make charlbury a eco town

Wed 26 Oct 2005, 16:44

Liz has given some good starting points - I'm so out of touch with the environmental movement nowadays its pathetic (for one who was once so involved)!

Could I suggest Richard perhaps sets up a "green charlbury" area so that interesting snippets can be posted into there for people to think about, and perhaps draw some inspiration from?

For example, there is a meeting on Thursday evening in central Oxford where someone from the Environmental Change Unit is reporting back on research into green home building and renovations, and some people from the area who have done this will be talking about their experiences of trying to implement this.

Not easy for young people to get into, nor for busy parents to ferry them to. But perhaps we could get something like that happening here, hooking in some builders and local architects? They will have to be worked upon to see the relevance, as will local people to commission them to do it. But things need to be started somewhere, even if it is only small scale.

And then, of huge relevance to someone of Becky's age, is the issue of how to create proper jobs when the cost of fossil energy goes skyhigh - do we want to live in a colder "Brazil" as the middle classes are squeezed out leaving 1% fabulously wealthy and 95% at lower than supplementary benefits income and the NHS rug pulled out from under our feet?

The world in 20 years from now is going to be very different than the one we've had for the last 40-50. We've become far too complacent thinking that the post-war golden age is going to last forever. It simply cannot in its present form, the resource base isn't their unless the West (or the USA) intends to take it all for them/us by force of military conquest (and methinks China may have something to say about that approach).

Technology leaves us standing on the brink of either heaven or hell on earth - and the psychopaths in the global corporates seem quite content to send most of the people in the world to hell in order to get their quick buck.

An alternative is an economy based upon gathering energy from all sorts of simple and sophisticated sources in the environment and linking them all together, maintaining equipment that can be repaired and re-used, distributed jobs using communications links instead of haring around the countryside, and so forth. These along with re-localising food production will provide those worthwhile occupations.

Becky, are you in Secondary school or primary? Have you talked to your friends about this sort of thing?

Many of the things that can happen at a village or a small town level may seem trivial compared to the scale of the problem, but each bit helps. Also forcing in front of people's eyes the choices they make will stop the deniers and the hiders and the don't-want-to-knowers.

If its their kids who are pointing out the blindingly obvious to the wilfully ignorant and making parent's think about their offspring's future life, then probably more effective than any talking head on a TV. You'll no doubt get a lot of "in the real world" crap, but the whole issue is that they aren't living in the "real world" but a delusion leading to slow-motion suicide. The flip side of being young and not knowing much is that being old and knowing too much the wrong way can blind one to the bloomin' obvious.

Someone has to point it out, and its the job of each generation to look at the world in new ways!