Hello and welcome to my blog, EcoTykki! Here I chart my journey into a world away from the new normal, where life focuses on buying, chucking, buying, working and chucking a bit more. I like recycling, reusing, avoiding single-use plastic and am a certifiable tinker. Anyone’s tat is a potential treasure!
About Me
I am a 39 year old Mum to three children and I live in beautiful Cornwall in the South West England. I am a copywriter in real life; I love researching and writing about anything but my passion is in writing about sustainability, ethical consumerism, the environment, and the politics and ethics of personhood on this ‘ere planet!
I have a doctorate in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford. I studied the effect of the international humanitarian response to the tsunami in India in 2004 on local fisherfolk. I found that their negative and critical voices had too often been subjugated in favour of dominant, positive charity narratives aimed at donors in the West. This turned me into a charity grump and you will often find me being cross at charities and their need to put money and donors in front of the aid recipients they are ostensibly there to serve. If there is anything that is going to make you realise that money corrupts, that thesis is it!
Focusing on humanitarian work closer to home, I worked on the front desks for various public sector departments in the South West. I focused on helping clients facing complex social, mental and physical health concerns access suitable services and help. I liked doing this.
Until recently I was a volunteer Community Leader with the national marine and conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage, working on their Plastic Free Communities campaign. Talking to businesses, community groups, schools and political groups about how and why we need to move away from using single use plastics, I helped gain Plastic Free status for Truro – the first city! – in June 2018. I did this officially for a year and have now left to let someone else have a turn and hopefully take Plastic Free Truro to new places and faces. Selfishly, it also means I can focus on writing in my own way a bit more, tinkering and being with my family.
Why ‘EcoTykki’?
EcoTykki brings together the obvious term eco with the cornish work ‘tykki’ which means butterfly as well as ‘beautiful thing’. I LOVE this! Butterflies are of course beautiful things as are the issues, places and creatures I like to write about and advocate for. The butterfly is also conceptual – tying in with the chaos theory that the distant effect of a flap of a butterfly’s wings has an effect miles away – and drawing in broader concepts of nature and our environment.
I am not visibly much of a hippy. I am conscious of the world and try to be thoughtful about my place in it but am fairly camouflaged as a typical mum of three, owner of a crazy rescue pup and two rescue goldfish called devon and Charlie. But I am also sensible and see that the world is turning into our rubbish bin. We dump quicker than we can tidy and from our privileged viewpoint perceive environmental problems as ‘someone else’s’: the council; the neighbours; the government; multinational companies… This blog is to understand why there are problems despite landfill sites and regular bin collections. It is a place to reintroduce what we can salvage and reuse. It is a place to explore the enlarging disconnect between us as human animals in our clinical, square nests and nature (as somewhere to visit? To look at through glass?). It is a place to try and explain why it is up to us collectively and as individuals to do something: to be different and challenge the new normal – and how the dickens to go about it.
EcoTykki 