Good Advice on Verge Planting
Most Transition initiatives I know of in our region place food security high on their priority list and are keen to push the envelope in their area for more community gardens and edible street verge plantings. Finding suitable spaces for community gardens and creating the necessary community organisation to build and manage the garden has some challenges and takes some time, so verge planting presents as an attractive supplementary or alternative project. However, there are some practical and civic issues to be dealt with if they are to be facilitated and supported by local government authorities
Our colleagues and good friends at the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Nework have come up with a very useful short guide for those thinking about verge plantings in their area. You can find it on their website using the link below
Celebrating Sydney's 52 suburbs
Transition Sydney loves Sydney and is interested in all of its localities and people. What a joy to find (through an article in the Sydney Morning herald today 2nd July 2010) a wonderful, creative photo-blog site created by a Sydneysider named Louise who has set out to go to and photograph all of Sydney's 52 suburbs. She has loaded great photos and comments onto her site
So far she has covered 40 suburbs and her photos are a glimpse into the wonderful diversity of people and locations. Well done Louise, we lov your work!
Here is a link to her site for you to enjoy http://www.52suburbs.com
Transition Epping - forging ahead
Transition Epping began earlier in the year with the founders Sandra Nichols and Deborah Burt designing a series of 8 workshops to which local residents and business people were invited to enrol at an initial launch 'town meeting'.
These workshops embraced the history and present resilience of the local area, the natural environment and our ecological footprint on it, local food production, waste and water, home energy use and efficency, health and wellbeing, building community and finally creating a 2020 vision for North Epping.
The final visioning session proved the value of the process and produced a great set of local transition projects with participants taking on team leadership roles and membership to take these projects forward,
The projects were:
Why Transition? - because governments don't have the will to act
The flavour of government spin (and budgeting) seems to be changing from bold action to prevent runaway climate change to minimising the impacts of inevitable climate change. This might be a realistic response but it also confirms the Transition Network's explanation of why Transition initiatives are necessary - "if we wait for governments to act, it will be too little, too late"
See the recent SMH article from Ben Cubby on the NSW Government's version of giving up on climate change prevention in its 2010 budget:
Love Food - Hate Waste
This initiative from DECCW is worth a mention and wishing well. OK, there's some "big grocery" sponsorship in the background (Woolworths, Food & Grocery Council), but it's not a bad thing to use some of their dollars to get useful information out there
A good local transition challenge is figuring out how to capture, reuse, recycle or process waste of all kinds locally and turn it into something of practical or economic value. Food waste is a good place to start. We waste an obscene amount of food.
Here's a link to the Love Food Hate Waste site
Remember this name - Waratah Community Land Trust Association
An early inspiration in the Transition Sydney search for people with meaningful solutions was Dr Louise Crabtree, who has been researching Community Land Trusts as a real and workable model for taking property speculation out of the equation of the toxic mix of financial motives making housing unaffordable for many Sydney people. Community Land Trusts have been operating successfully for many years in the USA and are being used in providing affordable housing and businesss premises for the people.
Now a motivated group of Sydney people have created the beginnings of the Community Land Trust solution here in New South Wales, the Waratah Community Land Trust Association Inc. It is going to be an important part of the greater mosaic of sane, sustainable and ethical initiatives that take us toward a resilient community better able to handle the challenges of the future.
Here's a brief video introduction to this inspiring new group
Watch this space for further news and contact details to get involved
Events
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30 Jul 2010 - 6:30pm - 9:00pm
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22 Aug 2010 - 11:00am - 3:30pm
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