Transition Town Tooting

Category: Other stuff

A place to gather things that have no category!

  • ‘Seasonal Food and Seasonal Wellbeing’

    Our monthly ‘First Tuesday’ meeting on 7th June met at Mushkil Aasaan – with many thanks for the use of the hall.
    Belinda, Tim & Charles used games and discussion to explore some of the interrelated features of the food we buy and grow – its nutritional value, its availability locally-grown, its ‘carbon footprint’, its degree of government subsidy or supermarket ‘shelf shout’, and food’s relationship with our own wellbeing.
    We shared some favourite seasonal recipes, local picnic locations, and ideas for outdoor cooking and eating. We looked at packaging and waste – and linked this to composting, and to the satisfaction of growing our own food.
     Some of our discussions in more detail:
    Ø  Where is some of our favourite fruit grown, how does it reach our shops – and how to do we do the last step of getting fruit to our kitchens – for example by foot, or bike, or car? Which of those can we control ourselves?
    Ø  Which fruit would become scarce or very expensive in the case of the end of cheap oil, and which fruit would still be readily available at which times of year – whether grown locally, or in the UK, or further afield?
    Ø  What would the end of cheap oil do to our eating habits?
    Ø  Taking a ‘shopping basket’ of 12 food items such as chicken nuggets from Thailand, home-grown apples or Irish mature cheddar, we looked at the carbon footprint of each food’s production, processing, packaging, and distribution.
    Ø  This is a complex topic – we used a game from the ‘Carbon Conversations’ course and tried ranking these 12 foods, from lower to higher carbon footprint.
    Ø  As consumers, we realised we probably don’t know enough about the complex relationships between different foods and different processes! 
    Ø  Sharing seasonal recipes took us from English asparagus to strawberries and cream. Some of us who thought ‘there’s nowhere to picnic in Tooting’ were shown others’ drawings of good locations.
    Ø  We looked at the positive aspects of appropriate food packaging (yes there are some!), and at the drawbacks of seeing packaging, or food waste, as part of a linear process that ends with dumping in landfill.
    Ø  We explored taking a cyclical holistic approach, where ‘waste’ becomes valued – whether at the community or the household level.
    Ø  Waste took us into household composting and a reminder of our Tooting Community Garden as a local way forward to get involved with local food growing (we will focus on the Garden in our next TTT ‘First Tuesday’ on July 5th).
    Ø  We heard about two other community initiatives –
    o  Balham Country Market, to be held on Fridays from 2-4pm at Balham Baptist Church in Ramsden Rd, for members to sell home produced items directly to the public. Email balham.country.markets@gmail.com for more info.
    o   Jack Astbury is starting a local project in a hidden-away corner of Tooting: ‘an inner city space to create an organic small holding that grows food for a local community who in turn supports it through buying.’ It is early days, and we’ll keep in touch. Jack’s website is www.home-growers.co.uk
    Ø  Finally, we shared ideas for involving local experience in Tooting to support local wellbeing through seasonal food – for example having a swapping site online for gardeners with spare produce, or sharing skills for some of the useful jobs like building a compost box, or having an outdoor cooking skills plus picnic event.

  • BATCA Fun Day 2011

    TTT will again be participating in this year’s BATCA Fun Day held as in previous years at the Gatton School and St Augustine’s church opposite in Broadwater Rd, Tooting.  More details to follow soon but here is the BATCA poster:

  • Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival Shortlisted for Award

    The Trashcatchers Carnival which took place last summer in Tooting is one of four finalists shortlisted for Climate Week’s Best Event.
    The Carnival was a vibrant and colourful event that used recycling as a metaphor to build a vision of a low-energy future for Tooting. It aimed to create beauty from rubbish, using story, art, science and celebration to tap into the collective ingenuity of local residents. Characters, sculptures, musical instruments, dance, performance, costumes and floats were all created using discarded materials such as plastic bags, bottles and boxes.

    Produced by Transition Town Tooting in partnership with Phakama and Emergency Exit Arts, the Carnival was one of the most significant community events to take place in the Borough of Wandsworth in 2010 and had the support and participation of numerous schools, community groups and local organisations.
    The community of Port Adelaide in Australia have been so inspired by this event that Transition Town Tooting and Phakama will be working with their local transition, waste, education, arts and environmental groups (by skype, facebook and social media) to connect up the two communities through the ‘Trashcatching’  concept of public celebration. 

    Climate Week is a national occasion that offers an annual renewal of our ambition and confidence to combat climate change. It is supported by every part of society – from the Prime Minister to Paul  McCartney, Vivienne Westwood to Manchester United, the CBI to Girlguiding UK. Its commercial partners are Tesco, Aviva, EDF  Energy, Kellogg’s and RBS.
       
    “We are delighted to have been shortlisted for the Climate Week Best Event Award. The Trashcatchers Carnival was an inspirational project that enabled us to reimagine our relationship with our earth. We want to dedicate this to every single Trashcatchers Carnavalista and to the whole community of Tooting”.
    Fabio Santos. Director of Phakama
    and Lucy Neal. Co-Chair of Transition Town Tooting  
       
    The winner will be selected by a judging panel which includes Lord Nicholas Stern,  Met Office Chief Scientist Julia Slingo, environmentalist Tony Juniper, author Ian McEwan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate  advisor, Terry Tamminen. It will be announced on 21st March at the official Climate Week launch  event at Lancaster House in Central London where the keynote speaker is Chris Huhne MP,  Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. 

  • April 5th Food Event – Call for Tooting Photos!

    With Spring fast approaching TTTs Food Group have been busily preparing for the new growing season! to celebrate this the Food Group are having a community food and growing event on Tuesday the 5th of April at Mushkil Assann on Upper Tooting Road between 7 and 9pm. For the event we need lots and lots of photos of Tooting -both the space that’s wasted as well as the space that is used in fantastic and innovative ways. If you’d like to submit some pics for the event, please email all JPEGS to colour_ride@hotmail.com.
    More details to follow and see you on the day!

  • Ecobuild Trip

    This year’s Ecobuild was bigger and better than ever before, mixing lots of high tech, next generation eco products with useful demonstrations and lectures from leading thinkers such as Richard Heinberg and Susan Greenfield.

    Several members of TTT went along and were impressed by the range of innovative building  products that were on show. Such as; insulation boards made out of straw, carpet tiles made from recycled carpets, a solar water heating system that works 24 hours a day, night or day, or OLED lighting that can revolutionise the way we think about colour, interior design and lighting in our homes and buildings.

    It was all very exciting stuff, and gave us an insight as to what it could be like in our homes in the future.         Malsara

  • Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    Have a go at your creating your own plan for the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050.
    Transition Town Tooting – along with lots of other local groups, businesses and NGOs – were invited to a consultation event last Friday run by DECC where they unveiled The 2050 Pathways Analysis.  Described as ‘an online framework through which to consider some of the choices and trade-offs we will have to make over the next forty years. It is system-wide, covering all parts of the economy and all greenhouse gases emissions released in the UK. It is rooted in scientific and engineering realities, looking at what is thought to be physically and technically possible in each sector.’
    Giles and Hilary shared some interesting, and heated, discussions as we joined groups thrashing out various options for our future.  The tool allows you to test out scenarios relating to energy usage and production whilst seeing the immediate outcome of your actions on a graph of predicted CO2 emissions.  There is also a huge amount of background information provided to all your ‘decisions’ if you take the time to investigate. 
    It’s a very good way of demonstrating how hard it is to balance the books between supply and demand under current modes of exponential growth.  A startling example is that the most ambitious target you can select for future UK flights involves a doubling of current usage.
    It also gives an insight into the areas the government is looking at and into current thinking around possibilities – looking at the parameters used is extraordinarily insightful and gives us clues for where we need to inform the government and policy better
    It was also interesting in exploring areas people are willing to sacrifice to balance the power sheet – every one we saw was completely different.  Some people favoured nuclear over biofuels and others who hated nuclear were willing to sacrifice food growing land in other countries to continue our Western gravy train.
    You can create your own ideal pathway and can debate and compare with scenarios produced by a number of others including organisations as diverse as Friends of the Earth and the National Grid.   The online tool is fascinating to experiment with – if occasionally frustrating – as there are limits on the range of options available to you.  In addition to the assumption of growth we spotted the following, you may find others: 
    • There is no account taken of the carbon footprint of any UK imports as these are not currently included within government targets. 
    • Cost involved in the various options isn’t currently taken into account – some people questioned the bias this gave nuclear despite the infrastructure and decommissioning costs of reactors with only limited active life.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly no account was taken of the long term availability of key raw materials such as oil, gas, coal or those used for generation of nuclear power.  Maybe the recent Announcement by the UK Government of Emergency Plans to wean the UK off Oil will see them factored into a future version!

  • Brilliant Books!

    Jeni and Jane organised a great Book event this evening!  Charlotte and Bruce told us about books they love, while Doug from My Back Pages, one of the only independent bookshops in south London, talked knowledgeably about writers and books with local connections, before setting us all a really hard quiz!  The evening continued with “Speed-booking” – where we had one minute to impress our “dates” by explaining our love for a book we had brought along.  Meanwhile Libby taught paper making from recycled shredded paper
    (see a couple of dodgy first efforts above!).  And don’t forget World Book Night on Saturday!  A full list of books discussed and recommended at this evening’s event follows:

    • The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron (David)
    • Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science – Immanuel Kant
    • The Man Who Planted Trees – Jean Giono (Susan) 
    • Liberation Therapy, The Initiatory Way to Peace – Sheik Ali N’Daw www.international-sufi-school.org
    • The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone – Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Jane)
    • A Sand Country Almanac and Sketches from Here and There – Aldo Leopold (Bruce)
    • To Have or To Be – Erich Fromm (Kim)
    • The Carbon Diaries 2015 – Saci Lloyd (Charles)
    • Out of Iran – Souson Azadi (Rose)
    • The Medieval Economy – M.M.Postan
    • Cradle to Cradle – William Mc Donough and Michael Braungart
    • No Destination – Autobiography of an Earth Pilgrim – Satish Kumar (Charlotte)
    • Local Food: How to make it happen in your local community  – Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins (Charlotte)
    • The Energy Glut – Ian Roberts (Jeni)
    • The Great Work – Our Way Into The Future – Thomas Berry (Bruce)

    Rose has several copies of the “HDRA News” and “Hortus, A Gardening Journal” if anyone would like them.  Please mail TTT.

  • Do we want a Biofuel Plant in Wandsworth?

    A local campaign to stop a 10MW biofuel energy plant being built as part of the proposed Battersea Power Station redevelopment is gaining momentum.  Andrea Speranza of biofuelswatch gave some reasons why the plant will not be a good thing for Wandsworth residents. She told us that biofuel production:
    1. Leads to an increase world food price rises. 
    2. Causes the release of more greenhouse gases through land conversion and chemical fertiliser use than fossil fuels.
    3. Effects local air quality by burning vegetable oil which emits nitrogen oxides and small particulates linked to asthma, bronchitis and heart problems. (NB: In 2010, a similar sized biofuel power station was refused planning permission by London Borough of Ealing because it produced too much air pollution.)
    4. Leads to people being thrown off their land and suffering human rights abuses in the Global South
    5. Will mean heavier traffic in Wandsworth due to fuel tanker deliveries

    What do Tooting residents think?  Is this really what we want on our doorstep? You can express your opinion on the proposed biofuels plant to Wandsworth Council via planning application 2009/3575 or mail info@biofuelwatch.org.uk for more info.  DT

  • Eco Build 2011

    With less than two weeks to go for this years Eco Build 2011, TTT are gearing up for a fascinating day out the event on 2nd March.
    If you are interested in learning about energy efficiency in buildings, understanding the benefits of the Feed in Tariff, seeing live demonstrations on solid wall refurbishment, modern glazing solutions, existing loft insulation and finding out about the latest technology in harnessing solar energy, energy efficient lighting, urban planting, bee keeping plus much much more, then come and sign up for your FREE pass at http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/index.html

    Personally, I am looking forward to seeing the seminar on Freecycling and a complete interior makeover for £0.00  This could give me some solutions for my Victorian refurb.

    The event runs from 1-3 March 2011. If you are interested in joining a group going for the event on the 2nd March, we will be meeting at 10.00am by the ticket barriers at Tooting Bec Northern Line tube station. Please let us know by email if you would like to join us for this really inspiring event.

    Hope to see you there – Malsara

  • Problem or Predicament?

    Another interesting and well-attended First Tuesday event this evening at Mushkil Aasaan in Tooting was spent watching Chris Martenson’s UK Crash Course; a link to the youtube video is below for those of you who missed it.  And there’s more on Chris’s website.  One thing he explained was the difference between a problem (which can be solved) and a predicament (which can only be suffered).

    Do we want to wait until peak oil driven Energy shortages,the fallacy of an ever growing Economy and a resource depleted and changing Environment crunch us?  Or do we want to do something different?  Do we want a future shaped by disaster or design? Needless to say there was plenty of discussion afterwards.