Transition Project Update

The plans to submit a 10 towns-based Transition Towns bid, with a collaboration between St Davids, Llandeilo, Lampeter, Fishguard and Blaeunau Ffestioniog are taking shape well, with an Interreg European bid due to be submitted in April. Martin Fitton has been developing the Wales side of the programme, working with Davie Philip in at Sustainable Ireland as our partner organisation.

Tom Latter, who founded the Fishguard project, recently sent a useful link to a workshop that Rob Hopkins recently gave at the Findhorn Foundation; click here for more details.

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