The Bloody Well Smell It Yourself campaign...

Right, I'm launching some new campaigns. The first one will be called "The Bloody Well Smell It Yourself" awareness week. This means USE YOUR NOSE to test whether food is really off or whether you are just being ripped off by the manufacturer who are covering their backs by putting the Use By or Best Before date a week before it really needs to be there. OR the opposite problem is of course having loads of rotting stuff in the fridge. Particularly single people who are sharing domestic quarters do this, I find. They buy in bulk once a week or less, when hungry, and don't get around to planning or eating up leftovers. Either way, it's all WASTE. And that means methane emissions from landfill 23 times worse than Co2. So the answer - buy less more often, locally not at the supermarket, plan better, and don't believe the hype about dates. Here's someone who's started a charity to redistribute surplus food to the needy : http://www.fareshare.org.uk/

Getting the Plot...allotment plans!

My name is down for 2 allotments (greedy!) which should be coming up in the next year. Because I am unlikely to be able to tend to them all by myself, let alone eat the produce, I'm planning to turn them into permacultured forest gardens in which my local community can learn to grow  and share food by close observance of nature and how it behaves in order to get the best fruit and veg. Seeing as I only took up gardening in September 08, I've gotta lot to learn! So in fact, I'll be looking for teachers and gardeners ready to come along and show groups what to do and why. I attended a short permaculture course at Naturewise in the Lea Valley in July '09 and there's certainly a lot of fascinating theory to learn about too. Wish I had time to attend the longer courses. http://www.naturewise.org.uk/page.cfm. There is even a Permaculture Picture House in east London devoted to showing films on this topic. The best known is Rebecca Hoskings BBC documentary "A Farm for the Future", which you can probably find a copy of somewhere. I'll be returning to this post to write more about permaculture and to start mapping out how we might plan the plots and if you have any suggestions as to planting combinations you have found successful, I'd love to hear. EG - maize supports the climbing runner beans and squash plants used as ground cover beneath them prevents weeds. On the other hand, I need to get the community involved so I'll leave a lot till then. I'd also like to get a local artist on board to document our plots development.  Also, I'd like to see bikes with trailers selling the produce door to door, all over the community. As always, how to fund it?

Plastic Planet: The Curse of the Carrier Bag, 2006

In 2006 I made a no-budget short film about plastic bags. Put it on Myspace and then suddenly the whole world was contacting me wanting to use it in anti-plastic bag campaigns. At least 40 campaigns from Canada to India to Australia showed it to public gatherings to raise awareness. I think people latched onto plastic bags as a ubiquitous symbol of all that is wrong with our unsustainable way of living these days. Anyway, The Cooperative group in the UK showed it internally, Liverpool projected it in their town square on an open film day, it won a Green TV competition at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and Discovery Channel asked to put it on their interactive website to show what's happening at grass roots level, I think as part of their buying the TreeHugger site. I hope to embed the film here but it doesn't work at the moment. Interviewees in the film are : Satish Kumaar, ex-Jain monk and environmentalist, started Resurgence, Mukti Mitchell, eco-designer, Jonathan Porritt, Sustainable Development Commission Diana Verde-Nieto from Clownfish, and ethical PR company, Jessica Symons, social entrepreneur the lovely Jeffrey Davies running a plastic bag factory in London (Polybags), telling us why biodegradable bags aren't the answer a waste-worker in Brighton, Irish minister talking about the banning of plastic bags there My favourite bit is the fact that I found a song with the most perfect chorus, and got permission to use it: Simon Denyer's Plastic Bag song. A little bit too catchy...and I like the 50's archive material with its enthusiasm about plastic. Anthony Alexander edited with a great deal of talent and commitment, and I got Rosanna Jon to draw these cartoons for me with her animation expertise, using photos I had taken of plastic bags arranged with blue tac on my wall in certain positions. They appear at the end of the film depicting the nicknames which people have given the plastic bags you see strewn all over the place : Landfill snowbirds, witches' knickers, urban tumbleweed, Tundra ghosts, and one to do with kites which I've now forgotten... 2 of the cartoons below.
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Also, some of the horrid photos that didn't make it into the film. (All copyright permissions cleared in 2006) Every time you throw away a plastic bag into the bin going to Landfill, conjure these images to mind.
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