The Great Unleashing: Transition Towns

Unleashing the Children in Forest Row; photo: Mike Grenville

“We are the most useless generation in history” says Rob Hopkins, pioneer of the fastest-growing social movement in the UK: Transition Towns, “most people in the past had many skills.” This is not a lament for bygone ages, however, but a call to action.

Fed up with obfuscation on climate change from central government people are voluntarily banding together to reduce their carbon footprint and green their area in transition to a low-carbon lifestyle. “A Transition Initiative is a community that is unleashing its own latent collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to discover and implement ways to address this BIG question:”

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The Budget 2008: Green or Greenwash?

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling delivered a budget that might be called “Watercolour Green” – a rather diluted transparent green wash. There were environmental measures, but not the decisive strokes that would position the UK strongly as a greening economy.

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A Green Day Out

Power: our society runs on it – the raw calories of energy produced by petrol, diesel, Jet A1, natural gas, uranium, coal and renewable sources. We can't do without it, unless we want to shiver in caves, but we do have choices about how we generate it and what we use it for.

Information is also power. Unlike the physical stuff, it's not likely to run out. Nowadays we often suffer from an excess of it – information overload. Ideally what people need is to apply accurate, useful information to sufficient physical power to make things happen. This is the concept of empowerment.

Carbon Managers wants to empower workforces with A Green Day Out.

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The Burnt Offering

Photo: Craig Jewell

The UK Government is proposing to build new Coal Fired Power Stations. As coal is by far the most polluting form of energy production this seems the most retrograde step in terms of ameliorating our carbon footprint.

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The Carbon Footprint of a Burger

We all have become familiar with the method of carbon footprinting. Every product and service we consume has an impact on the atmosphere in terms of carbon emitted. Many of us are accustomed to considering the effects of taking flights or driving cars, but we don't necessarily worry about mundane everyday items. I wanted to find out what's the carbon footprint of the humble takeaway burger?

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