Keep Kermit and carry on...

I looked that up after going tadpole catching recently. My wife and I had heard about a likely pond, so we took our daughter down for a glorious afternoon of splashing about in bare feet with a net. We ended up catching dozens of the little wrigglers and carried them home in a bucket. But of course a bucket’s not really an ideal place to raise frogs – so I was casting around for easy homemade pond ideas the other day, when I spotted the wine-barrel top.

A funny story about the barrel: a friend who’s always coming up with mad-cap schemes bought it because he liked the idea of making whiskey. His partner, however, liked the idea of a sober boyfriend, and the whiskey project was quickly canned. Would we like an empty wine barrel he asked? He sure wouldn’t be using it… Thanks, I said – and ended up cutting the end off to create a neat little goldfish pond. But I never did find a good use for the top.

Until last week when we needed a home for our tadpoles, that is. It took five minutes to waterproof the inside with some plastic sheeting, and hey presto – we had a cute little frog pond to go with the fish barrel. What do you think?

Well, our daughter loves it, and now every morning we go out to feed the tadpoles and see how much the froggier ones have changed overnight. It’s been a cool project, and I love watching her little hands dip in the water as she points excitedly to all the mini Kermits. But it has made me notice something.

In this crazily hot weather we’ve been slathering on the sunscreen, and now every time our hands go in the pond water, they leave a faint sheen on the surface. Is that bad for the tadpoles, I wondered? After all, they’re very sensitive animals.

By coincidence one of the Green Ideas writers emailed their article on sunscreen in the next day, and to be honest it was a bit of an eye-opener. It turns out that a lot of conventional sunscreens – including the brand we use – contain something called oxybenzone, and it’s controversial stuff.

Sensible mainstream scientists are linking it with environmental effects like turning male fish female and killing coral. And there are medical questions about whether it can damage your skin.

Now, we don’t do paranoia in our house, but I reckon that once our current tube runs out, we’ll be switching to a less controversial sunscreen – and finding one will be simple. Because although poor old Kermit might have had it tough back in 1970, I reckon 43 years on, being green is getting easier. If I want an oxybenzone-free sunscreen, for instance, all I need to do is choose one of the brands we’ve listed in our Smarter sunscreen story.

Seems like an easy decision to me. After all, who wants their frogs singing falsetto?

Greg Roughan
Editor, Green Ideas magazine

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