Blog bearings

Now blogging here: http://sustainablecitiessustainableworld.blogspot.co.uk/

Soundwalk: free event, Arnos Vale, 28 May, 10am to 12 noon

Noise and air quality expert Steve Crawshaw will be leading a soundwalk on 28th May, 10am to 12 noon at Arno's Vale. He hopes it will lead to greater protection for quiet areas in the city. It's also a good opportunity to experience Arno's Vale in a new way. More details on Steve's blog http://bristolnoise.blogspot.com/2011/05/research-activity-soundwalk-and-mapping.html
Both images can be clicked on to see an enlarged, more readable version and for details of how to book a place at this free event lead by an expert.

SouthvilleGreen: Bolton is back!

Hey, Charlie Bolton is back to blogging again. He's standing as the Green Party candidate for Southville in this year's local elections too. Comments to Charlie - and to Southville's Cllr Tess Green via this blog.

SouthvilleGreen

New energy and environment blog

Interesting new blog on energy and the environment has just started up. Check it out here:
http://energyandenvironmentblog.blogspot.com/.

Water Words

Pairs of words that sum up a lot of water issues: life’s essential; renewable...potentially; community rooting; unevenly distributed; wasted widely; polluted commonly; rich, 100’s l; poor 10’s l; piped...UK; carried...Africa; city...leaks; extremely useful; farming, mostly; cooling, cleansing; ‘universal’ solvent; reservoirs, dams; socio-environmental havoc; community uprooting; climate changing; needs...wants; conflict prevention; modest measures; efficiency, accessibility; massive benefits!
http://blogactionday.change.org/

Water footprints and the Living Planet Report 2010

WWF's Living Planet Report 2010 has some vitally important things to say about our planet not least our use and abuse of water...Lets not foregt the huge amounts of water embedded in the vast quantity of material and goods exported all over the globe - including from countries whose people struggle to get enough water for basics.

http://www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/about_us/living_planet_report_2010/

http://blogactionday.change.org/

Wealth: water or diamonds? What is worth more to the thirsty and hungry?

Ed Miliband drew on the well known Oscar Wilde quote ‘What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ in his first conference speech as Labour leader. Strange coming from a man who directly equates ever increasing money flow through our economy (GDP growth) with progress and wellbeing. Ed, along with Tory David Cameron and Lib Dem Nick Clegg, supports and advocates a corrupted notion of wealth which is narrow, materialist and cash-value centred.

Wealth creation has come to mean the stockpiling of affluence, running down finite natural resources, wasting and mismanaging potentially renewable resources like water such that many people around the globe struggle even to get enough to drink and wash. What is worth more to the thirsty and hungry – water or diamonds?

‘Value’ is largely what can be bought and sold if you have Ed’s (and Dave’s and Nick’s) view. The rich continue to hoard, deny the poor, and build for their leisure, recreation and luxury. The poorest around the globe continue to be unable to meet their basic needs such as decent public clean water supply and healthy sewage disposal systems. In fact the rich (and relatively speaking that’s most of us living in the Western hemisphere) are rich precisely because others are poor – GDP growth, Ed’s, Dave’s and Nick’s primary focus, has been very large over many decades and in many countries but numbers unable to meet basic needs are also very high!

We are GDP growing out of proportion to the proper, healthy working of life support systems. These systems include: those that can continually supply rainwater; those that keep our climate in a reasonably stable balance; those that process our soils, keeping them productive; many that keep ecosystems in a diverse state. Furthermore, we are sapping the energies and threatening the existence of the whole interconnected water, air, soil and biodiversity system – yet this is the source of our resources and the basis of our lives and thus is our true wealth.

We are also GDP growing out of proportion to the healthy working of socio-economic systems. Acting on the notion of wealth creation as increasing money flow through our economy has resulted in relatively small numbers of individuals and institutions with inordinate, concentrated cash and property. This inequality and unfairness decreases quality of life and as time passes is increasingly destabilising. Very strange, then, that Ed – and Dave and Nick – talk so much about building a fair society.

To benefit people and planet, GDP growth needs to pass tests of: efficiency; renewability; respecting environmental limits; building stronger local communities; meeting needs now and in the future; local and global fairness; health, wellbeing and quality of life. This means taking a very different view of wealth.

For more on water and related issues see: http://blogactionday.change.org/

Blog Action Day 2010, Oct 15: Water

Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

About Blog Action Day
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts us all.

Our Goal
First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue. By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue.

Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action. In 2007 with the theme of the environment, we saw bloggers running environmental experiments, detailing innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices, and focusing their audience's attention on organizations and companies promoting green agendas. In 2008 we covered the theme of poverty, and similarly focused the blogging community's energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions. Last year, the conversation around climate change brought our voices around the globe to discuss an issue that threatens us all and mobilized tens of thousands of people to get more involved in the movement for a more sustainable future. This year, with the theme of Water, we are eager to shed light on this often-overlooked topic.

No Impact Man: UK release this Sept.

Dogwoof, a film distributor specialising in social-issue and environmental documentaries and whose previous titles include Age of Stupid, Burma VJ and Food Inc are now preparing their next UK release, No Impact Man. Its a documentary that follows well-known American environmentalist and blogger Colin Beavan and his family as they embark on a year living with absolutely no impact, in Manhattan. This means no cars, no fridges, no TV … and no Starbucks. The film trailer is above and is on You Tube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyzjjpKTv0Y

More details on show dates and venues to follow. Further information:

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

http://gonoimpact.dogwoof.com/

http://www.dogwoof.com/

Chris Hutt

Very sad and shocked by news of the death of cycling campaigner and well known blogger Chris Hutt. (http://greenbristolblog.blogspot.com/).

We've lost a great green campaigner with a distinctive libertarian perspective and a very committed, independent-minded and persistent character. I first met Chris over 20 yrs ago and I've worked with him a lot in recent yrs on cycling and green spaces issues. I know just how strongly he felt about excellent achievements like the Bristol to Bath Railway Path.

Tributes to Chris here:

Bristol Traffic

James Barlow

Politics online in Bristol...

Praise for the online work of Bristol's Greens over on Bristol 24-7 :

...what they bring to the table are some basic journalistic instincts that the other parties either lack or are withholding. These qualities might be raw but they include natural curiosity; an eye for a story; the desire to dig beneath the surface; a willingness to question authority; disdain for the ‘party line’ and that quality Paxman summedup as, “why is this lying bastard lying to me?”. All are alive and well on the Green blogs alongside an uninhibited willingness to deal in ideas...

http://www.bristol247.com/2010/01/28/why-the-greens-dominate-bristols-online-politics/

Story written by a certain Bristol Blogger - lets hope he finds a new internet host for his blog soon.

Climate change is not only about melting ice caps and polar bears. Climate change is about people.

Guest blog post (for Blog Action Day: Climate Change) from CARE International's, Simon Owens:
Swinging weather patterns are creating disasters on a scale that human civilization has never before witnessed. For the world’s poorest people – the ones least equipped to deal with its effects – climate change is devastating their crops, livelihoods and communities.

"Climate change is worsening the plight of those hundreds of millions of men, women and children who already live in extreme poverty – and it threatens to push hundreds of millions more people into similar destitution," says CARE International’s Secretary General Robert Glasser. "A concerted international response to this unprecedented challenge is required if we are to avoid catastrophic human suffering."

CARE is working toward a world where poor people can create opportunity out of crises like climate change. But the current reality is that climate change makes poor people even more vulnerable.

For instance, agricultural production will likely decline in the poorest countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Less reliable rainfall will likely affect planting seasons, crop growth and livestock health – and lead to increased malnutrition. In other parts of the developing world, flooding will likely further diminish the quality of already-marginal soil and could cause outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

Climate change also is hurling many poor families into "Catch-22" situations. For example, they may select crops that are less sensitive to rainfall variation, but also less profitable. As incomes decline and people are not able to eke out a living, children are forced to leave school, assets are sold off to afford essentials, malnutrition rates increase and large-scale migration ensues. The end result? Deepening poverty for tens of millions of people around the world.

What Must Be Done?

At the international level, negotiations to develop a new treaty to guide global efforts to address climate change will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark in just a couple weeks. The United States must help lead those efforts, and forge a strong agreement that caps emissions, stops global warming and responds to the effects already in motion. We must do this for the sake of all of humanity.

What can I do to help?

First, you can make a tax-deductible donation to CARE to help poor families access the tools and education they need to adapt to the effects of climate change, make efficient use of their existing resources and overcome poverty for good.

Second, if you live in the Unites States, you can write your senators and urge them to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a critical step toward U.S. leadership in tackling climate change. U.S. leadership is critical to making the Copenhagen negotiations a success.

Third, you can join the CARE mailing list to be kept up to date on CARE’s activities and other ways you can take action in the days counting down to Copenhagen.

To donate, take action and join our e-mail list, please visit www.care.org/climate

Blog Action Day 15 Otober 09: Climate Change

Just signed up again for Blog Action Day. The more people get involved the better!!

Compliment to Bristol's 'citizen journalists' - including this one!

Writing in this weeks Venue, Eugene Byrne pays this compliment:

The campaign to save the Railway Path also marked the point at which "citizen journalism" came of age in Bristol. There have been local blogs and "alternative" local news websites around for years, but 2008 was the year in which we suddenly found there were a few of them actually worth looking at. The Bristol Blogger, James Barlow, Vowles the Green, the Green Bristol Blog and some others don't just peck away at their keyboards complaining. They find stuff out as well sometimes, and made a lot of the running in the Railway Path campaign and on a couple of other issues.

Good to get some recognition. I'll do my best to keep up the efforts. The Bristol Blogger deserves his 'Top Banana' award but several other bloggers (see right and see the long list on the Bristol Blogger site) and their commenters have contributed to reporting, debating, activity and campaigning. I'm sure that 'citizen journalism' will continue to grow in size and influence.

Joined up thinking needed for joined up transport modes at Temple Meads

The new Stockwood Pete blog strongly argues the case for 'a proper transport hub for Temple Meads' whilst making powerful points about lack of openness and local democracy with respect to the associated land. Its not just green land development that is driven by developers it seems! Good stuff - Pete is sure to be an influential blogger! Local paper report on the issue here.

Now is the time to invest, invest, invest in going green!!

The poorest people in the world are suffering most from climate change and will be the worst affected by climate change to come. The map starkly illustrates this. They need richer countries, who have produced the climate problem in the process of becoming rich, to act seriously and urgently. Higher temperatures mean many of the world's poorest areas face: less water availability; lower crop yields; degraded resources such as woods/forests, biodiversity available; higher disease incidence; weather extremes from prolonged drought to sudden extreme flooding, extreme temperatures to violent storms (see this report on scientific evidence from the IPCC for instance).



That moves have been made to dilute and undermine valuable work on tackling climate change done by the EU is thus very worrying and shortsighted (details here). Governments across Europe, not least our own, are using the current financial crisis to excuse tough action on climate - they are willing to spend billions bailing out banks but action to benefit the world's poorest is not a priority. The potential impacts of the climate crisis are enormous for all of us and you'd think that the effects of not planning, regulating, and investing for both the short, the medium and long term are clearly illustrated by the financial crisis! Action to genuinely tackle climate is just not an option - clearly our society and within it our economy (and within that our financial system) exist within and are dependent on our environment.

Investment needed to build secure, stable, climate-friendly green economies around the globe is just the kind of investment that would help tackle recession too. Hundreds of thousands of jobs could result in Europe alone from the right kind of policies on just energy efficiency and wind power, also excellent for cutting carbon and tackling climate change. This could be repeated around the globe, building green infrastructure in countries both rich and poor. Scope for growth from green investments is very high!

Details on the Green New Deal.
Some background on Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s.

Update: interesting to see that Jonathon Porritt, Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission has made basically the same point as this post on his blog.

This post is part of Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty

Scrutinising plans and proposing changes...local democracy, not a problem!!

Councillor Abdul Malik does not seem to want much public debate about selling, then building on publicly owned green space, rich in wildlife, on the Bristol to Bath Railway Path ('Call for unity over factory development', Bristol Evening Post, Sept 20). He does not want light shone on the issue I guess (?). Very unquestioning as far as the development is concerned. He contradicted himself by saying he did not want ‘arguments to threaten the future of the site’ (employing a fear tactic..) but later said that he had ‘concerns about over-development’! Scrutiny of plans and seeking after any necessary changes is an essential part of the local democratic process! Does he just want people to accept proposals?



Over 200 local people have signed a petition on this issue and so concern is certainly significant (and growing as people find out the facts). Also, given that the Bristol to Bath Railway Path is used by large numbers of people from all across Bristol and from outside it, there are a wide range of stakeholders interested in the green nature of the path and its protection. There is a much bigger issue here of the procedures that should be used to decide on land selling and change of use, given that the council has plans to flog off more of Bristol's green spaces year on year!

Public investigation and debate, which Councillor Abdul Malik seems surprisingly reluctant to have, and which has been lead by bloggers (see here too), has shed a lot of light on this issue which we would not otherwise have had. Its been vital in revealing how intensive the development is and how the process has lacked openness. The plans need to be scaled back and changed to avoid the worst impacts, which have been a big concern to the council's own Nature Conservation Officer. I’ve written direct to the George Ferguson, Chairman of the architects involved about this and copied the message to the council and developers but so far have no reply nor even an acknowledgement.

What place for legitimate nature conservation, environmental and amenity concerns in the face of high development pressures?

My MP, Bristol East's Kerry McCarthy, has been cajoled by myself and other local bloggers (here), into debating the sell-off of biodiverse green space on the Bristol to Bath Railway Path and the pros and cons of the proposed development on/near this land (see planning application details and form to submit comments, objections etc here). I was distinctly unimpressed with her initial unwillingness to engage in discussing the issue (she tried using her blog rules to try to avoid discussion at first but then engaged after further pressure from both the Bristol Blogger and Green Bristol Blog author Chris Hutt).

At least we have discussion somewhere now, thanks to bloggers and concerned locals. Bristol City Council has not consulted on the land sale, though the planning process now has to be gone through. I've not had a reply from Cllr Rosalie Walker (see here) on why this land is, apparently, not covered by the Parks and Green Spaces Strategy and have written to Kerry expressing concern about procedures and asking her to look into it.

I strongly disagree with the views my MP was pressed into giving on her blog, which appear to favour development on this high value green space which is home to such protected wildlife as badgers and sloworms (see Kerry's comments in italics below). What priority is Kerry giving to legitimate nature conservation, environmental and amenity value issues? Wouldn't we just build, on a small scale if its just a matter of scale*, anywhere eg Bristol's Downs, Leigh Woods, Ashton Court... if we shared Kerry's apparent attitude? The plans could and should in my view be scaled back and/or modified in the eastern portion at least, as the Railway Path is one of Bristol East's few good quality green spaces. This would address some of these issues whilst not impacting the development as a whole that much. Is this too much to ask??

MP Kerry McCarthy's view '...I've seen the Bloggers site, the Green Bristol site and others. I've looked at Square Peg's plans for the 'cycle houses' and am now following it up with various people (although I think I'm right in saying that no constituent has contacted me directly). I just haven't chosen to blog about it, and I'm not going to let other people dictate to me what I do and don't blog about. My initial view is that it doesn't look as if very much land is involved*, but I want to see for myself how the land is currently being used and whether the development would have a detrimental effect on the enjoyment/ use of the cycle path, or mean a significant loss of green space*. From the plans, it doesn't look as if that would be the case, but I take on board people's comments that the plans may be misleading.As for Kevin - several campaign leaflets have gone out to everyone in SGW and he's replying to everyone who has written back. If anyone raises this issue - and it hasn't come up on the doorsteps so far, not that I know - I'm sure he'll respond to them with his views.'
_____________________________________________________________

And more of her views '....And as for the railway path, as I've said it's a very small section* (100 metres acc to Chris) and I'm not opposed either to building upwards (I think it's overstating it a bit to call it a tower block) - how else would you suggest we find space for homes for the 19,000 people on the council waiting list? Obviously brownfield sites must be the priority, but it's not the entire solution. I'm also concerned about the number of houses being turned into flats, with associated problems re parking, and often anti-social behaviour from the people who rent them. We need family homes - but they've got to be built somewhere. Where do you suggest?'



Well, her own party's policy in Bristol says not on high quality green spaces !!

Pete Postlethwaite in 'The Age of Stupid'

According to Green Home (the very recently developed '...hub for Green Party bloggers, promoting the idea of a green blogosphere or community...') the film 'The Age of Stupid' was shown at the Green Party conference (on Saturday I think). It sounds great and I do like the work of Pete Postlethwaite who stars in it. I look forward to seeing it shown in Bristol (it will be released here early next year I'm told).



More news/bckground on this here.