On 14 February we held our first Beeston Transition Seed Swap. Over 150 people attended and got the chance to give and receive some seeds, get advice on growing their own food, composting, seed saving and more.
Please post your comments from the Seed Swap here. We are particularly interested in your feedback on the event itself and how we could improve for next year. We also invite you to let us know whether your sowing produced good results and whether there were any surprises!
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Beeston Transition Initiative has been offered an area at the Beeston Community Garden (see photos below). The Community Garden is on the Wollaton Road Allotment site and has an orchard, pond and wild area, a number of growing areas and a polytunnel. There are plans to erect an educational building there too. BBC Radio Nottingham are running a ‘switch off’ experiment on Wednesday 18th February. The idea is that everyone in Nottingham switches off all unnecessary appliances from 9pm on 18th Feb until 6am. Central Networks will monitor the change in electricity consumption and report back to say how much difference the switch off made. Presumably they don’t want you to actually turn off the radio… For full info click here. I found this to be extremely low-brow and alarmist. The author presents assertion as fact without exploring alternative arguments. The author appears to reject transition models as a means to survive the oil shocks and suggests praying instead. If, as I think his argument for the failure of transition is based on an analogy with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, then my feeling is that he doesn’t fully understand the game-theoretic and evolutionary mechanisms that can resolve commons dilemmas. He cites the argument that self-regulating and cooperative communities are subject to predation to the point of extinction. In this analogy he means the transition community. This is only half of the story, and nature demonstrates that it simply not true because every (successful) group has mechanisms to resist and deter predation. An example of this in nature is dialect. An example in transition might be local currencies. Read it with a pinch of salt. RJT This book begins well but the author is dazzled by the bright lights of hydrogen as the fuel of the future. He doesn’t seem to understand where the hydrogen and the power to make it come from (David Strahan provides the calculations to refute this in his book). Classical economics will always provide the answer: it is a ‘business as usual’ approach to peak oil that lacks any intellectual integrity. If I were a cynic I might think that this was written on the back of the publishing bandwagon for personal gain rather than a heartfelt treatise. RJT. This is an excellent piece of guardianesque British investigative journalism, apart from an unfortunate public spat with a government minister in the middle. The book provides much detail on how oil reserves are estimated and possibly in some cases fabricated. The book also explains why hydrogen is not a viable alternative fuel and why there is no alternative to energy decent. Great cover. RJT. Monbiot does a number of important things in this book. He first sets out the importance of tackling CO2 emissions now rather than later. He then proceeds to examine how in about 20 years time the actions of enlightened governments could have introduced new technologies that enable CO2 emissions to be reduced to be reduced by 80% (I think), while at the same time allowing us to maintain our current lifestyles. We can keep our cars, shop at supermarkets, produce waste, tumble dry our clothes, and live in an economy predicted on economic growth. In Monbiot’s future the only thing that we can’t do is go on holiday. The technical solutions include biofuels including wood from Scandinavia, hydrogen from natural gas, benevolent supermarkets, buses on the motorway, and possibly even nuclear power. My feeling is that the premise of the book is wrong. I can see that a plan in which business continues as usual and people just continue to live their lives as they are with technological changes occurring in the background, is the most palatable solution to many people (apart from the holidays). Two things. Doesn’t this require benevolent and visionary governments to be both elected here and abroad and to spend large sums of money on results that are by definition invisible. Doesn’t it also require that these technologies actually work (I’m thinking hydrogen here)? In this plan the only thing we need to do to ameliorate climate change do is elect such a government. I’ll turn the light off while I wait shall I? |