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A write-up of the 2008 Soil Association conference
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Last year’s Soil Association conference offered delegates a deep immersion in the peak oil/Transition debates, and was, for many, a seminal experience. This year’s took the discussions deeper and offered delegates an update on progress since and a re-energiser in terms of the scale of the work needed to be done for food and farming to truly be ‘in Transition’. You can hear podcasts from the whole conference here and download the pdf of the conference programme here.
I arrived slightly late, midway through a video address from Caroline Lucas MEP, which was excellent. This was followed by Jeremy Leggett, who gave an excellent refresher in peak oil and climate change, based mainly around the recent Peak Oil Task Force he was a major player in, which brought together 8 companies from across UK industry to look at the implications of peak oil. The report concluded that peak oil would be in 2013 and would “hit society like a tidal wave”. He went through the various objections to the peak oil concept, and addressed each one in turn. We can get through though, he argued, with a Green New Deal (he was one of the contributors to the nef report) and with a revolution in energy generation.
(2 December 2008)
‘Super ants’ threaten UK gardens, scientists warn
James Randerson, Guardian
An ant species that forms huge supercolonies and infests gardens and parks is marching rapidly across Europe and will soon invade the UK, according to entomologists who are monitoring its spread.
The colonies can swell to 10 or 100 times the size of those of common garden ants and scientists warn that they can cause significant damage to plants.
“When I saw this ant for the first time, I simply could not believe there could be so many garden ants in the same lawn,” says Prof Jacobus Boomsma at the University of Copenhagen, one of its co-discoverers almost 20 years ago.
(3 December 2008)
As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The Guardian
STERKSEL, the Netherlands — The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.
The farm at Sterksel makes electricity for itself and for sale, and sells carbon credits. That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow’s ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid…
