Saturday 5 December 2020

Climate Crisis Film Festival

A few members of Leicester Friends of the Earth signed up for the online Climate Crisis Film Festival in November and we’ve written brief reviews of the films we watched in case you are looking for an environmental film to show to your community group.

 

Zero Waste Living

This was a very short upbeat film. It was about a guy who was a ‘dyslexic school drop-out’ (his words), who went to work in the food industry and realised that it had some major problems with food waste.

He went on to open his own restaurant, which was to be a zero-waste restaurant – he didn’t even have a bin!

He said the early years of setting up ‘Zilo’, his restaurant, was the hardest thing he had ever done. He began by having a failure, then another failure, then another failure – for three years he wondered if he had been crazy to even begin.

But then the fog began to clear, he had a success, then another, then another – he got some recipes sorted and began to get lots of customers – who loved his idealistic approach to food and waste management.

Today, ‘Zilo’ is Britain’s most ethical restaurant – he opened it in Brighton – creating change and he is now opening a restaurant in London.

The amazing quote from the film was ‘Waste is a failure of the imagination’.

Well worth watching!

 

Just Eat

This film was about food wastage.  Apparently 40% of our food is wasted.

A couple on the film set themselves a challenge:  To only eat food that would otherwise be wasted. So, they collected food from supermarkets.  Food that the supermarkets were going to throw away – this was usually vegetables and fruit that was the wrong shape. The couple were amazed at how much food is wasted.

People look for food that is aesthetically appealing. Farmers say that a lot of good crops won’t sell as they are the wrong shape. Consumers drive waste into the system by wanting to buy only perfect vegetables.

Supermarkets usually state the standards which they want and won’t even take food that is the wrong shape or size. This waste is as high as 70% of fruit and vegetables that is thrown away – perfectly good fruit but there is no market for it.

It showed celery being cut in the field and being chopped down in size before it even leaves the field as it is too big to fit in the supermarket bag.

The film showed the journey of food – to grow the food, you begin with the soil, sunlight, water – energy needed to produce the crop. Then it is picked, sorted and packed and (if it is the right size and shape) it is transported to the supermarket. Then it is bought but still not always eaten.  They discussed the energy of the production but sometimes it is just wasted when the food goes mouldy and is thrown away.

All rich countries are wasting food. This is causing huge environmental problems. If you look at the Earth from the sky you can see a huge number of fields producing food. This is where we are having a massive impact on the world.  We produce too much and waste too much.

Preventing food waste is a good way to fight climate change.

The film ended by saying: ‘Buy what you need. Make meals with what you buy. Just eat it!’

 

The Need to Grow

This film began with information about soil that will be familiar to many of us. We have an estimated 60 years of farmable soil left on the planet and the extraction mentality of industrial agriculture is leading to dramatic soil loss. Vandana Shiva refers to industrial agriculture as a ‘war against the Earth’.

We then follow the stories of a child food activist petitioning Girl Scouts to remove GMOs from their cookies, an urban farmer trying to re-localise the food system and an inventor who creates a system for rapidly rebuilding soil using algae and biochar. Each faces setbacks and in the middle of the film, their efforts to change a destructive system all felt a little futile. However, things start to improve and they all make some progress in what they are trying to do. The final image, with the child activist now a teenager, standing looking over the inventor’s pool of algae, left me with a feeling of hope that we will be able to learn how to grow food without destroying our environment.

 

How We Live: A Journey Towards a Just Transition

This short film is freely available on Vimeo and it is well worth 7 minutes of your time. It explains what an economy actually is (which is something that has always puzzled me!) and how it needs to change in the face of climate change. Go and watch it now!


System Error

I think this is the film that I struggled with most during the film festival – the inner workings of capitalism are pretty nightmarish.

An economics professor starts by pointing out that we recognise all growth has limits until we get to economic growth and we somehow expect that to be different. The only type of growth that does not have limits invariably ends up killing its host. The Club of Rome recognised the limits of economic growth in the 1970s but their revelation that growth was destroying the planet was promptly dismissed as fearmongering.

We move on to those pushing for more economic growth. Farmers in the Amazon basin surrounded by endless fields of soy or tightly packed cows, pigs and chickens are lobbying to reduce environmental laws that protect the forest.  A young Donald Trump in the early 80s explains how he is making money by buying derelict apartment buildings and getting tax breaks to do them up – he says he has never found a limit to growth but he hopes he will know when he reaches his limits (ha!) The director of Airbus in China boasts that 15 – 20 new airports are built in the country every year and there is an enormous ‘opportunity’ in the expansion of air travel.

However, at the core of all this economic activity seems to be a lie that I couldn’t quite understand. The trading centres in New York are now mostly empty as the financial markets are run by algorithms rather than people. Share prices are no longer linked to companies’ profits. In 2010, there was a ‘flash crash’ caused by a positive feedback loop in the algorithms that had to be resolved by shutting down computers. Robots now seem to be creating economic growth with little input from humans.

The film ends with the economics professor instructing us that optimism is a choice that we have to make. However, I just wanted to retreat to my allotment and get really good at growing my own food after seeing behind that particular curtain!

 

Anthropocene

This film reminded me of Home, which I saw years ago at the Phoenix. It presents the impact that humans are having on the planet without judging or offering solutions.

Geologists say that we have now entered a new geological age, in which the impact of humans on the Earth outweighs that of natural systems. We see a pile of elephant tusks in Kenya, rescued from the black market, the iron smelting factory in Norilsk, the most polluted city in Russia, Lithium mining in the Atacama desert in Chile, which supplies a battery plant in the USA. In Germany, a town called Immerath is being destroyed to make way for a coal mine. We watch as a bulldozer crunches up a church and hear that two towns have already been destroyed for the mine and four more are in its path.

85% of the Earth’s forests have been cleared, fragmented or degraded for human use and we see deforestation in British Colombia in Canada and Lagos in Nigeria. On their days off, the Nigerian workers attend a church like a warehouse, built to hold 1 million people. In Gudong in China, workers build a sea wall to protect an oil refinery from the rising sea levels.

Off the shores of Indonesia and Australia, the coral reefs are bleaching. In London Zoo, the highly endangered species are highlighted to the public with signs: tigers, gibbons, okapi, oryx a strange-looking fish and a tiny frog. Back in Kenya, they burn the ivory. A woman conservation worker says that she could not save the elephants but at least she can save their tusks from degradation.

I felt like I was acting as witness to a crime.

 

How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things Climate Can’t Change

This was part of the ‘Fear and Hope’ theme at the festival, alongside a short film and a talk on climate anxiety by a member of Extinction Rebellion. If you ever suffer from despair about climate change (and I imagine most activists do), I really recommend this film. It won’t tell you that everything is going to be okay (because everything is already not okay), but it might show you a way through the despair that makes it possible to keep campaigning for change.

It starts with the director dancing as the Delaware River Basin in New York state is protected from fracking in 2011 after a long campaign. He then retreats to his local woods to enjoy the victory and discovers that a Hemlock tree he planted as a boy is dying – the victim of a parasite that spreads farther north every year with the warmer winters. He had helped prevent oil and gas extraction on his doorstep but he was still losing what he loved to climate change. Hiding in the woods was not going to be possible.

We are then taken on a journey through the effects of climate change and fossil fuel extraction and we meet those trying to stop it. We see the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York city in 2012, an oil spill in the Amazon that is poisoning the fish and the indigenous people who eat the fish, Pacific climate warriors blockading an Australian coal port, chanting ‘We are not drowning, we are fighting’, people in Beijing trapped in their apartments by the thick air pollution outside. Climate scientists recite facts and the director repeats, ‘Overwhelmed’. That feeling was entirely familiar to me.

But then we start to hear how others are dealing with this despair. An activist in the USA, arrested for disrupting an auction of federal lands (and later sentenced to two years in prison) tells us that there is no point in trying to avoid despair – we must learn to carry it with us. He explains that carrying a heavy weight in stormy times can help to keep you anchored. A woman in China trying to set up solar cooperatives asks ‘What do you want from your own humanity?’ and talks about ‘moral imagination’ that leads people to try and create a different world. In Vanuatu, communities discuss climate change at their daily council and dance together as a way of supporting community links. Perhaps the most moving for me was the climate warrior in Samoa who goes to visit the tree under which his father’s placenta was buried (a tradition to anchor people to the land) and discovers that it has been claimed by the sea. He stands and cries for a few minutes, totally overcome. But then he wipes his eyes, smiles and tells the director that he is not depressed because ‘we have a choice’.

These people completely inspired me. If they can make peace with their despair and keep going, surely those of us less immediately affected by climate change can do the same. The film ends with two girls brought together by the Hurricane Sandy devastation, now best friends, practising their ballet together on a beach as the director dances between them. 

Sunday 8 November 2020

Launch of the Alternative Local Plan

We have spent months during lockdown re-writing the City Council’s Local Plan, after we discovered that the draft was missing many key policies needed to address climate change. Leicester City Council declared a climate emergency in February 2019 but in spite of this, the draft Local Plan that they published in March this year contains little detail on reducing Leicester’s carbon footprint. The Local Plan is the most important planning policy document for the city and will affect all planning decisions for the next 16 years. 

Members of Leicester Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire were dismayed to find so much missing from the City Council’s draft Local Plan and decided to take action. Four of us took a course in planning policy run by national Friends of the Earth (conducted over Zoom) to learn more about how planning works. We then worked with other local campaigners and set ourselves a timetable to read one or two chapters of the draft Local Plan each fortnight, discuss them in Zoom meetings and then write our own versions, with a strong emphasis on sustainability. We began in May and finished editing our Alternative Local Plan seven months later, in November. We will be submitting the full document, which stands at 63 pages, as our response to the City Council’s consultation and you can download it here

People tend to dismiss planning as boring but actually it is an incredibly important part of responding to climate change. How and where we build has enormous implications for energy use and biodiversity. Re-writing the Local Plan has been a massive project but we wanted to show the City Council what a really sustainable Local Plan could look like. It needs to include policies to improve energy efficiency of buildings, increase renewable energy generation, make it easier to walk, cycle and take the bus, protect green spaces and create more habitat for wildlife within the city. 

We hope that the City Council will be able to take inspiration from our version of the Local Plan.

To mark the launch of their Local Plan and to demonstrate that we are asking the City Council to make Leicester a model of sustainability, we created a cardboard model of a sustainable Leicester. A few of us worked on the models and then we collected them together for a photo. The model Leicester includes houses, flats, shops and public buildings with solar panels on their roofs. There are also green spaces, street trees and community gardens.

Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire are encouraging as many people as possible to submit their own response to the consultation. They have prepared 12 key points that people might want to mention; these are published on their website along with a 40-minute talk that anyone can watch and even a song about the Local Plan! If you haven't responded to the consultation yet, please do so before the deadline - 7th December.


Saturday 29 August 2020

Planning for Leicester's Future


If you follow this blog, you could be forgiven for thinking that Leicester Friends of the Earth has been taking a break during lockdown. In fact, we’ve been busier than ever but it just hasn’t been very newsworthy.

Leicester City Council published their draft local plan in March and we have spent the last few months reading it carefully, discussing each chapter in Zoom meetings, learning more about the planning system, looking at local plans prepared by other local authorities and deciding what an ideal local plan for Leicester would look like. We’re working with Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire on this project. The consultation has been delayed but we’re now expecting it to re-open in September and we’ll let you know more about our response then.

All local authorities which make decisions about planning have to develop a local plan. This document is then used to decide whether planning applications are approved or rejected. It sets out the council’s expectations and requirements and covers everything from where development should take place and the density of housing to energy efficiency standards, the amount of parking provided for office blocks and the amount of green space needed for a given size of population. The local plan decides what our city will look like in the future. When we are facing a climate emergency, it is incredibly important that local plans take this into account and set high standards for making our towns and cities sustainable, healthy places to live.

The process for local authorities to create a local plan is long. It starts with detailed analysis of the area and what is needed (e.g., the type of housing, the level of flood risk, the requirement for employment land) and then works through several rounds of consultation. People who live in or near to the area can review the council’s drafts and have a say. Friends of the Earth groups and other campaigning organisations put an enormous amount of time into responding to local plan consultations and often manage to persuade their council to strengthen the environmental credentials of the final version. This is as it should be; democracy doesn’t begin and end at election time.

But now the government wants to change all of that. On 6th August, they published their ‘Planning for the Future’ White Paper setting out proposed reforms to the planning system. And it is clear that they envision a future in which we have no say about our local area at all. The Guardian, the Town and Country Planning Association, Rights Community Action and even the Financial Times have all published articles explaining what is wrong with the government’s proposals. (And I urge you to read these articles if you haven’t already – everyone who cares about the future needs to understand what is happening.) To summarise: the government wants to move to a zonal planning system, where our local plan would be reduced to a colour-coded map and all of the detail prepared by those who know the area and have a stake in its future would simply be removed. Planning applications would not even be needed apart from in exceptional circumstances, so we wouldn’t be able to object to individual developments. We might be able to have a say about the design code, but the government is also preparing a national version so our control over our local area would be minimal.

We cannot accept this. Our planning system needs reform but we want more democracy, not less. Those who live in an area should have a say about its future. There is a campaign gathering steam to object to the government’s proposals. Some of the people involved have written their own proposals for what needs to change and called it The People’s Charter for Democracy in Planning. The articles of this Charter are as follows:
  1. The right to participate.
  2. Local decisions should be made locally by democratically accountable bodies
  3. A meaningful legal duty to secure sustainable development, tackling climate change, and the health and well-being of all citizens.

We think this offers a much better vision of the future of planning. We will let you know how you can get involved in supporting this Charter.
In the meantime, if you want to object to the government’s proposals, national Friends of the Earth has written a model response to the consultation that you can use and adapt. Please get involved and do whatever you can to prevent this attack on our rights.

Tuesday 5 May 2020

Michael Gerard and Doug Holly


We lost two longstanding members of Leicester Friends of the Earth recently – Michael Gerard and Doug Holly. Both had been members for so long that we’re not sure when they first got involved but we think it was probably in the 1980s. A fuller account of their lives is given in the latest edition of the Leicester Secularist but we wanted to pay a tribute to their contribution to the group here.
In recent years, the campaign that was perhaps closest to Michael’s heart was ‘The Bee Cause’ – a national campaign to draw attention to the plight of pollinators. In Leicester, we planted two small bee meadows and we held many street stalls, collecting signatures on a petition to ban the use of pesticides that are known to harm bees. As a beekeeper, Michael was very helpful in talking to us about the best habitat for bees. For example, did you know that city trees are abundant nectar and pollen sources for bees? There is likely to be more food for bees in one tree than in quite a sizeable area of wildflowers so it is vitally important for Leicester’s bees that we protect our trees.
Doug was the coordinator of the group before handing over to Jill and I (Hannah) in 2011. His most recent focus had been a campaign about the carbon impact of our food system but he helped out with every campaign we worked on until ill health prevented him attending meetings a couple of years ago. Perhaps because of his background in education, he was brilliant at talking to people on street stalls. I remember having a silly competition with him a few years ago to see who could collect the most petition signatures in an hour and of course he won hands down - he could talk people into signing anything! People always stopped to talk to him – perhaps his waistcoat with all the pockets dazzled them. Doug was awarded an Earthmover award in 2011 and when he went to collect it at the national gathering, he declared that he was merely the ‘poster boy’ (at the age of 80-something) for a very successful group. But the truth is that he was an inspirational campaigner.
Michael and Doug will be very much missed. We won’t forget the things that you cared about and we will keep campaigning for the greener world you envisioned.
Doug and Jill on a stall

Sunday 12 April 2020

As we "move out", nature moves in....

Hello All, hope you are keeping well.

As we all hunker down at home, well most of us at least, it's interesting to see how nature is responding.  We might be in lock down, but this time of year nature certainly isn't!

There's a certain cruel irony with us being stuck at home and in the house this time of year, but the eerie peace and quiet enables us to see and hear things we wouldn't normally see and hear. 

Just yesterday I raised the kitchen blind first thing in the morning to see a mallard duck and ducklings passing under the kitchen window. In the 29 years of living here I've never seen that before.  Melanie managed to nip outside and snatch a quick photo, below. Good camouflage!

As they were heading towards the A47 at the bottom of our garden I went round to see if I could catch them coming out, to no avail. I hope they've survived, especially given the lack of ponds nearby and the resident fox population.  Whether we should try and intervene in these situations is an unknown, to me at least, although I did go armed with a bag for the duck and cardboard tray for the ducklings, just in case..

On our nightly walks we've also seen bats on Bushby main street, toads mating in the gutter, as well as hedgehogs scurrying about and owls. We've even managed a stroll across the A47, not something you can say normally!

During the day the ring necked parakeets, normally in the wood between Thurnby and Stoughton have decided that Thurnby village can now be explored, as well as the lesser-spotted woodpeckers and the odd red kite and buzzard, all enjoying the lack of boy-racers with their noisy exhausts.  

As we look forward to the lock down coming to an end, there are some things I will definitely miss, which makes you wonder how we can preserve the good bits of the lock down whilst enjoying the return of previous freedoms. No easy answer to that one but sure to be exercising a few minds - a challenge for us all. 

We had to cancel our planned event of planting of the wildflower margin outside the Thurnby Scout & Guide HQ, but nature doesn't wait.  So we've had to press on, on our own, with nightly sessions of turf removal (completed), seed sowing (completed) and now transplanting of wildflowers from our garden (mainly forget-me-nots and foxgloves, which self seed all over the place) and watering.  Let's hope this experiment is successful and spawns more planting elsewhere in the village. It certainly had widespread support when we did the door-door survey of local residents it was claimed would be affected. I'm looking forward to nature moving in here too.


Bruce Wakley

Saturday 1 February 2020

Biomass power generation


Sounds good doesn’t it?  Nice and green. Dig into it a bit further though and it’s a different story.  The majority of biomass is cutting trees down in the USA, making them into pellets, shipping them across to Liverpool, loading them on trains and transporting them across to Drax to be burnt to make power. Doesn’t sound so good now does it?  Even if you accept trees as a power source as carbon neutral, the transport of the pellets makes the claim on renewable power a farce. It’s somewhat ironic that as we push to plant more trees, others are cutting trees down to supply our power while claiming it’s environmental.

If you want to see what’s going on try the Gridwatch web site.  Here you can see the reality of where our power is coming from.  How we rely on interconnectors to our near European neighbours (Brexit impact unknown!) which means exporting our power generation pollution (e.g. France is 75% nuclear powered).  Once again we are exporting our pollution to other countries.

You can also see what happens on sunny days.  Yes, solar ramps up but mysteriously wind power generation can drop, even when the wind is blowing well.  This is due to curtailment, where wind generators are paid not to generate power so as to preserve our power generation agreements with other generators and interconnector partners. 

Curtailing renewable power, when it could be stored or used to generate green hydrogen is surely an environmental “crime” that needs addressing.  It’s all a symptom of a skewed power generation market that needs overhauling, but I’m not going to hold my breath. 

Frustrating?  Totally.

Bruce Wakley

Do you love/hate Marmite?


So, do you want HS2?

It seems to me it is like Marmite or Brexit or Veganism. You either want it or don’t want it – love it or hate it. Everyone has an opinion.

I’m afraid I don’t want it – well not in its present form – but not because I don’t want railways because I do. Well, I try to be an environmentally conscious person so I would - wouldn’t I? I want to get some cars off the road and get more people onto trains after all. Also, it isn’t because of the cost although I realise that is astronomical.

No, the reason I have to say – we can’t go ahead is because of the Ancient Forests. Did you know that 108 Ancient Forests are in the path of HS2? Which makes me wonder what the point is in the Government saying let’s plant 11 million new trees, whilst at the same time planning to chop down thousands of ancient trees!  Obviously planting new trees is good but saplings are not nearly the same as a 300-year-old tree when it comes to sucking up the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So, whether you love/hate Marmite, Brexit or HS2 – take a stand for nature – for the Ancient Forests – take a stand and say NO we can’t do this! We have to look for another route or another way forward – if you have time – write to your M.P. and don’t just ask them to re-think – beg them to save the trees. Make a stand for Nature and help us all to breathe cleaner air. We might not get a second chance.

Melanie Wakley

Saturday 18 January 2020

Climate Action Plan consultation - don't forget to respond!


Leicester City Council were the first council in the East Midlands to acknowledge that there is now an urgent need to act on climate change; they declared a climate emergency in February last year. They are following this up by writing a Climate Action Plan for the city, with proposals for reducing the environmental impact of housing, workplaces, transport, land use and even the products we buy.  


The City Council have published their proposals and they are asking people for their comments before they write the final plan. We have responded, firstly by praising the Council’s approach to writing the plan and secondly by asking that sustainability be embedded within every department, committee, and policy of the Council so that the impact on the environment is always considered first. 


We have stated that they think the Council now needs to set annual goals for reducing carbon emissions and then create a carbon budget for the Council’s activities. We are also asking the Council to take all of their pension fund investments out of fossil fuels, explaining that it is incompatible with their declaration of a climate emergency to continue to invest their employees’ money in the dirty energy that has created this problem. You can read our full consultation response here.


Leicester Friends of the Earth are part of Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire, a group of individuals and organisations working together to address the climate crisis. (We helped to launch this group last year.) Climate Action is encouraging everyone to respond to the consultation and they have written a briefing and a template letter to help people, which are available on their website. They will also be running a drop-in event on Saturday 2nd February, from 1pm to 4pm at Quest Gaming on Belvoir Street, where people can write their responses to the Council’s proposals together.


We hope that thousands of people in Leicester will get involved in helping the Council to write a Climate Action Plan for our city. Democracy doesn’t start and end at election time – we can have our say about the Council’s plans at any time and on such an important issue, it is really important that everyone joins the conversation about how we can tackle climate change.