our natural environment are entwined together in a beautiful, interdependent, complex puzzle that works perfectly and leads to our happiness, contentment, and fulfilment when it's in harmony, but leads to our misery, poor health, and aggressive greed when the relationships within the puzzle aren't properly balanced - i.e. the position we're in today where people have lost touch with our natural world, and are continuing to push it further away and destroy it as we crave more technology, more travel, and more fuel/energy resources. This greed leads to aggression right from the domestic and community level, right up to civil and international war due to our greed to possess objects, land, and fuel - or conflict can come as a result of being deprived of life's essentials i.e. water, food, shelter, because the greed for resources often causes people to be denied the basics of survival. Our thoughtless scramble for Earth's resources means that we hasten its destruction, which will inevitably lead to our own, as we remove forests, destroy species, and pollute water, seas, and the air we breathe - and seemingly we’ve even turned the weather and climate against us as a result, yet we still persist towards destruction - but all it takes is for us to STOP, and turn our Great minds, sciences, and technology towards a new way of living and ‘being’ with nature to secure the future of our world and of ourselves.

When human, animals, and nature live together in a more harmonious, respectful, and caring relationship we have all we need and more - we have clean air, drinking water, and clean seas, we have plenty of food, and as a result of this people, communities, and society feels less inclined towards aggressive greed, because we're healthier, happier, and more content. In the 21st Century worldwide human society needs to work towards SHARING our Earth's wonderful resources rather than selfishly greedily possessing them while allowing others to do without and allowing nature to die. In the 21st Century worldwide human society needs to acquire the understanding of what REALLY is important in life, and we also need to understand that even TODAY we’re fully capable of living in a thoughtful, harmonious, comfortable way with each other and with nature that doesn’t involve destruction.

The most desirable FUTURE for us all no matter who we are or where we live in the world is one in which we feel content, happy, secure, healthy, and have less worries about fulfilling our basic needs for a home, for food and for water, etc. But every day we seem to be leaving that desirable future further behind as we continue to negatively impact upon our natural world. But all we need to say is - enough is enough - then stop and change direction towards a more positive future. It’s REALLY not so hard!

The central ethic of Go Green Today is that of RESPECT for one's self, your community, and the environment - we call this 'Green Citizenship' and it's about promoting the benefits to all of living harmoniously with our natural environment and with each other in a sustainable and enjoyable way that leads to good physical, mental, and emotional health (i.e. wellbeing), with shared co-operative and community values towards a more balanced society that's focused on human, animal, and environmental needs, and on redressing the harmonious interdependent balance between these partners.

Unlike most environmental charities GGT has NEVER supported 'green' biofuels due to the way they're cultivated (i.e. after deforestation, plus use of food crops for fuel, etc), and also because they're NOT the answer to reducing Greenhouse gas emissions, as their lifetime CO2 emissions are comparable with fossil fuels (maize-based fuel actually has much worse CO2 emissions than fossil diesel), plus their NOx emissions are far higher (with NOx creating dangerous smog worldwide and being a much more powerful Greenhouse gas than CO2). We're also entirely opposed to the use of tallow-based biofuel on ethical/moral grounds, and due to it not being sufficiently proven via long-term 'real life' testing that diseases such as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies unequivocally cannot be passed to humans or animals via tallow biofuel (don’t be fooled when told there’s "no evidence" to support this concern - the reason there’s no evidence is because no valid research has been done yet).

GGT also has an open-minded attitude towards the causes of climate change, and doesn't buy into the wholesale explanation that climate change is solely being caused by human emissions of CO2, and that we can halt or even reverse climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. GGT accepts that humankind is very likely contributing to the effects of climate change (especially via deforestation and change of land use), however we do not accept that humans are 100% responsible for climate changes. The focus of GGT with regards to climate change is towards ADAPTATION rather than mitigation, although having made this statement it does NOT mean that GGT doesn't support efforts to reduce air pollution and our dependency on carbon-based fuels - Go Green Today is passionate about preserving our irreplaceable virgin rainforests, and about preserving, improving, and protecting the purity of our shared global natural resources such as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the seas from which we find food. For these reasons GGT does NOT support any further escalation in air travel, or in other forms of travel that pollute and/or damage our shared environment, or that compromises the good health of humans and animals. We’re also extremely concerned about the rise in NOx emissions, which in addition to being a very powerful combination of Greenhouse gasses is also the major component of SMOG, which is very dangerous to human health and is also responsible for damaging acid rain - strenuous efforts need to be made worldwide to drastically reduce NOx emissions.

CONTACT:

The best way to reach us is via the contact form below if you have any general enquiries that haven’t been dealt with on this website. Otherwise you can also write to us via our P.O. Box address below. Thank you.

J Hart - Go Green Today - P.O. Box 13175 - Duns - Scotland - TD10 6UJ

(please note that due to technical reasons our CONTACT FORM has now been placed on the DIRECTORY page. Thank you.)

Please note that if your query can be answered by reading this website, or one of our other websites, it’s unlikely you’ll receive a reply to your email - this also applies to queries unrelated to our work - we follow this action due to the number of inappropriate queries we receive, plus the fact we only have limited time available to reply to emails. Thank you. If you experience a problem with our contact form - i.e. it won’t send your message - please report the fault to us at this address (input manually) contactus @ gogreentoday.org.uk and we’ll rectify the fault (PLEASE don’t use the email address for anything other than to report a website fault as it isn’t designed to handle any other messages and we can’t send you a reply. Thank you).

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:

There are other groups and websites using titles similar to, or the same as the titles of some/all of Go Green Today’s project groups and/or our URLs. Go Green Today wishes to make clear that the Charity is NOT associated with, or affiliated with ANY other group or website using the name ‘Climate Concern’ (or any of our other stated working names) in their title or URL. If in doubt about whether any other group or website is actually run by the Charity PLEASE use the contact form on our HOME page to ask us, and we will be very glad to clarify the matter with you to avoid confusion. Thank you. Please also note that we only use ONE P.O. Box address for ALL our postal mail (inc. donations and Memberships) and this is the same on ALL our websites, and that we DON'T accept any online payments - therefore any other group or website purporting to be run by GGT having a DIFFERENT postal mail address and/or accepting online payments is FAKE. Please be aware of your own security online!