Edible City

The Naked Food project that I'm working up with the Groundwork Trust is setting out to create large scale community horticulture as social enterprise, with a plan to start four schemes in 2009 that each have the capacity to feed 5000 people with a good proportion of the fresh vegetables that they need for a healthy diet. Edible City is an American film coming out in late 2009 with inspirational stories of what's already happening.

Edible City Trailer 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

A Million Minds

It's right that young people aren't concerned about what's going on to their environment; they shouldn't be concerned - they should be livid, steaming angry and calling for justice. Remarkably, the majority of young people and students seem to be unaware of the limitatations that their parents, uncles, aunts and relatives have locked into the system on which their future depends.

'A Million Minds' intends to close some of the gap between knowledge and action by creating a project space that gives students a three hour assignment on sustainability, peak oil and resource depletion as part of their existing coursework, to be completed by working with students from other subjects. The focus of their work will be informed by the outcomes of discussions with local businesses about the challenged facing them today - the obstacles to profitability, security and business success.

In Wales alone there are over 320,000 further education and higher education students; when each one of them has completed a three hour project, a million hours of research, conversation and consideration will have been conducted that may have created practical solutions for the businesses that could be future employers.

Our plan is to get the first 10,000 hours of reseearch in the bag with three colleges or universities that commit 1000 students to the project - from there, we aim to get Minsterial support and launch a national campaign at the Hay on Earth Seminars at the end of May

Stay Grounded

Around 18 months ago, two of the most enterprising creative minds in the UK committed to making positive change happen. They created www.dothegreenthing.com to tell people what needs to happen in a gentle, humourous way. Today, they posted up this neat piece on flying - good to watch, from the ground.

Stay Grounded from Green Thing on Vimeo.

One Track Mind

It's good how connections work out. Alice & Ross, co-workers at TYF headed off to the US at the end of last year for a couple of months of west coast surf. Through conversations with TYF suppliers Patagonia and our contributions as members of One Percent for the Planet, they met up with seven times world surf champ Kelly Slater and Celtic connection film maker Chris Malloy for a premiere of Chris' new film, One Track Mind. One thing led to another, and TYF are hosting the European Premiere of the film in St Davids this Friday, and have a neat feature on Patagonia's The Cleanest Line blog. Doing good work is reward in itself; it's not surprising that it often comes with the bonus of meeting great people and doing good play too.

When the sea is rough...

Twenty five years ago, I crewed a yacht on delivery from Port Glasgow to Villamoura in southern Portugal;  heading through the western approaches, we hit a Force 8 gale, which buffetted our 39' boat for 24 hours. Trying to sleep in preparation for my coming watch, I was thrown around the cabin, and dozed fitfully and fearfully, lying with my feet on the ceiling to jam myself into the bunk as I listened to the crash and vibrations as the boat fell off the back of deep ocean waves. They said that a trip like this can take a year of a yacht's life: it felt like it was doing the same to mine.

After a couple of hours below decks, I dressed in oilskins and headed out the cockpit to take my three hour stint on the wheel. The sea was towering, with wind-whiped whitecapped throwing spray into the air around us. With the boat heeled hard over, whoever was at the helm had one food on the seat and one on the floor, at all times clipped into the safety cable. As daylight broke, it became possible to see the true scale of the sea and take stock; providing your line was chosen carefully, it was possible to avoid the worst (as my fellow crew had been doing), and make progress, edging forwards towards La Coruna, our next port of call. Being able to get a sense of the issue, and know that we had a reasonable control over our actions and course made a huge difference and the fear that had been present below decks disappeared in minutes.

It occurs that there was more learning in the salty wind at that time that I realised, and how much of our fear comes from not knowing what is really happening. With the compunded challenges of economy, ecology, environment and ethics pushing hard into our awareness, it seems more important than ever to show anyone scared about the future how the sea is running for real outside, rather than inside their heads, or ours.