There’s a new bottom-up force for tackling climate change and preparing for Peak Oil. It’s called, the Transition Towns initiative. Starting from the town of Totnes in Devon, over 100 towns, and villages, and even a Forest and a City, have already signed up. They all help one another through the Transition Network, but Transition is about communities on the ground bringing together their existing projects and skills to prepare for life after cheap oil.

World demand for oil is relentlessly climbing, driven by the booming new economies such as China. The people in these countries quite legitimately aspire to the same standard of living as people in the rich West enjoy. But world population is also rising, and will reach at least 9 billion before it possibly stabilises around 2050. Quite literally, the Earth is full. We have already used half the fossil fuel oil available - the planet is not going to be able to meet the growing demands for consumption from its human population.

Of course, burning all this oil is going to wreak havoc on our climate, and the poorest will suffer the most.

Transition is a hugely positive response to these crises. By re-building resiliant, vibrant local communities, we can greatly improve our quality of life without having to increase our consumption - our ’standard of living’ - to do so.

The first Transition City is Bristol. Now a diverse and loose coalition of people in Birmingham want to make a positive start on Transition for their city. If you want to find out more, please contact me - treaclemine [at] intranet [dot] org - Transition is about whole communities working together, and every single individual has something to offer, whether their memories of coping with rationing, their skills at setting up online communications, or their enthusiasm for bringing in future generations.

A draft flyer for this project is now available.

“Spiralseed and OrganicLea cordially invite you to the launch of ‘EARTH WRITINGS’ by Graham Burnett,

Sat 13 Jan 2007
4pm onwards

The Hornbeam Centre, 458 Hoe Street, Walthamstow London E17
(near the Bakers Arms - 5 minutes walk from Walthamstow Central BR)

This event will be preceded at 2pm by a talk ‘Introduction to Permaculture’ by Mark Warner of ‘Naturewise’ All welcome! Please feel free to pass this message onto anybody who might be interested.

www.spiralseed.co.uk/earthwritings

–
Graham Burnett: Integrated Design for Local Environmental Resources”

I’ve always had the utmost respect for environmental campaign groups. Most start as grassroots groups of concerned people who dedicate a phenomenal amount of their own time, energy and frequently money to their cause.

Like any organisation though, as they grow, the administrative overhead grows and you reach the point where you can no longer run on just goodwill - you need to make an income, you need more resources, and then you need fundraising to pay for all these extra resources.
An article in todays Guardian, paints a damming picture of Greenpeace, and whilst this article must be considered as just one side of a story, there are worrying signs: Continue Reading »

Brazil Environmental Authorities Investigating Fish Die-Off in Southern River

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — Environmental authorities were investigating what caused some 15 tons of dead fish to wash up in a major river in a southern state Monday.

Andre Milanez, of the Rio Grande do Sul state environmental agency FEPAM said that lack of rainfall was the most likely cause of death but that some kind of industrial accident or illegal runoff had not been ruled out. Continue Reading »

At the end of October, I gave a presentation to a group at BVV about the environmental impacts of intensive animal farming.

I tried to take commonly available and verifiable research to create an objective overview of the current environmental crisis we find our world in. The presentation was broken down into the following sections;

• Global Climate Change
• Habitat Destruction & Deforestation
• Water Usage / Water Pollution
• The Oceans (Pollution & species destruction)
• Efficiency of Land Use
• Fossil Fuel Use

You can now download a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) copy of my notes which has been enhanced slightly after my talk thanks to valuable feedback. Please use the link below (the file is approx 400k)

Meat Eating and the Environment

From BBC News site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6181396.stm

According to the BBC news website, United Nations negotiations on fisheries have ended without a global ban on trawling methods which destroy coral reefs and fish nurseries.

Conservation groups and some governments had argued for a ban on bottom-trawling, which drags heavy nets and crushing rollers on the sea floor. Continue Reading »

(Reuters) The world’s fish and seafood populations will collapse by 2048 if current trends in habitat destruction and overfishing continue, resulting in less food for humans, researchers said on Thursday.

In an analysis of scientific data going back to the 1960s and historical records over a thousand years, the researchers found that marine biodiversity — the variety of ocean fish, shellfish, birds, plants and micro-organisms — has declined dramatically, with 29 percent of species already in collapse.

Extending this pattern into the future, the scientists calculated that by 2048 all species would be in collapse, which the researchers defined as having catches decline 90 percent from the maximum catch. Continue Reading »

From The Daily Telegraph

A complete ban on fishing for cod in the waters around Britain will be called for by international scientists in their advice to the EU published later this week.

The advice from the Copenhagen-based International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (Ices) is the same as it has given the EU for the last four years — and which ministers have ignored. But it has new force. Continue Reading »

Targeting of larger fish makes populations prone to collapse, says Rex Dalton at Nature.com

Fishing makes fish populations more variable from year to year, and so more vulnerable to complete collapse, says a study in Nature this week.

These ‘boom and bust’ cycles are probably amplified by fishermen targeting the stronger, bigger, older fish, the international research team says. So quota-setting agencies should consider adjusting fishery takes to protect larger fish, they advise.

For decades, researchers have examined the rise and fall of certain fish populations, trying to determine why the numbers changed: excessive fishing, ocean temperature shifts, or some combination of these factors have been blamed. Fishing-industry groups often laid the blame for plunging populations on environmental change. Continue Reading »

This appeared in the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) magazine and was brought to our attention by Nigel. It is easy for us, sitting here in relative luxury to be judgemental about people in far away places and say they ’shouldn’t’ be doing this or that, but these people believe that there are no alternatives but to carry on what they have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. Whilst the end result is not 100% veggie, it shows people that there are alternatives to fishing to the point of extinction without being dictated to.

In the small coastal town of Hernani on the island of Samar in the Philippines, seven VSO volunteers are working with the local government to find alternatives to over-fishing in Matarunao Bay. Continue Reading »