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Transition, Energy Descent Plans and Relocalisation in Australia.
Wonderful World Media (Australia)
Join us for an interview with Sonya Wallace of SEAC, to learn more about Australia’s first transition town…

Based at a community education centre on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, SEAC has produced the first Australian Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP) to be embraced by both the community and local government! Having acknowledged the looming effects of peak oil, SEAC has created a community that is leading the way in preparing for our future without the abundant high energy resource our economy relies on.

SEAC’s website provides a wealth of information and Wonderful World Media looks forward to bringing you more on the work being done by this amazing group of people.
(28 January 2008)
Recommended by Rob Hopkins at Transition Culture who writes:

Sonya Wallace in Sunshine Coast in Australia (Australia’s first Transition Town) just sent me a link to an interview that she did on Wonderful World Media Network which explores the relocalisation process happening there, and how their Energy Descent Plan process is going. The quality of the recording isn’t that great, indeed it does sound rather like listening into the Apollo landings at a time when the conversation moved away from booster rockets to peak oil and local currencies, but it is well worth a listen. Great to hear what people are up to there.

Sermon for a carbon fast
Zoe Williams, Guardian
The church should keep up its climate preaching. It is taken more seriously than politicians or media
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Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent and the day, traditionally, on which Christians cover their foreheads with ash, symbolising repentance. The Church of England is ringing the changes this year, preaching a carbon fast instead of a chocolate one. The word "carbon" affixed to almost anything makes it sound faddish, but there is something pleasing about this plan, whose tenets of frugality are themselves pretty modest.

You don't have to get rid of your car or pledge never to take another long-haul flight - just take it a bit at a time. Remove a lightbulb in an act of symbolism and also saving; don't use the dishwasher for a day; snub the plastic bag; pray for a developing world community whose climate has been ravaged by western excess. How effective that is depends on the depth of your faith, but you have to admit it doesn't use much carbon. Then at Easter, instead of the traditional gorging on chocolate, you can set fire to some tyres in the back of your garden and turn the tumble drier on, empty.

...The church, however, has history, tradition, ideology, sincerity and authenticity; there is a message of self-denial going back to the dawn of time. It has an awful lot to play with when it seeks to influence our behaviour in terms of carbon use. It has been into small economies since before the environment even existed. Even people with no other knowledge of Puritanism know that it is against excess.
(6 February 2008)

Thou shalt not waste
Mary Horsley, Guardian
Thrift is fashionable again. But what is it like to grow up in a home where nothing is thrown away - and even toilet paper is strictly rationed? Mary Horsley remembers ...
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...Summer nights in the 1950s and 60s would find her in her trademark dungarees digging for Britain, by the light of a lamp hung in the apple tree. Her "compost-grown" vegetables kept all seven of us in rude good health. Our Morris Traveller often stank of manure she had gleefully scored from somewhere. And she wasn't the only one in dungarees. Uncle Fred, MD of Jesco Clean Overalls in Newcastle, had the firm run up a pair for all of us. Dungarees are still my garment of choice.

She was anything but mean: when my children were young, I had to teach them to discreetly return to her purse the £10 notes she pressed on them. But she was the most frugal person I ever knew. When I was a child, she would stand outside the lavatory door, listening to how many sheets I pulled from the Izal box (the soft variety was not yet invented). "Only two pieces now - that's quite enough," she'd whisper through the keyhole. "Scrunch them up - they work better."

Food was almost never thrown away. Mould was scraped off jars of jam, sliced off the edges of a loaf. Her version of a use-by date was: "Smells all right to me." Leftovers were ingeniously recycled. As members of a "Christian fellowship" called the Order of the Cross, we were vegetarians; my brothers and I became used to playing "spot the macaroni" in our nut roasts, and kept an eye out for the remains of the previous week's "meatless steaks". Potato peelings were boiled up and mashed for the hens, filling the kitchen with a strong, yeasty smell not unlike that of a brewery. Crusts were baked hard in the warming oven of our old coal-fired stove, then ground up to top the next macaroni cheese.
(4 February 2008)

Shopping for ethics
Leo Hickman, Guardian
A Co-op survey found its customers considered the welfare of other people, then animals, then the wider environment when making ethical consumer choices. How do you prioritise?
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First, we worry about the welfare of other people, then animals, then the wider environment.

There's not much in it, but if you were looking to rank the ethical concerns of the Co-op's customers, this would be a quick snapshot. I can't say that I'm too surprised by the findings of the supermarket's latest survey of "customer ethics", as reported in the Guardian, because it pretty much sums up what most other similar research shows - namely, that we tend to connect more with issues that directly effect the lives of other living beings - be they human or animal - than amorphous concepts such as climate change (even though this will, of course, directly effect the lives of all living beings in the longer term).
(5 February 2008)
Related in the Guardian: Shoppers care more about animals than climate.