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Transforming England’s towns into green and pleasant land
Matt Ford , CNN
To begin with, visitors to Todmorden, Yorkshire, might think it looks like any other small town in northern England.
Working allotments are becoming more popular in Great Britain, as locally grown-produce becomes increasingly economical and environmentally-friendly.
Working allotments are becoming more popular in Great Britain, as locally grown-produce becomes increasingly economical and environmentally-friendly.
But look closer and you will notice some unusual features that have placed the town at the forefront of a new food revolution.
There are herbs growing in flower boxes at the bus stop, raspberry canes on waste land, cabbages in the flower beds at the local park – and even beans between the graves in the local cemetery.
In fact, wherever you look food is growing, free for anyone to pick and take home to cook.
The architects of this remarkable landscape are two local women, Pam Wallis and Mary Clear, who are on a mission to make their town self-sufficient within 10 years.
The duo became frustrated at the number of allotment sites available — only four in the whole town — and so decided to find their own sites through a bit of what is known as “Guerilla Gardening”.
All across the world planting fruit and vegetables is becoming a new form of non-violent direct action for a diverse group of environmentalists and food campaigners.
It has a long history in the UK: 350 years ago the Levellers, or Diggers, seized land for food production.
(16 October 2008)
This week my wife and I saw a documentary from Netflix about an early figure in English history, <:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrard_Winstanley”>Gerrard Winstanley, who started out as a Digger/Leveller and ended up as a Quaker.
The film was strange. At first it seemed amateurish and slow-moving, but gradually I become caught up in it and found it moving. That’s a period of English history I’d like to learn more about — about the time of the Civil War when things were unsettled and could have gone in different directions.
http://www.sover.net/~ozus/winstanley.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMSL7UsIu00
Green Fantasia (Thomas Friedman review
Bill McKibben, New York Review of BOoks
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America
by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 438 pp., $27.95
Thomas Friedman is the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they’re in-the-know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease. He performs a useful service as a kind of political GPS unit, telling us where the country is, and could reasonably be expected to go. And this is his best book, more nuanced than his last, the best-selling The Earth Is Flat. But it needs to be viewed as a snapshot of the current dilemmas of policy, not as the oracle that it often aspires to be.
By this point, even casual readers of the New York Times Op-Ed page are familiar with the arguments in his book, because he’s rehearsed most of them several times.
(6 November 2008)
Fifth U.S. Peak Oil Conference – Last Chance for Early Registration
Community Solutions and Upland Hills EAC
Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change
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The Fifth Conference on U.S. Peak Oil and Community Solutions
October 31 – November 2, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan
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With a new partnership, location and many novel program additions, this year’s conference promises to be an exciting and unique event that will educate and build community across a broad spectrum of experience and interest levels. To give you some extra time to make your travel plans, we have extended the early registration period through this Sunday, October 19th at 10pm. We hope you will take time this weekend to make plans to attend and invite your colleagues to join you, and thereby benefit from generous group discounts and shared travel expenses. Check the conference program and schedule, then register on-line at www.plancconference.org.
As always, the conference will provide cutting-edge information from the frontiers of peak oil and community solutions, including the following presentation and panels:
* Keynoter John Michael Greer, author of the forthcoming The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
* Keynoter Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects
* Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, author of The Party’s Over and Powerdown (via webcast)
* Katrin Klingenberg, director of the Passive House Institute US
* Peter Bane, editor of Permaculture Activist
* Christopher Bedford, President of the Center for Economic Security and the Sweetwater Local Foods Market
* John Richter, co-founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Education
* Pat Murphy, author of Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change
* Megan Quinn Bachman, Outreach Director of Community Solutions; co-producer of The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
This year’s conference will include many new activities designed to build community across lines that often divide us, including:
* a Green Living Expo of green products, services and organizations, offered free to the public and conference goers alike
* a Connections Cafe of roundtable discussions led by those who have “walked the walk” in their own lives and communities
* tours of local sustainable projects including MI’s first sustainable restaurant, a LEED certified school, and the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center, a model of thoughtful ecological design and renewable energy
* entertainment, shared meals and plenty of other networking and socializing opportunities
The conference is an outstanding opportunity for you to learn and to lead, to strengthen existing connection and forge new ones. It will bring together peak oil pioneers with folks just starting to appreciate the looming energy and economic crises – a microcosm of the challenges facing the sustainability movement.
Community Solutions and Upland Hills EAC are committed to making The Fifth U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions not only a world-class educational and networking opportunity but also a great value. We have extended early registration through this weekend, and are offering significant group discounts, with a full conference pass starting at just $100 and discounts for volunteers.
By acting now, you can significantly cut your personal household energy use and overall consumption, support more localized economic production, and reduce your dependence on high energy transportation in your daily life, and just as importantly, encourage others in the process. By doing this, you will be helping to create a more resilient and sustainable community adapted to the coming economic and ecological storms.
For more information, visit www.plancconference.org, call Upland Hills EAC at 248-693-1021 or Community Solutions at 937-767-2161 or, or email [email protected].
(17 October 2008)
