Becoming the thing that you want to be

Marketing experts Eat Big Fish have created an excellent free resource called the Challenger Project to give people tools, motivation and examples of how to make big, good change happen. In the video below, On Your Feet co-founder Rob Poynton introduces Fast Food Stanislavsky, a technique from improvisational theatre to help people find out what it is that they'd really like to be. He's a great speaker, thinker and doer; watch and enjoy:

Fast Food Stanislavsky from eatbigfish on Vimeo.

Who's season is it anyway?

I had an email yesterday from a good friend in north Wales. She'd been into her local branch of Tesco to discover that they had a "buy 2 for £3" offer on selected seasonal vegetables. It would be super nice to think that they were starting to act responsibly and promote food that's been seasonally harvested in the country it's eaten, to improve freshness & nutrition, increase prosperity of farmers, and reduce carbon emissions.

There was one small snag though. Tesco don't appear to be bothered by which country's season they are referring to. Their offer was for:

Asparagus (air freighted in from Mexico)

Kenya beans…. (air freighted from Kenya)

Green Runner beans  (air freighted from Morocco)

Bigger snags were to come. Trading Standards impotent about Tesco's dodgy claim, because technically the food was 'seasonal' - just not in the UK. Somewhere in their system, there's a missing connection...

About 30 years ago (yeeks) I spent a couple of weeks winter / spring climbing in the Cairngorms and Skye. In the Cairngorms, due to youthful, blissful ignorance, a group of us were avalanched in Corrie An t'Sneachda and allthough badly shaken, we walked away with no more damage than a lost axe and glove.

When I returned to Shefflield Uni a few weeks later, I made it my job to become an expert in snow avalanches and even now, can picture the front of Colin Fraser's  book on the subject. The desire to do that came from a realisation of consequences that could be triggered again by the yawning gap between what I knew and what happens on the mountains.

What scale of near miss I wonder, will it take for us to feel the same about safety of our food system?

Earlier this week, Jeremy Leggett, writing in the Guardian, said:

"During the financial crash the world went within weeks from a received wisdom that investment banks had squeezed risk out of complex derivatives, to a spiralling doubt, to a tipping point of disbelief and panic. With peak oil, officials around the world, corporate and governmental, would experience exactly the same collapse of confidence in their cosy cultural assumptions. A second giant industry would have been found to have its asset assessment systemically and ruinously wrong. The net impact would be that oil-producing nations would begin to husband their own resources: keeping exports back for use in their own oil-hungry multi-hundred-billion dollar-and-rouble infrastructure programmes.

This is a scenario that could lead to food delivery lorries failing to reach Tesco in time for Friday-night shopping.

The lessons from the financial crash ought to be stark. The prevailing culture mocked the disbelievers, ahead of the crash. Gillian Tett, capital markets editor at the FT, saw the crisis coming because she was a trained anthropologist and knew how to recognise a cult when she saw one. She was accused of scaremongering from the stage of the World Economic Forum."

Here's a small do. Next time you're in a food shop, ask for the manager, and pose this question "I've been hearing a bit about the impact of peak oil on food production and distribution. How much have you heard from your suppliers, colleagues or manager about this?" Send your responses to emily.g@growingwales.org

A Peak at the Future

It's taken a while for Peak Oil to reach the awareness of the folk responsible for developing government policy and delivering strategic goals, and I'm not convinced that it's there yet. Only 18 months ago, major spatial planning documents in Wales paid it scarce attention, and assumed a 'business as usual' approach.

In an article on Monday 9 November, the Guardian revealed that predictions on the future of global oil supply had been distorted due to US pressure. Hard to believe, but there you go.

My question for today: knowing that a) a 60% rise in energy prices within the next seven years was likely anyway, b) it seems likely that we're around Peak Oil now, when would it be prudent to start serious planning for alternatives?

This the UK Govt's representative on peak oil in response to the Guardian's disclosure of the news:

"John Hemming, the MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil and gas, said the revelations  confirmed his suspicions that the IEA underplayed how quickly the world was running out and this had profound implications for British government energy policy.

He said he had also been contacted by some IEA officials unhappy with its lack of independent scepticism over predictions. "Reliance on IEA reports has been used to justify claims that oil and gas supplies will not peak before 2030. It is clear now that this will not be the case and the IEA figures cannot be relied on," said Hemming.

When shall we start planning for this? Answers on a postcard please.

Lining up for action

There's been even more of a spring in my step (worrying for some, I know) since the Do Lectures, with many conversations about converging possibilities around food, design, education and more.

In true Do style, the participants at Herefordshire Environment Partnership that joined for a meeting yesterday agreed unanimously to set out a plan and project to reduce the county's CO2 emissions by 20% in 12 momths; it was a big ask and they responded magnificently.

More Do recommendations will be coming soon from the fine line up of speakers who were with us at the end of the talks. From my left, Gabriel Branby, Geoff McFetridge, Gregor McLennan, Paul Deegan, Duke Stump, Ben Hamersley, Adam Lowry, Alistair Humphreys

Do: with pictures

Pictures are appearing all over the web, flickr and other sites, capturing the essence of last week's Do Lectures in close up. One particularly good example is this one from George Gilbert. It was a huge bonus to have so many talented professional and hobby photographers capturing the images of the talks that will be posted soon.